The second night of the Salem Horror Fest was where the real horror movies came out, and they had a theme: found footage. The similarities ended there, though. The first film of the night was a lo-fi, no-budget film that felt evocative of The Blair Witch Project with its distinctly freeform style, while the second one was a hyper-modern one set in a Twitch stream gone horribly wrong. How were they? Read on...
It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This (2023)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti, the writers, directors, and stars of It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This, are among the rare found footage filmmakers who understand the things that only this style of filmmaking can do, and exploit this to the fullest. This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it means that this film can often be fairly slow and plodding, the camera capturing as many mundane moments as it does big scares and the flow of the film not readily conforming to a traditional structure. On the other, this means that it also had a very particular organic energy to it reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, another film that understood this, lending credibility to the basic premise that this is supposed to actually be footage recovered by a young couple who were hunting for ghosts in their house. It's a meandering film that takes its sweet time getting to where it wants to go, but one where I appreciated the ultimate destination, and over the course of its run, the found footage/mockumentary style got me into the headspace of its protagonists and helped me grow more attached to them as characters. It's a tiny little film with a lot of heart, and while Kempf and Toti's insistence on only showing it at live screenings for the time being (you can schedule one on their website) will undoubtedly ensure that it doesn't become more than a cult classic, I did not regret watching it.
The basic premise is found footage boilerplate: Rachel and Nick are a married couple who, the both of them being horror/paranormal enthusiasts and (alongside Rachel's friend Christian in the city) amateur filmmakers, decide to buy a dirt-cheap, run-down house in their small town in order to shoot a horror movie -- and maybe spot some real ghosts. The place they bought was reputed to be haunted, and sure enough, at night they spot random people standing outside staring unflinchingly at the house, the beginning of a series of paranormal events that come paired with indications that their little film set may be having some kind of psychic effect on them.
The first half of the film or so is devoted to Rachel, Nick, and Christian's relationship and the mundane, day-to-day activities of their lives and the film project they're working on, and these scenes proved critical. I got a sense that these were real people whose lives were caught on camera as opposed to characters in a movie, giving the film a real, lived-in texture that lent authenticity to everything that happened next. The small-town Missouri setting where this was filmed also did wonders in this department, the protagonists explicitly pointing out that the reason they were able to get the house for so cheap was because their hometown was an out-of-the-way dump, a feeling that definitely came through. The film's attempts to be scary, on the other hand, were often its weakest parts, perhaps most visible in one of its first big horror set pieces, which consists of Rachel and Christian silently sitting together in front of a flickering candle for several uninterrupted minutes until we get a huge jump scare. I get what this scene was trying to go for, but after about a minute or so, it crossed the line and just had me saying "enough is enough, get to the point." It was when the scares tied into the character work that they worked best, especially with the growing hints in the back half of the film that Rachel in particular is slowly losing her mind in her obsession with the house. I would've liked to see more of a focus on this side of the story, a more psychological horror film about Rachel's spiral into madness indicating that she may not be as immune to the house's malignant psychic influence as she thinks she is, and that it's just manifesting differently for her compared to the various people who gather outside to stare at it, especially considering the film's ending, which wrapped it up on a suitably creepy note that managed to pull off a lot considering the low budget.
The Bottom Line
It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This was a rough and imperfect film, but one whose low-budget qualities ultimately won me over and played a major role in what I liked most about it. If this ever comes to your area, give it a look.
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Second film of the night stood at the exact opposite end of the found-footage spectrum, going for internet modernity instead of small-town grit.
Livescreamers (2023)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
At once a love letter to horror gaming and a vicious takedown of everything toxic about the increasingly commercial world of video game streaming, Livescreamers is a film that combines the "set on a computer screen" conceit of Unfriended with a modernized version of the basic premise of the crappy 2000s horror flick Stay Alive: a group of livestreamers employed by a Rooster Teeth-like company called Janus Gaming decide to play a new multiplayer horror game called House of Souls together for a livestream, only for it to turn out that the game is haunted, knows a lot of their personal secrets, and makes it clear that if they die in the game, they die for real, leading them to start tearing each other apart as all their behind-the-scenes drama starts spilling out into the open. It's undoubtedly a better film than Stay Alive, too, buoyed by creative writing, some good scares, an authentic understanding of gamer/livestreamer culture, and not least of all the actual game itself, which were enough to make up for some hokey acting throughout. This was a very fun ride that I would highly recommend.
I didn't bring up Rooster Teeth back there for no reason, either. Anybody who has one foot in geek culture knows about the behind-the-scenes chaos that destroyed that company, once a pioneer of online media made for and by nerds, in the last few years, from casual bigotry to pedophilia to overwork of its employees, and while writer/director Michelle Iannantuono was in large part drawing from her own experiences in media when writing these characters, the interview she gave afterwards indicated that elements of Rooster Teeth's downfall also informed her writing, complete with some of the dialogue being direct quotes from leaked chat logs. Janus Gaming, like Rooster Teeth, is a company that loves to put forward an image of positivity and inclusion for its fans, but behind the scenes, it's an absolute shitshow where everybody has beef with one another and the leadership is as two-faced as the company's namesake. Taylor is grooming his underage female fans behind his wife Gwen's back, and their boss Mitch knew about it but covered it up to save face. Nemo had a frightening encounter with a mentally unhinged fan that caused him to close his DMs and stop interacting with the fans. Jon and Davey, a pair of very attractive young men, blatantly queerbait female viewers for ratings in ways that Dice, who is actually queer, finds distasteful. Dice finds themself overworked, tokenized, and underappreciated by everyone at Janus, especially with their health problems and Mitch's refusal to cover his employees' health insurance. The game knows all this and ruthlessly exploits it, throwing the characters into situations where they have incentive to leave one another to die if they want to progress, and when that happens, the knives come out. While I wasn't fully sold on the cast's performances, which often veered between overly histrionic and stilted once they left their clean-cut streamer personas, I did buy their characters as the kind of personalities you often encounter in the world of online fame, both the kinds who exploit their power over others and the normal people who find themselves slowly ground down by the industry.
And it was all helped by House of Souls, the elaborate tech demo that Iannantuono made for the film, evocative of all manner of horror games both classic and modern ranging from Resident Evil to Outlast to Until Dawn. Even beyond the more personal touches that the game serves up for the protagonists indicating that there's something else going on with it, this is a game I could see people not only actually playing, but eagerly watching others play, filled with creative environments, set pieces, lots of Easter eggs and deep-cut references that don't feel forced, and a very cool-looking "boss" monster who regularly accosts the protagonists throughout their playthrough. Movies about video games often have a habit of not understanding what games are actually like, or at least having a very old-fashioned understanding of such from back when the middle-aged screenwriters were kids with Super Nintendos, often throwing in the most surface-level references to more modern games to show that they're Still With It. With this, it's clear that Iannantuono is somebody who is fully immersed in modern games and gaming culture, and replicated on screen the kind of game you could imagine coming out on Steam today, or at least at the height of the 2010s boom in indie horror gaming.
The Bottom Line
Livescreamers is already one of the highlights of the Salem Horror Fest for me. Its video game references and satire of gamer culture mean that geeks in particular will get a lot out of it, but even if the only time you've ever picked up a controller is because you were buying one for your kids, this is still a very good horror flick that I highly recommend when it hits home video and streaming.
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