Found-footage movies are a lot like pro wrestling: Your enjoyment largely depends on your ability to embrace kayfabe. Exactly one movie was able to exist in a world that was legitimately unsure about whether the framing device (that is, “this movie is a recording made by people who are now missing”) was true: The Blair Witch Project, of course, which came out at the exact right point in history — just on the cusp of technology ruining the fun immediately, but also in a sweet spot that allowed word-of-mouth to spread. Since then, many movies have strived to capture the magic of Blair Witch’s suffocating journey into the psyches of three people who meet their demise while hopelessly lost in a world that was beginning to feel impossible to escape.
Of all the found-footage films to come out since Blair Witch, Robbie Banfitch’s dirt-caked and viscera-soaked multipart opus The Outwaters is the closest anyone has gotten to replicating the spirit of pure, screaming terror that exists in that film. The Outwaters also came out at an ideal time, part of a wave of “liminal horror” films to take movie-nerd circles by storm, alongside movies like Kyle Edward Ball’s domestic trauma-nightmare Skinamarink or Jane Schoenbrun’s delicious creepypasta sendup We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which each told wildly different stories, but used very similar means to get there. But let’s get back to the term “liminal horror.” These evasive, elusive movies derive a lot of terror from depriving you (and, typically, their characters) of the ability to get a steady footing on where you are, and how long you’ve been there. Think recent trends in “The Backrooms,” a trend that may be why films like Skinamarink and World’s Fair were able to find champions outside the Shuddersphere.
If you want to pigeonhole The Outwaters, it’s the classic “college kids go out into nature and encounter forces they don’t understand” movie: Director Banfitch also stars as amateur filmmaker named Robbie who, with his brother, Scott (Scott Schamell), singer Michelle (Michelle May) and hairstylist Angela (Angela Basolis), embarks to the Mojave Desert to camp out and make a music video. However, Banfitch isn’t content to stick with the standard “shaky cam and weird sound effects in the distance” approach, instead opting for the “absolute fucking insanity” route. The first hour or so of the film is gently creepy, if a little routine. We know things are going to escalate: The film introduces us to the cast of characters by showing their photos, names, ages and “Last Seen On” dates over a warped 911 call. It’s a wonderful, bold move: we get multiple earthquakes, thunderstorms on a crystal-clear night and the majestic sound of electrical drones coming out of holes in the earth, reminding us that things are going to go haywire very soon, but not quite yet.
The Outwaters is presented as three memory cards, submitted into evidence for the ongoing investigation into the foursome’s disappearance. Card 1 and Card 2 are mostly tame; there’s corny music-video antics, drinking and talking. Things aren’t idyllic, though: The ground feels like it’s alive, someone left a menacing hatchet embedded near the campsite, and those massively loud thunderstorms with a pale yellow moon in full view are freaky as hell. You can feel the terrors lingering just out of view in the Mojave, salivating, ready to finally be revealed.
When the title card “CARD 3” appears, the tension shifts and things go bugfuck insane. A menacing figure shows up in the night wielding a hatchet, and before they know it, members of the party are being brutalized by an unseen force. Before long, everyone but Robbie is dead or disappeared, leaving Robbie detached from reality and trying to piece together what happened. Are his friends alive? What did this to them? Who knows, but as reality begins to bend and shift, they appear as blood-soaked phantoms in the night, whispering prayers and pleading for their mothers to save them. At one point, he’s led from the mouth of the bloodied tent into his mother’s house, where she awaits, caked in dried blood, pleading for him to come home. By day, he wanders the Mojave barefoot, encountering bizarre, fleshy, screaming worms (one of which he kindly rescues from a sticker bush) and squishy piles of viscera. The cycles of terror and confusion repeat. The hatchet man returns, but maybe Robbie is the hatchet man, or maybe the hatchet man is another form of a horrible, scaly beast that he encounters in the night, its form too unknowable and huge to be understandable in the small beam of the flashlight. The “CARD 3” section of the film offers us essentially no joy, or salvation, and almost no relief. Here in the Outwaters, we all die in the dark.
