Since its inception, as a child’s birthday suffers an otherworldly interruption in 1989’s The McPherson Tape, the found-footage subgenre has existed at the tenuous crossroad between authenticity and artifice. The genre name alone primes us to accept that facade; whether through grainy video feeds or digital handheld lens, a this-really-happened aura of verisimilitude reigns supreme, such that too much of banal reality can invite criticism of a slack pace and too little often leaves one wondering that all-too-common question of why characters are still filming amid mortal danger. Faux-documentaries like the BBC’s Halloween classic Ghoswatch, Kōji Shiraishi’s Noroi, or last year’s The Medium take that aspect to even further abstracted heights, grounding their horror in docu-real clarity and mundanity.
Currently playing at Panic Fest 2022 following its film festival premiere earlier this year, Robbie Banfitch’s The Outwaters runs howling in the opposite direction of verisimilitude and instead embraces delirious chaos. The most apt comparison to describe the director’s debut feature wouldn’t be another found-footage film, but rather the nightmarish descent-into-madness video logs usually only seen in glimpses by horror-movie characters, a la Event Horizon’s notoriously censored Hell sequence. Watching The Outwaters is like watching one of those videos in its horrifying entirety.
One has to wonder if that exact parallel was on the director’s mind, as the set-up for the film is effectively the same principle: three camera memory cards found in the Mojave, the final known record of a missing music-video crew. A hysterical and haunting 911 call hints at the madness to come, but for its first forty minutes, The Outwaters escalates gradually, from Los Angeles film-crew preparation and family frictions to ominous desert isolation. A micro-production with four main cast members (including Banfitch, who also acts as the movie’s writer, editor, cinematography, and special effects designer), this is very much a chronicle of omen and doom rather than a traditional narrative, compensating for thin plot through naturalistic chemistry. The quartet of Robbie (Robbie Banfitch), Ange (Angela Basolis), Scott (Scott Schamell), and Michelle (Michelle May) imbue their desert shoot hang-out with an awkward genuine friendship that grounds their coming torment in charisma.
True to those horror-movie video logs, omens lurk at the fringes: thundering booms sans storms, a microphone picking up white-noise static from rocky ground, an amorphous discomfort worming through the crew’s skin and minds. Banfitch subtly pulls the rug of reality out from under his characters and the audience, the air saturated with unknown unexplainable suspense, until that suffocating strangeness erupts and The Outwaters shatters into unrelenting eldritch delirium. If you have a divisive relationship with found footage, this won’t change your mind. The frenetic camera that won’t stop filming, the sacrifice of personality for hysteria, showing nothing or just flashes of a terrifying something: all those aspects are here, fueling a kaleidoscopic hour of grotesque viscera and wailing, the camera’s perspective shrinking to manic pinhole peering into endless darkness. Time and space slips, blood gushes, a hatchet swings, screaming faces and shadowed figures flit past the lens, fleshy entities slither in the dirt, something massive reverberates in the shadows. The distance between camera and character is utterly obliterated; more than any other Lovecraftian film I’ve seen, The Outwaters captures the subjective insanity that occurs when a feeble human mind crumbles in the face of unfathomable cosmic horror.
Equal parts belying calm and phantasmagoric gore-splashed bedlam, Robbie Banfitch’s debut is a harrowing showcase of found-footage extremity, transmuting often-frustrating subgenre qualities into nightmare-logic strengths. The Outwaters may sacrifice its narrative threads for a first-person descent into a hell beyond comprehension, but its relentless horror delirium makes this a uniquely unnerving and deranged experience in the subgenre.
