Sober Horror Fan

Day 168 of Sobriety.     Lake Mungo is a 2008 film by director Joel Anderson, who seems to have made this one feature and then vanished with scarcely a trace, which is a great shame because Lake Mungo is very good. It tells the extremely sad story of a family who lose their teenage daughter in a tragic drowning accident, and the uncanny events that follow in its wake. It is presented as a faux documentary—a “mockumentary”—and I think it is one of the best examples of that style that I have seen.     The acting is absolutely convincing throughout. I found it very easy to “buy into” the mockumentary conceit and allow myself to be convinced that I was watching something real. Apparently, the actors were given scenarios, but no actual script, and so the dialogue (or more often than not monologue) is all improvised.    Like several more recent films, such as Hereditary (2018), Midosommar (2019) and Talk to Me (2022), the exploration of bereavement and grief...

Day 126 of Sobriety.   The Sacrament was directed by Ti West, who has recently been making pretty big waves with the Mia Goth-starring X and its sequels.   It’s embarrassing to admit, but this is another film that. like The Dark and The Wicked (2020), which I (re-)watched last week, I had actually seen it before, but didn’t I fully realize that until about halfway through. Well, that’s on me and my boozing. No doubt I was inebriated when I last watched it.   The plot of The Sacrament follows a small news team that is accompanying a man who travels to the commune of a religious cult in a remote (unspecified) jungle location to find his sister. When the crew arrives, they find that all is not well in the commune. It is made in a “found-footage” format, as a fake documentary program being filmed by the VICE media company. (Interesting aside: the cult in the movie is initially described as a “sobriety cult”!)   The film is heavily based on the actual ...

Day 90 of Sobriety.  This is another film that has been on my radar for a while. It is a portmanteau horror movie comprising five short films all connected by a wraparound story. All of the films are shot in “found footage” format. Recently, while watching (in some cases re-watching) the Paranormal Activity series, I have come to realize that I actually really like the found footage format, provided it's done well. One of the main reasons is that it often manages to get under my skin and actually scare me. In addition to the Paranormal Activity films (particularly the first couple), the original Blair Witch Project would be a good example of that. I did not, however, find that to be the case with V/H/S, a lthough I thought the film as a whole was OK. Each of its segments was made by a different director and production team, and as might be expected from that patchwork approach, the result, while interesting, is also a bit patchy. As some general comments, I would say...

Day 80 of Sobriety. I watched this the day after watching the first Paranormal Activity film, so I guess this is really a comment on both of them. I wont say much about the plots, because I imagine that most people are familiar with these films by now, but they are both "found footage" films that document the intrusion of a malevolent evil presences on two different households. I had seen them both before, around the time they were released, but that was over a decade ago now (fifteen years in the case of the first one), and I couldn’t remember much about them at all. I did remember that had I found them pretty scary back then, though, and feeling like I wanted to actually be scared by a film for the first time in a long time, I bought some extremely cheap ex-rental blue rays of the first five films in the series. The only thing that had stuck in my mind with any clarity was the very final scene of the first movie, but this time I watched the “alternate ending”...