Grave Encounters (2011)

What It's About: A film crew who investigates paranormal activity for a reality television show bites off more than they can chew when they are locked into a mental asylum for the night.

Review: Like most "real" horror films, Grave Encounters employs the shaky cam to give a shocking first person view, putting the audience directly in the scare zone. And it works, even as the movie treads ground that has been done over and over again by hundreds of various ghost hunting shows along with popular mass-market films like the Paranormal Activity trilogy. Basically, it's almost exactly like Ghost Hunters meets House on Haunted Hill, the remake with Geoffrey Rush (don't knock it, it's a good film). We follow the team, the namesake of the film, who is led by Lance Preston, who really hams it up good for the camera; from the moment he stepped into the frame with the cheesy opening for Grave Encounters, he reminded me of Nick Groff of The Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures - the hair is what really made it work for me.

Fun guy, amirite?

The opening of the film gives a prologue, where the producer of the show explains where the footage came from, giving details such as "of course, then they got to episode six." He impresses on the audience that the film we are about to see (assembeled from 76 hours of raw footage) is in no way doctored, that everything captured on film is real. From the start, we learn that the team doesn't believe in ghosts in the slightest - they just see this as another job, a way to grab fifteen minutes of fame through society's sudden obsession with the paranormal. It's actually really interesting to watch as they do everything from ask people to make up fake encounters to hiring an actor to pretend to be a medium. In Lance's words, "you put slow motion, music behind it - everything's creepy!"

And of course, the place they're investigating is one of high prestige in the haunted house world. Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, as touted by the film, was home to over 80,000 patients, most of them discarded relatives and complete mental cases that never had any hope of a cure. The film makes note of one Dr. Arthur Friedkin, a neurologist who performed experimental brain surgery including up to 140 lobotomies. He was killed by his own patients when they broke loose from their cells and stabbed him to death, but everyone promptly forgot all about him because Babe Ruth died around the same time. Who gives a shit about a mass torturer when a beloved athelete passes?!

Don't mind our satanic rituals, go watch your baseball games!

The eight-hour lockdown for the cast doesn't begin until about 20 minutes into the film, but by then we are well set up to be completely relaxed and I knew I had formed definite opinions about some of the cast members, becoming attached to them as real people. For a few minutes, everything meets the team's expectations - sure, it's a creepy building, but there's not much except darkness and a lot of boarded up doors and windows. Everyone does a great job of remaining completely natural, even as they're acting cheesy for their show's cameras; it really feels like a bunch of friends joking around and the chemistry between all of the actors feels great. Slowly, their antics begin to wake the building up - though, in the cast member's mind, they believe that someone is fucking with them because they've never received this amount of activity before.

Lance is ecstatic, believing that they're really found something that will earn them millions of dollars. The rest of the crew are  ready to pack it in and head home. Special effects in this film are top notch. Things start out subtle like moving wheelchairs and slamming doors, ratcheting up through the length of the film, eventually turning into full manifestations of the dead patients. The sanity of the cast starts to deteriorate as one by one they are separated and picked off. In seeking a way out, they quickly find that they are utterly trapped in the building, to the point of becoming admitted patients themselves. It quickly becomes apparent that the things they are trapped in the building with are not in the least friendly.

Look, he wants to play tag!

I think my favorite part of the film is how the building itself comes alive. The use of the huge space to mess with the characters' minds and perceptions of reality is far scarier than any jump scare - at one point, they ram open the front doors of the building, desparate in their attempts to escape, only to find that the front of the building has turned into another hallway entirely. Rooms and doors shift, objects move (and boy do they ever move!). And on top of that, the sun never rises: they are trapped in eternal darkness, even as their watches tell them that it's time to pack up and go home, that the caretaker of the building will arrive soon to release them.

The only real downside, in my mind, is pacing of the film. In a movie that's supposedly unscripted, sometimes it really feels like things can drag on. It's not the worst thing to weigh down a movie, but it can definitely leave you wanting to hit the fast forward button at times. There's also a ridiculous scene where Lance kills and eats a rat. I understand that he's trying to survive, but really? But in the end, this film is what every ghost hunter television show wants to be: to get serious ratings, you need some real scares, and if you want real scares, well, go to the stereotypical and juciest of haunting grounds. Mental asylums. 

I might be biased, but haunted house flicks are my favorite, and Grave Encounters seriously delivered in terms of bringing some freshness to an old topic. Though quite a bit of it is reminiscent of House On Haunted Hill, I still found myself enjoying it and even jumping from time to time, allowing the first person view of the camera to work its magic on my suspension of belief.

Remember, anything with a sepia filter and some jerky motion can be scary...