Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.
I don’t love found footage movies as a general rule. While there are a few exceptions, they all tend to flow together for me at some point. We get some set up of our protagonists going somewhere and doing something in a place that is supposed to be dangerous, bad things happen, there’s a lot of shaky cam and night vision footage, and everybody dies. The ones that work best for me are the ones that either did something relatively new (The Blair Witch Project), go outside of the genre (Chronicle), or don’t follow that basic path ([REC]. Grave Encounters does none of those things. It follows the basic formula to the letter, and while it does provide a few decent scares (and one very iconic moment), there’s not a great deal here that you haven’t seen before.
The set up is that we’re dealing with a reality television show called “Grave Encounters” that is more or less the precursor of the ghost hunter shows on The History Channel and the like. A team of paranormal investigators goes into supposedly haunted places and sees if they can find any evidence of the supernatural. We’re told by the show’s executive producer (Ben Wilkinson) that what we’re going to be shown has been edited down from the recovered footage of the proposed sixth episode of the show. In this episode, the team investigates the abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, where a number of paranormal and unexplained phenomena have been reported. We get a little background—like one of the doctors at the facility had a penchant for lobotomies and was eventually killed by the patients. We also get a little bit of the history of the place in general.
