Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to [email protected].
Julian here! My Cinapse journey began in 2014 with a piece about how an underground Japanese fake documentary was the best horror film you likely hadn’t seen yet. That film, Koji Shiraishi’s Noroi: the Curse, skillfully blended frights both real and fictional in ways that set a new bar for my expectations of the genre. A decade later, things have come full circle–as my debut audio commentary is included on Noroi’s first Western release as part of the J-Horror Rising box set from Arrow Films. To celebrate, Ed invited me to curate this month’s Two Cents, focusing on personal recommendations for found footage horror.
I hope this month’s selection of innovative found footage features reflects Noroi‘s trailblazing spirit, especially as the genre remains split between equally vocal champions and detractors in a world where our relationship with horror, technology, and media seems to evolve daily.
The Pick: Lake Mungo (2008)
To start, there’s no better film than Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo. Like Noroi, Lake Mungo transcends the traditional limitations of found footage by presenting itself as a fully completed documentary. Anderson foregoes expected shaky-cam scares shot by ill-fated characters in favor of a sleek, polished documentary of unexpected technical and emotional scope–one whose participants make it out alive, yet not unscathed from the horror they’ve witnessed. In assembling various footage sources, Anderson draws viewers into a haunting exploration of grief–blending love and loss, public and private lives, life and death, past and future in a deeply unsettling yet beautiful fashion.
It’s also a film whose journey into the public eye slightly mirrors Noroi’s own–years after its high-profile yet all-too-brief run as part of Lionsgate’s annual Eight Films to Die For series, Lake Mungo has gradually gathered a reputation as one of the most chilling faux-documentary horror films out there. It received a stellar (and region-free!) special edition from Second Sight in the UK, and horror auteur Mike Flanagan recently introduced a new 4K restoration at this year’s Beyond Fest.
I’m excited to gather everyone’s thoughts on Joel Anderson’s staggering, singular directorial effort as we kick off a month of boundary-pushing, reality-upending found footage films!
Featured Guests
Madeleine
The moment that haunts me from Lake Mungo is not the moment that frightens me the most. It is an ultra wide shot of the Australian landscape in twilight, a single road bisecting the frame, and a single car rolling backwards through frame. When I first watched Lake Mungo, projected in a large, mostly empty movie theater, it was the most striking image of grief I had ever seen. A mother and father leaving the morgue after identifying the body of their daughter, their car breaking down and only being able to drive in reverse. Even if it feels like the world is ending, we must keep going. Our lives must continue. We need to go home.
My mother was diagnosed with a very aggressive stage 4 lung cancer last month. Most nights I am driving home from the hospital in darkness, feeling a crushing sensation in my chest, my breathing shallow and my heart heavy. I need to get home, but I am being pulled back. I am driving in reverse.
While Lake Mungo is unquestionably a horror movie, it’s also one of the most powerful films about grief I’ve ever seen. I think a lot of this is due to the faux documentary format, which is utilized for a severe realism, as well as a means to relay information outside of a traditional narrative for maximum impact. Watching a fictional family lose a loved one is one thing, but seeing it recreated with old, analog footage, interviews tinged with trauma, and being told “this is real” just hits different. It feels real.
The moments that frighten me at a surface level the most in Lake Mungo is the obvious, Alice’s premonition. A jump scare so loud and so ostentatious compared to everything else the film presents. But what gets under my skin is the extensive use of the space in a frame throughout. Things hidden in corners, like a magic trick relying on sleight of hand. It becomes clear this is the space where Alice’s story will be told — even if her ghost does not appear, her brother Mathew expresses a compulsion to insert her into photos and videos. Maybe this is what a real haunting would look like… Not a garish apparition, but a compulsion to hang on.
Towards the end of the film, it is discovered that Alice did a session with the same spiritual medium that her mother worked with months later, both recorded and given to the documentary production for analysis, and played for the audience. As Alice’s guided vision syncs with her mother’s, no commentary is provided. Simply two intercut narrations as the camera moves through their empty house. Both spirits, one still living and breathing but bound to the afterlife by her grief, one a memory clinging to their hearts, passing by each other in the place that was most intimate to them — their home.
Where do we hold our loved ones while they persist in their half-lives? We live with the spirits of our loved ones, alive or dead like Alice, and we choose where we leave them, and how we see them. Choose to insert them into memories, into photos. Choose to lock them in a house and move away. As the family vacates the house where they have lived through so much grief, we think we may see Alice still there, still clinging to her home. It is inconclusive if Alice’s story is finished, or ever will be finished. But at least we know, she made it home.
“I guess I just really wanted to be inside someone else’s life for a while.”
Found footage only feels vital when it evokes or functions as a cursed object. Without convincingly presenting this inherently artificial thing as the genuine article, or getting the audience to play along, it feels like a gimmick.
