“Grave Encounters” (2011) is a great concept reasonably well executed. Canadian writer-directors Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz (a.k.a. the Vicious Brothers) imagine “What if one of those supposed ghost-hunting TV shows truly came upon ghosts?” They film it in the suitably creepy closed-down parts of an old asylum in Vancouver.
The film is more mood and scares than story, slightly to its detriment. Four years later, another “found footage” horror film, “Hell House LLC” impressively built a spooky backstory to go with its premise of people deliberately running cameras in a haunted location.
But “Grave Encounters” banks on us finding abandoned asylums creepy in and of themselves. That’s fair enough, as a team of five – led by Sen Rogerson as host Lance Preston – takes us through the building, lighting the way with the camera lights and flashlights, and sometimes relying on the camera’s ability to pick up images better than the human eye.
“Grave Encounters” (2011)
Directors: Colin Minihan, Stuart Ortiz
Writers: Stuart Ortiz, Colin Minihan
Stars: Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir
Riverview Hospital is the most-filmed location in Vancouver; for instance, “The X-Files” used it no less than five times, including in the pilot episode. This might be why I felt a slight sense of the generic during the hallway walks. Still, I enjoyed the peeks into almost every abandoned side room and stairwell. A bathroom features turned-over, stained bathtubs; a wheelchair sits forlornly in the hall; tiny room upon tiny room is starkly empty, but we know patients roomed here in the past.
I get a general sense of green in the color scheme, as the cameras often use the night-vision setting. Because the tech is trying so hard to see in the dark, images are grainy. And because we’re on edge from the premise, we’re hyper-aware of how grain bounces around in such images. Dust motes float through the frame, and rarely does a viewer’s eye fixate so much on dust.
Building the mood
Minihan and Ortiz go quite a way into their 92-minute film before the first outright scare, making sure the mood is established first. Then we get a bevy of pants-soiling moments and a touch of sci-fi. Rarely does a film hold one’s attention with so little, and with such thin, not particularly likable characters. As “Grave Encounters” was filmed in improvisational style, one actor chooses to yell “What the f***!” for at least half of his dialog, and it’s a bit annoying.
“Grave Encounters” mostly passes a “found footage” test that’s important to me: There are logical reasons for all the cameras to be where they are, and to be rolling. The setup is amusing as we see from footage (not intended for airing in the TV show itself) that this quintet does not believe in ghosts at all. They’re even willing to outright fake some drama, as Lance gives a groundskeeper $20 to say he has seen a ghost on the grounds.
The film would’ve benefited from beefing up its surrounding story, perhaps with more details of the horrors patients were subjected to – stuff that could linger in the back of our minds as the group wanders down the hallways.
More fun could’ve been had with the sci-fi/supernatural concept if we got an epilog of another group searching for our main group – although, granted, that would require a stretch of the found-footage premise. Perhaps “Grave Encounters 2” (2012) goes into that.
This isn’t an elite film of the subgenre, but it’s well worth a single viewing. Since found footage has only been mainstream for a quarter-century, each entry takes and passes the baton. If “Grave Encounters” paved the way for “Hell House LLC,” it’s an important entry.