Everyone Underestimated This Found Footage Horror Movie — Until Its Ending

The big picture

• The Forca
  subverts typical horror film conventions by giving depth to its characters, resulting in shocking plot twists.
• The film combines routine horror elements with disturbing scenes of violence, showing the intense suffering of its teenage characters.
• The Forca
  surprises viewers with an ending that reveals the seemingly innocent character as a cunning mastermind behind the terrifying events.

Found footage is an ingenious medium, a subgenre of horror that twists audience perceptions to root them in screen horror. There are still many innovative projects in this subgenre, such as the ongoing V/H/S anthology series or the mind-blowing original. Paranormal activity. But for every indie hit, there are plenty of mainstream attempts that fail to do anything groundbreaking, which is what people assumed about 2015. the gallows, directed by Chris Lofing i Travis Cluff. A cursory look at the film reveals a fairly basic plot: a group of teenagers find themselves at their school in the middle of the night, being chased by an evil force (conveniently caught on a video camera that a teenager apparently doesn't can delete). ). It's fair to recognize much of this premise as your average horror fodder, but it's how the film subverts these core ideas that reveal the film's true terror. It uses the audience's expectations of these tired concepts against them, making them believe they know exactly what to expect before surprising them with a level of suffering and fear they could never have anticipated.

'The Gallows' has a basic principle

Like any found footage horror film, The Forca The story is told by a character who can't seem to leave the camera. In this plot, this is the high school game Ryan (Ryan Shoos), an arrogant football player who begins the film by documenting the daily lives of him and his friend, Reese (Reese Mishler). Reese is a markedly kinder character than the brash Ryan and is currently the star of his school's play, The Gallows., a melodrama with a cliffhanger ending that, 20 years earlier, took the life of another student when it malfunctioned. He's doing all this to try to impress his co-star Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown), her crush and a big theater fan who is remarkably different from the typical love interests of this genre. Throughout the first act, Reese is extremely nervous, wanting to be around Pfeifer, but petrified of showing his bad acting to the entire student body, so Ryan has an idea: they break into the school that night and wreck the set, hoping they'll ruin anyone. possibilities to set up the work.

The film reveals surprising depth in this common setup, with Reese especially subverting the “popular jock” archetype with his surprisingly adoring affection for Pfeifer. It shows a subtle vulnerability to him, granting an empathy that makes the whole film that much more engaging. The film does the same with Ryan; he fits much more easily into the goofy persona that teenage horror usually presents doing things like bullying nerds and making fun of the theater to make his friends laugh, but the film shows that he feels conflicted when he does these things. He doesn't justify his actions, but the internal conflict he has between hurting someone's feelings and gaining validation from those around him is a real confusion facing teenagers today. These quiet developments characterizeboth boys as fools, but also innocent, and remind viewers that, beyond being horror stereotypes, they are children at the end of the day, which causes the film to begin subjecting them to intense acts of suffering.

Horror is easy when the characters are simple

Ryan and Reese move forward with their plan and recruit Ryan's girlfriend Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford), to destroy the set. They are stopped by the surprise appearance of Pfeiffer, who claims she saw Reese's car parked outside and wanted to see what they were doing. The four then realize that something has locked them in the school. The film begins to follow the plot of similar ghost stories, the quartet discover the spirit of the boy who died two decades earlier, Charlie Grimille (Ariel Castro), has decided to take revenge by unleashing terror on a new generation of teenagers.. Everything is pretty normal for a scary movie, until Ryan surprisingly manages to get the ghost to break his leg. The film spends an awful amount of time on the young man's screams of pain and fear as the specter confronts him. It's a painful and heartbreaking scene as onlookers watch Ryan, his former swagger gone, whimper and crawl across the blood-soaked floor, begging for his life. It's a reminder that, even though they're wrong, these characters are still just teenage high school students, making the suffering Charlie puts them through far worse.

These scenes are reminiscent of more enjoyable found footage movies The Poughkeepsie Tapes, a film that spends as much time on the anguish of its victims as it does on their actual deaths. The Forca it's already subversive in how it combines its routine elements with these disturbing scenes of violence, with Cassidy's subsequent death as horrifying as Ryan's, but where it really twists all expectations is its ending. Reese and Pfeiffer's bond has grown amid all this chaos, with Pfeiffer creating a kinder, more sincere version of a final girl than viewers may be used to, and Reese realizing his love for her and understanding that he may have to give up his life for her. It is at this heartbreaking moment that Pfeiffer begins to… monologue. Reese begins to panic, watching as the girl she gives her life for carelessly recites the script of her play, her long death by hanging only becoming more terrifying as viewers begin to understand the truth: Pfeiffer it's been there all along. Revealed as Charlie's evil daughter, this seemingly innocent teenage genius is shown to be a cunning mind, playing with the emotions of everyone around her to not only draw them further into her late father's traps, but also ensure I want each of their deaths to be as painful and devastating as possible.

There's more to “The Gallows” than meets the eye

The Forca it's a film with a thoroughly creative approach, but it's not without its flaws. Even with its attempts to create a more layered plot, the film tends to fall into more repetitive scares and the plot elements of your typical found footage films. Still, the film finds every opportunity to subvert expectations by giving some depth to what could have been your basic stereotypes and showing the evil hidden behind seemingly innocent characters. It concentrates on providing each person on screen with a certain complexity, making watchers wonder if these are the one-note archetypes they've been waiting for or perhaps something more before that. putting them through a great deal of pain and suffering. It's a genre-insensitive twist that plays with the audience's perceptions, giving them the basic horror plot they've been waiting for in the most disturbing way possible.

The Forca is available to stream on Amazon Prime in the US

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