The Vicious Brothers (25-year-old filmmakers Stuart Ortiz and Colin Miniham) have publicly stated that their “intention with Grave Encounters was to try and take things back to a time when horror films didn’t play by the rules, weren’t afraid to disturb and to offend, while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of the ‘found footage’ style with a high level of technical sophistication and wit.” I definitely applaud the gusto with which they approached their feature debut, and sure Grave Encounters is undeniably technically well-made, but to say that it doesn’t play by the rules would be a stretch. If Ortiz and Miniham did in fact break any rules, I’m fairly certain they weren’t rules worth breaking. Furthermore, the horror/thriller rules they did play by were stale and left me barely wondering when all that foreshadowing painstakingly set up in the first act and first-half of the second was finally going to run its course.
Grave Encounters begins much in the same way that Cannibal Holocaust did, the opening scene fading in on a sleazy cable TV exec explaining to a documentary crew how he found these remarkable and nearly unbelievable footage of some young filmmakers meeting their demise. After briefly (and unnecessarily) filling us in on how it’s only been edited for time and nothing else, we’re treated to an episode of reality television gone horribly (predictably) wrong. Grave Encounters, in its first season, is a low-budget knockoff of Ghost Hunters or whatever. The crew making it are thoroughly skeptical about their subject, all completely aware that they’re going to make some money by hyping photographic artifacts and blurred night-vision whip-pans. When the young TV crew ends up spending the night in a Mid-Atlantic decommissioned insane asylum, however, things take a turn for the formulaic.
The story of this film is fairly rote. The writing is staid and hits on many of the elements of plot that made Quarantine a fun, if a bit excessive, thriller. It’s a passable narrative that, if left merely as a skeleton upon which to build the flesh of character, wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. However, the individuals depicted in Grave Encounters are slaves to the plot of the film. One might argue that’s the case with any work of fiction. However, plenty of pioneering filmmakers have created intensely fascinated works almost bereft of story, relying on the sense of character that film is uniquely capable of achieving through sound and image.
The characters in Grave Encounters are never allowed to develop to a point where the tragedy that befalls them becomes more than a prerequisite for gnarly effects; one can’t have someone get massacred if one doesn’t physically have a character in her film to get massacred, for instance. If this was what the directors were going for, and they had the gumption to completely debase and depersonalize their characters, I could see this film working superbly well. Unfortunately, the directors allow the people in their film just enough back story to urge us to care about them, without really letting those characters show us why we should.
With their first feature, Miniham and Ortiz have definitely made obvious their technical skill. The visual scare sequences in Grave Encounters are genuinely well-made and frightening, and if someone were looking for a visual effects team, they could do much worse. Unfortunately, both the staleness of the tale and the directors’ slipshod attempt at characterization are enough to render this first attempt a failed one.