Lake Mungo possesses a unity of form, wherein the quality of the “archival footage” directly relates to the quality of the “documentary” footage. Neither depiction exceeds the veracity of their purported source, like news reports, talking head interviews, and the home movie footage at the center of the “investigation,” forming the engine of the film. No elements of the movie betray this concept, or the filmmakers’ adherence to it. No one feels silly, there is no gotcha, and no one is the butt of the joke. There is no joke. This is someone’s life we’re talking about.
The care taken in attention to detail to mimic a documentary, not a horror film, makes all the difference in verisimilitude. We follow the victim’s family’s coworkers; we’re presented with tableaux of funeral parlor workers, grief counseling sessions, and garage band practice; and we see candid photographs of the past alongside pastoral footage of the present.
Even the title, a la The Blair Witch Project, is a clever use of restraint, insisting on telling this story with utmost sincerity. With Lake Mungo, the commitment to this particular bit is even more unflinching, daring not to use any words that may evoke any horror elements whatsoever in its title–instead allowing its straight-faced delivery to terrify you with its hypnotic, gestalt presentation. Pieced together, Lake Mungo becomes something–somehow–so much more horrific than you could have imagined when it began, and you knew it was fake.
Convincing, unknown performers–standouts being David Pledger and Rosie Traynor as the parents–populate every role. This briskly establishes a stakes and tone that’s constantly, subtly reinforced throughout this story. It automatically engages you in a way that makes the movie’s payoffs extremely scary and satisfying, with a compounding effect unmatched by other films in this subgenre (barring Blair Witch and Noroi: the Curse).
The fact that the film’s central photographs and home movie footage used to seamlessly construct and stitch together Lake Mungo’s false reality also become the vessels for the film’s narrative and experiential payoffs is an impressive sticking of the landing.
Director Joel Anderson deserves immense credit and admiration for his achievement here. Lake Mungo sadly remains his sole directorial credit, and I hope that his lack of follow-up films isn’t due to any lack of faith in him as a filmmaker. Rather, that his singular work is instead yet another example of his restraint as an auteur, unwilling to do anything that would diminish or dilute the spell that Lake Mungo casts on those convinced (or willing to) believe. His Executive Producer credits in recent years make me hope the above even more so.
It just feels real–like someone just found this footage and released it as a complete, polished documentary. I mean, come on–didn’t you see what I just saw? That poor girl, and her poor family…
And don’t even get me started on its bizarre, seemingly superfluous connections to Twin Peaks. The Palmer family, and an entire community by extension, grieves and is traumatized by the death of the young Palmer girl, a death prophesied in a supernatural, self-fulfilling manner, with her corpse being found by a body of water, not to mention doppelgangers, secret journals, burying things in the woods, and secret tapes of scandalous sexual exploitation becoming major elements later on. Weird!
While my week didn’t allow the time to do a deep dive into my thoughts on this great film, I wanted to note that Lake Mungo was the most influential mockumentary on my own work when setting out to tackle my found footage film Tahoe Joe because it’s so realistic and it truly takes itself seriously as a “based on real events” piece. I actually thought it was a real documentary for about the first half hour because it was so convincing. And, for a film that really only has one shock moment – and we all know that moment – it still finds a way to build a creeping dread leading up to it. I’ll never forget that reveal, though; you can tell something is off even with the poor quality from the cell footage, and as it gets closer and closer and they start to show you frame by frame of what she’s walking by… still gives me goosebumps and this very real sense of seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see. It’s just haunting stuff.
The Team
I don’t believe in ghosts. I just don’t. But nothing in the world scares me like ghost movies scare me. And holy shit, Lake Mungo had me quaking in my boots. What a remarkable accomplishment this little Australian mockumentary pulls off with its deceptively twisting narrative and classical, almost banal visuals that yield ever more disturbing images the deeper you look. This is a haunted-ass movie.
Writer/Director Joel Anderson really crafted a script that worked in a massively satisfying way and almost held me in the palm of its hand for the entire runtime. I had this very personal experience watching the film where each time I thought I was starting to get ahead of the script or asking a question about the central mystery of “what happened to Alice Palmer?”, it either answered the question and raised a new, more intriguing one, or zigged where I thought it would zag. The twists and turns here are remarkable, and yet never particularly strain credulity. The grieving Palmer family looking for answers in light of their teenage daughter’s tragic death kind of flail about but always feel like real human beings wrestling with tragedy in a hyper-modern fashion: with a documentary crew shoved into their faces. Anderson was always a step or two ahead of me in a way that is uniquely satisfying, almost like he was in my head and answering each concern or question I had in real time.
Lake Mungo was simultaneously not as unrelentingly harsh and soul crushing as its reputation (it’s got a real heart and a genuine streak of empathy running through it as the audience feels for the surviving Palmers), and even more frightening than expected as it creeps ever so slowly under your skin until the last of the credits roll, revealing that Anderson has indeed been ahead of you, guiding you towards the inexorable end.
This is a remarkable piece of faux documentary horror that I won’t soon forget, much to my non-believing-but-what-was-that-sound dismay.