Somehow, though, moments of beauty exist within Banfitch’s world. For starters, throughout the film, Robbie (and his crew) encounter wild donkeys of the desert, whose (completely nonviolent and un-weird) presence feels like a reminder that even though nightmares exist out here, sometimes the nightmares are just creatures trying to survive. Other beauties, though, are tinged with fear. At one point, Robbie’s plunged into a mysterious sea of red, swirling liquid, as though the horrors have seen fit to cleanse him, the acid stink of his fear mixing with the gorgeous imagery. That feeling amps up later, when Robbie finds himself staring down an inky abyss, punctuated by fixed points of light and enveloped by a choir of heavenly drones. It’s as though whatever is tormenting Robbie wants to give him tiny dashes of something that isn’t fear, but only to play with him until it can convince him to disembowel himself before the unrecognizably mutilated heads of his friends.
The best liminal horror is like a roller coaster, but if you can’t suspend your disbelief, it can be like watching a YouTube video of someone else riding the roller coaster. The Outwaters (and, for that matter, Skinamarink) really sings when you’ve confined yourself to the dark of the theater, at the mercy of the film’s flow and its ideas of sound design. In your home, on your TV, you can turn down the volume when the scream-worms show up, or get distracted by your need to vacuum, or even fast-forward through the music-video-centric parts of the plot. In the theater, the small circle of the flashlight beam that is our only sliver of visibility takes on extra power, cutting through the darkness that we find ourselves in, too, even if we are safe in cinema seats. It’s not for everyone, but if you let yourself fall into the nightmare kayfabe, it’ll leave you reeling for days.
For those who felt like The Outwaters needed something else to keep it going, Banfitch also released two short companion pieces: Card Zero and File VL-624. On its own, the 34-minute prequel Card Zero is nothing more than a short film about a queer relationship being soured by one person clinging on a little too tightly. The players bring enough authenticity that you’d almost buy that this was personal footage that Banfitch decided to Outwatersify. Robbie and his boyfriend Julien (Julian Broudy) whisper sweetnesses to each other and fool around tenderly. The following day, Robbie gushes to Michelle about their romance, and the trio take a day trip out to the desert to scout music video locations. It’s all very tame, and only a couple stray nosebleeds and a moment of paranoia tip us off to the world Robbie will end up in. When they return, the energy has changed and Julian distances himself, seemingly triggered by an offhand comment about the future. Did the malicious presence of what lies in wait in the Mojave push Julian away from his doomed associates? It’s hard to say. On its own, Card Zero feels all too real, and though its inclusion in the final film would have ruined its flow, it feels like it breaks the world of The Outwaters open. It’s antithetical to what liminal horror seeks to accomplish, but it makes Banfitch’s vision all the more tantalizing.
Finally, we arrive at File VL-624, which presents itself as a reconstruction of corrupted files from Cards 1-3. What begins as a glorified 20-minute deleted scenes reel (told in seven fragments) slowly morphs into something wilder, as Banfitch uses The Outwaters and Card Zero to weave together a glitchy desert nightmare. Again, your mileage may vary depending on your willingness to go along with Banfitch; for some, this could be a glorified Final Cut Pro experiment. For anyone terrified by The Outwaters, though, its intense, rapid-fire cuts and auditory gore are all the more horrifying and gut-wrenching.
In The Outwaters, a distorted voice issues one command to Robbie: “Show them.” That voice returns on File VL-624, calling out as much to us as to the holder of the camera: “Decipher me. Unravel me.” The Outwaters doesn’t want to be understood, but it wants to be examined, puzzled over, taken as an omen of an unknowable oblivion awaiting us all. We all die in the dark, the film’s poster tells us, less a warning and more a statement of fact. Even if Banfitch never makes anything like The Outwaters again, it stands as a monument to the untold terrors that one can accomplish with a shoestring budget and a video camera.
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