Found Footage Friday is back and this week we have an absolute favorite of mine with Frogman. This cryptid flick has everything you want: Frogman has a wand! Frogman is psychic! Frogman FUCKS!!!
All of these are true.
Also true is that Frogman creator Anthony Cousins (also the director) and John Karsko took a page out of one of the best horror flicks of all time when it came to the opening of their film. The film? Night of the Demon or Curse of the Demon (depending on which side of the Pond you live on). The page? Night of the Demon shows us the demon within the first five minutes of the film. There is no, “Is it real?” drama in the film. The audience is asked to take the creature as fact and then the rest of the film, filled with witchcraft and sorceries, seems far more plausible. Frogman also shows us the signature cryptid within the first five minutes and that allows what follows to really shine and develop. Yes, Jaws is still a masterwork of storytelling, but there is something to be said for NOT hiding the monster or antagonist of your film. It changes the pace of the journey and allows for a deeper dive into what the Frogman actually is, and does it ever!
Today will bring a double feature of fascinating found footage. As I posted yesterday, I meant to post this one last week but I messed up the scheduling and it was never posted. So to make up for that you all get two for one today.
So there are lots of different kinds of found footage films. We have the found tape, the video diary, and the documentary (either too radical to air, or recovered or what have you). A lot of the films I pick for these posts will be in the latter camp. And to note: there are indeed many additional types of found footage that we have yet to explore and I promise I will endeavor to touch on a lot of them and provide solid examples worth your eyes and your time.
Up first we have a favorite of mine, The Taking of Deborah Logan. It is presented as a documentary about the terrible deterioration that comes with Alzheimer’s disease and the toll it takes on the caretaker and takes a hard left turn almost immediately at the start of the film. What follows is a tale of cosmic horror and personal terror as the filmmakers discover what is going on and rush to put an end to a tragedy long in the planning. Here is the film, via Tubi but it is available on other streamers as well:
(Here is the link in case the video above does not work!)
Next I bring you another favorite, this time one that is action packed. Whereas The Taking of Debiorah Logan is certainly a slow burn, no can make the same accusations about Frankenstein’s Army. Filmed in large single take, POV shots Frankenstein’s Army is, according to Tubi, about: “An alternate history of World War II that finds a squad of Russian soldiers lured to a secret German laboratory to fight mechanized war monsters”.
I redacted the last bit on purpose, we have to have a little mystery in our lives if we are to enjoy ourselves and I would hate for you to be spoiled by a description that does no justice to the insanity on display in this truly fun film. Check it out here:
(And HERE is the link to Frankenstein’s Army if it doesn’t work above.)
I could just let that be my entire review of the series. It won’t be, but it really could be.
More importantly, this is not hyperbole. I am not a shill for Apple TV (+ if ya nasty), but I am happy to recommend the service. It is one of the few I am happy to do so with, but in the few months I have elected to pay for it I have found a lot to love in their offerings.
Widow’s Bay is the best of these offerings. So I have a theory, a sort of unifying theory of television and film, if someone who was involved with Parks and Rec is involved with a project, then the show or film will be worth my time. So when I saw that Katie Dippold was the creator, I immediately had some high expectations. After finishing the first season, I am happy to report that I could have set those expectations as high as I wanted to and this show would have easily exceeded them.
For those not yet in the know, Widow’s Bay is the “next Martha’s Vineyard and definitely not cursed.” Just ask Google if you don’t believe me! Go ahead, google Widow’s Bay and see what Google then suggests! Fun, reality-based, Easter egg aside, Widow’s Bay is a small island community off the coast of New England. The opening episode introduces us to a mayor who very much wants to level up his community and is willfully ignorant of the many, many red flags that the town and island are waving in the face of his attempts. From an unnatural fog bank, to haunted hotels, to generational curses, Widow’s Bay has it all and even more is hinted at. This town is the town that Stephen King writes over and over, but even more so. Matters are made even worse when the mayor’s attempts to increase tourism come to fruition, putting even more people at risk.
I enjoyed the series immensely and I cannot wait for season two. Dippold and crew weave a fascinating tapestry of terrors, some immediate and some ancestral, to make up the town’s history and more importantly they keep us guessing at all times as to the true nature of the town’s reality. Is it a cursed bloodline? Is it a demonic presence? What is it? All I can say for sure is that it feels to me that there is a truly mind melting cosmic horror heading our way next season, though what that will look like through the lens of Widow’s Bay is anyone’s guess. The show spent its run building up the current story while matter-of-factly establishing the horrors that make up the island’s history, and every paving stone on main street seems to have a tale of terror attached. As do the lakes, trees, and caves of the island. Everywhere you step, the town and island can tell you of tragedy. This gives Dippold and co. an infinite amount of threads to pull on storywise and I am thrilled. We can do eras and decades in Widow’s Bay, there can be spinoff shows, and there will always be interest by viewers to check out the history of the town even as we spend time with Tom, Whit, Patricia, Evan and Ruth.