Lake Mungo is one of those movies that serves as a dividing line in my life, a sense of two eras forming in my brain, one for before I saw this haunting film, and one for after. It changed my DNA, shifted the way I thought about horror, found footage, and the nature of ghost stories.
In the years since that marvelous change, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this movie, trying to drill down into what specifically hit me in such a powerful, indelible way, and the film’s own aura of mystery has always flummoxed me a bit. I don’t know that I’ll ever find a concise way to explain the spell Lake Mungo casts, which is perhaps paradoxically part of the appeal. After all, can we ever really explain the ghosts in our lives, even if we can recount in exact detail how they manifested for us?
If I had to take a stab at it, though, I think it would come down to the way the film handles a certain sense of inevitability, a foreboding cloud of fate that hovers over the Palmer family as they try to reckon with the loss of Alice. Lake Mungo is a film filled with twists, from the reveal of Alice’s very personal secrets to the reveal of Mathew Palmer’s various deceptions to, of course, the discovery of that horrifying footage on Alice’s recovered cell phone. These swerves all work remarkably well, especially in the docudrama context in which they’re presented, so you might come away thinking that this is a film about how you never really know someone, even after they’re gone and you’ve combed through their life.
That’s certainly part of it, but what endures about Lake Mungo for me is the feeling that this was all always going to happen. All it needed was a camera to turn on it, the right amount of attention to fuel its cold fire. Does Alice ever disappear if she doesn’t capture that footage on her phone? Does the family ever learn about her secret life if Mathew doesn’t set up those cameras? And perhaps most importantly, do we learn what’s really lurking in Mathew’s images even if we don’t keep looking?
Maybe not, but Lake Mungo‘s overall tone is one in which all of these surprises are somehow inevitable, like Alice’s own revelation that she was always fated to die. In the world of this film, we are all haunted, even if we don’t realize it, and the real journey isn’t about learning that, but about what we risk when we dare to look closer.
Opening with black-and-white Victorian images of spiritualist photographs, writer-director Joel Anderson hammers home the central theme of Lake Mungo: that tenuous connection the dead may still have with reality. While it’s a film about the existence of ghosts, it’s more interested in the need to believe that ghosts exist. As our loved ones depart, we seek to fill their void with understanding: not just of the questions they left behind in life, but of whether or not we can determine where they’ve disappeared to in death. In either case, such questions remain torturously provocative for the living.
The Palmer family finds disparate, isolated coping methods after the drowning of teenager Alice in the isolated town of Ararat. Father Russell immerses himself in work; mother June, battling insomnia, sneaks into neighbors’ homes to “be someone else for a while.” Brother Mathew takes up photography, eventually capturing eerie images of Alice in time-lapse photos. This discovery unravels hidden secrets within the Palmer family—especially Alice’s—as Anderson’s film reveals just how Alice wasn’t the only one who survived on a regular blend of truth and fiction.
The Palmers’ revelations about the true nature of Alice, her mysterious life, and her seemingly random death ironically only birth further unsettling mysteries. Like Lake Mungo’s opening spiritualist photographs, Mathew doctored reality to give closure to his mother–but couldn’t catch the real ghostly Alice lingering in the background. The revelation of an illicit relationship with the Palmers’ neighbors dries up into an afterthought when Police fail to track them down. And the revelation of a kindly psychic’s connection to Alice in the terrifying days before her death opens up deeper questions about whether familial bonds can transcend time and space. Just as these characters conceal the truth from one another, Lake Mungo suggests that the collective weight of their individual stories of grief and deception points to a deeper, more daunting truth on a cosmic scale—highlighting how each fragment of knowledge only underscores how much remains bound by the limits of their (and our) understanding.
While many found-footage and faux documentaries explore the Faustian pursuit of knowledge, Lake Mungo stands out for grounding this obsession in such deeply flawed, human behavior. It all comes to an ending that’s as heartbreaking as it is horrifying–revealing how the spiritual closure we seek with our loved ones may be more one-sided than we can possibly know.
As this month goes on, you’ll realize that I’m a true found footage/POV junkie, with the faux-doc take on the subgenre among my favorite specific formats. I watch a wide variety of films in the related POV subgenres from widely heralded films to even more widely panned ones, and a host of unknown Tubi gems. It’s truly probably my favorite type of horror film for many reasons.
Lake Mungo is among my favorites. It’s haunting, even if not often “scary” in that jumpscare kind of way. People talk about films like The Witch being all about dread, but it’s movies like this that encapsulate dread for me. The dread finds its friends grief, sadness, despair, and guilt and they work together to make you feel a heaviness that few films are able to really embody.
As a parent, I feel this especially potently. It stings and keeps stinging long after it ends. Truly, a brilliant film with more emotion packed in than anyone is likely to be prepared for.
And we’re out.
OCTOBER: Found Footage Horror Curated by Julian Singleton
October 14 – Incantation (Netflix – 1 hour 51 minutes)
October 21 – Horror in the High Desert (Tubi – 1 hour 22 minutes)
October 28 – Noroi: the Curse (Available on Shudder October 15 – 1 hour 55 minutes)
