Austin’s own Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman prove there’s plenty of life to reality horror in this Southern slice of cosmic terror
As a lifelong diehard fan of the genre, I believe it’s insane to dismiss faux-docs or found footage as a somehow lesser or exhausted form of horror. In the right hands, these films can be wonderfully intriguing challenges for both new and veteran horror filmmakers, providing incredibly strict limitations in terms of staging and setting that can also serve as a source of limitless creativity. Just look at the entire month Cinapse featured for Two Cents last October! I was intrigued when a new faux-doc popped up as part of this year’s Tribeca lineup–the debut venue of other now-classics like Grave Encounters and The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Naturally, that curiosity only deepened when I learned that Man Finds Tape was made in Austin’s own backyard by a rogues’ gallery of hometown creative luminaries, led by Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman.
I’m excited to share that Hall and Gandersman deliver an exciting entry in the world of faux-doc horror: the film infuses small-town scandals with chilling Lovecraftian dread, leading us to question which monsters are more terrifying: the ones invading from eldritch dimensions, or the all-too-human ones we trust here at home?
After their videographer parents’ mysterious deaths, Lynn Page (Kelsey Pribilski) fled Larkin, Texas, leaving her brother Lucas (William Magnuson) behind. Years later, Lucas finds a miniDV tape in their crumbling barn–with his name on it. The tape shows creepy, glitchy footage of a stranger feeding young Lucas something while he sleeps. This and other tapes propel Lucas to viral YouTube fame, leading to lucrative studio deals. However, Lucas’ public descent into this strange rabbit hole uncovers a bizarre supernatural conspiracy involving local beloved TV preacher Endicott Carr (John Gholson). Carr’s legal actions bring Lucas’ success to a crashing halt. When a new piece of security footage from Larkin reignites his paranoia, Lucas recruits Lynn and his girlfriend Wendy (Nell Kessler) to solve this decades-old mystery.
In a world filled with livestreaming and disappearing physical media, the only thing more challenging than surprising a found footage horror audience in 2025 is establishing a justifiable foundation for the film in the first place. In Man Finds Tape’s case, it pivots into a genre cousin I vastly prefer–the faux documentary. A surprising rarity of reality horror that includes favorites like Lake Mungo and Noroi: the Curse, fake documentaries allow their creatives to get away with more stylish filmmaking tricks typically reserved for straightforward narrative films–musical scores, cross-cutting between disparate sources of footage–that ironically give their fictional stories a greater shot at convincing us of their realism.
In Man Finds Tape, Hall and Gandersman are kids in a genre candy store, joyfully collecting all sorts of inventive different media sources to patch the creepy narrative of their film together–whether it’s an entire town’s network of security cameras (installed by the Page parents as a side gig), to invasive livestreams by fans of Lucas’ work amid his lawsuit PR crisis. Lucas’ sincere confusion and public shaming-fueled paranoia also fuel his overwhelming desire to record everything, which only drives further conflict between Lucas and Lynn. Man Finds Tape’s writer-directors skillfully sidestep the usual pitfalls of found footage by not just establishing natural motivations for the characters to record their footage, but also finding organic ways for footage to exist independent of the characters themselves. It’s the best kind of found footage horror film–one that not only justifies its existence in unexpected ways, but also demonstrates that it couldn’t be made any other way and still provide the same exciting impact.
Once Hall and Gandersman get into the horror side of things, it’s clear to see what attracted the attention of its esteemed genre backers XYZ, Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (The Endless, Synchronic), and C. Robert Cargill (Sinister, The Black Phone) & Jessica Cargill. Joined by The Stranger (Brian Villalobos), the Page siblings and Wendy’s true-crime investigation becomes unexpectedly vital evidence of a disturbing otherworldly power schism unfurling in plain sight. Larkin’s backwoods Texas charm, filled with hole-in-the-wall BBQ joints and elderly churchgoers in their big-hatted Sunday best, reveals itself to be rotten to the core with grimy, goopy creatures from beyond space and time. Icky practical effects augmented by cursory CGI provide some fun, gruesome visuals, and Hall/Gandersman prove themselves adept at restrained moments of suggestive dread as they are with bloody shock. This skillful balance between what horrors they put on full display versus what’s deliciously teased at the fringes makes Man Finds Tape a satisfying slice of Southern cosmic horror.
This approach also plays deeply into Man Finds Tape’s most effective and refreshingly original conceit: that those most affected by these horrors ironically find themselves supernaturally unable to witness or acknowledge them in the first place. Ordinary people can see these horrors on screen, but the citizens of Larkin literally fall into an amnesiac trance whenever they’re shown such footage. It’s an elegantly simple manifestation of the film’s larger themes of blind eyes turned, scandals permitted, and community trusts well taken advantage of–all without sacrificing Man Finds Tape’s genre thrills at the altars of Capital-M Metaphor. It provides a degree of viewer culpability in eyewitness horror that’s often cited but rarely examined this sincerely; the closest comparison I can draw is Koji Shiraishi’s equally scrappy and disturbing Occult, in which the film’s central leads find themselves as much perpetrators as participants, with plenty of bystanders left in their wake.
The sign of a fantastic found footage horror film lies not just in knowing its limitations, but in using them to its advantage. Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman’s Man Finds Tape not only reverently embraces the tried and true tropes of faux-documentary horror films; it also finds delicious ways to subvert them in hopes of getting at something deeper, terrifying, and real.
Man Finds Tape had its World Premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival, represented by XYZ Films.
