2022, Joseph & Vanessa Winter (V/H/S/99) -- download
Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter; yeah the director) is a popular streamer that has fallen from grace due to a stunt gone wrong. After his "apology" he needs to rise again in the ranks, so he arranges an extreme version akin to his previous stunts, in which his gimmick was facing things that scare him, usually stupid shit. And to that intent, he is staying the weekend in a notorious haunted house, and states that instead of running away from the scary things, he will run towards them. Of note, which got a loud chuckle from me, he states that this particular haunted house is not popular enough to actually cost him anything to stay in, which says something about the industry that is haunted houses.
Shawn is all about the tech. He has multiple cameras stuck to his body, all wirelessly streaming to his site. He also tacks up more, in each scary room of the scary (and gross) house, with duct tape. The setup is pretty sweet, with multiple camera views always on, always live, while Shawn walks around with a tablet hanging from his neck, allowing him to view all the cameras, as well as paying attention to & interacting with the chat steam, and load videos and pics from his fans, as need be. Our "found footage" view of the movie is a combination of everything.
Speaking of the "found footage" motif, given that our viewing season usually includes one, a loud guffaw from me, when they did an intertitle commenting on how "streamer Shawn Ruddy disappeared during a night in haunted house" only to pull back, revealing it as a tshirt, which he of course is selling. I would buy one!
Anywayz, Shawn goes in, sees lots of spooky shit, and locks himself into the house. There are fuzzy lights, bumps in the night, creepy left behind shit, and lots of details that add to the legend of the house, involving the ghost of Mildred, a girl who hung herself. As we settled into the movie, the house really was creepy AF, and I expected the story to take a strongly serious turn allowing us to mostly root for the house against this rather annoying streamer. But instead, they do a damn good job of comedy and nostalgic horror references (Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson to name a few) combined with the conceit of the technology being used. Some of the best bits are when Shawn is focused on his own shit (usually crying or bleeding), so only we notice the fan chat stream has caught something entirely else on one of the cams, or has "helped" him by doing a bit of off-screen research, which eventually he catches onto, and it is integrated back into the story.
The jump scares are great, the gore is fun and watching Shawn getting knocked around is never not fun, which aligns well with my "old man yells at clouds" opinion of the whole thing.
This is the kind of movie I want to point at when I have to turn off incredibly low grade indie movies because they don't seem to even have the most basic aspects of film making down. On an imaginably tight budget and minimal number of contributors, the Winters did a great little horror flick.
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