I won’t say more about the show now, so please go and check it out. If you don’t have Apple TV available to you, there is always the free trial! (Or find it wherever you stream your shows in a way that is almost illegal.)
I’ll give you a few weeks and then, perhaps, I will return to break down the ten episodes on offer and give you the reader’s digest highlights of each episode (SPOILERS!!!!). In the meantime, please come back tomorrow for the next installments in Found Footage Friday. (An aside, I didn’t realize until yesterday that last week’s posts did not go up as I scheduled them to. Not sure what I did wrong but tomorrow will bring two separate posts to make up for it for those who have been reading along.)
Anyway, watch Widow’s Bay. It’s one of the best shows out this year.
Today is Friday and that means only one thing: FOUND FOOTAGE!
For this installment we will be keeping focus not only on Japan but on the same filmmaker. Kōji Shiraishi is an incredibly talented and creative director, writer, and part-time actor who has brought us a wide range of films from Occult to tonight’s choice to Carved: The Slit Mouth Woman (Which he featured again in Senritsu Kaki File Kowasugi! File 01: Capture the Slit Mouth Woman). My favorite thing about this creator is that he does not over complicate things, the world just accommodates the weirdness in his films. In Occult the main character does not question that he has been touched by the divine, and the film is focused on what the divine could want and what it means to follow a divine order…even if that order causes mass casualties.
Tonight’s film is Noroi: The Curse and it follows the last investigation of a famed paranormal investigator before he disappeared. Before you watch it’s important to understand that the world you’ll enter with Noroi is one where ghosts, psychics, demons, and game shows involving telepathy are all very real and commonplace. This makes the stakes in the film much greater as the mystery unravels itself, revealing a horrifying truth at its center and the film’s conclusion. So take a look below and enjoy:
(If you do not like the Youtube link, the film is available on Shudder.)
And as an added bonus, here is Senritsu Kaki File Kowasugi! File 01: Capture the Slit Mouth Woman which is an anthology series by different directors sending the same team after different urban legends and ghost stories.
If you happen to be looking for something to watch tonight, and you’ve happened by this page for one reason or another (two unlikely happenstances), then I have just the ticket! Ladies and gentlemen, I present the first installment of Found Footage Fridays!
A preface, I love found footage films. I was the demographic for TheBlair Witch Project when it released and I have loved the genre ever since. I love it as a story telling POV or as a unique way to present an idea that is otherwise unfilmable, either due to budget constraints or an idea being too visionary (or both!), and making it work by limiting the scope of the story. We can only see what the camera sees and for that we need them to keep filming. We will talk more about the idea of KEEP FILMING in later installments of this segment. Tonight I want to focus on what the camera sees and how that can be used in truly fun and interesting ways. Tonight’s film is a mind melting masterpiece of FF from Japan that brings the cosmic horror and a sense of dread that builds all the way through the start of the end credits. The film deals with the idea of being marked by fate and posits the question, “What would you do if Fate marked you, and told you It had some truly big plans for your future?” And it uses various perspectives to explore the idea. But here, let’s ask you:
What would you do? Would you reject Fate or would you follow Fate? What if Fate was a forgotten God whispering from a different place altogether, would you want to join it? Would you fight Fate?
You might have answers to the questions above, but so to does the film. All of these questions and more are answered as the film plays out, starting with a vicious knife attack on a bridge and ending with an answer to all the questions above. Watch via the link below:
I tried really, really hard to like Undertone. In fact, I keep trying but no matter what I try, I just do not enjoy that film at all. I appreciate its novel approach to haunting the viewer with its incredible sound design, but I have heard podcasts that were just as affecting as the ending of Undertone and had better stories.
If you are looking for something that will absolutely blow you away, check out The Left Right Game. It is incredible.
Undertone on the other hand, is not. The acting was subpar, the spooks and gags offered by the director and production team fall flat time and again and fail to scare, and the single location they use for the shoot is unappealing. Iron Lung (made for a similar budget) absolutely used every dollar on screen. Undertone‘s budget was not utilized to a similar degree.
With Undertone, I am not sure where the disconnect for me was. The sound design really was incredible, and the ending five minutes were as intense an experience as any I have experienced in a movie theater but the rest of the film that preceded it was flat, uninspired, and almost nonsensical.
It was also narcotizing. I struggled to stay awake BOTH times I saw the film (I went back a second time to see what I missed and it turns…not much). In fact, I will probably do a follow up piece on films with great sound design that are not Undertone (i.e. good or great).
HUNTING MATTHEW NICHOLS: A DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE DRAWN FROM THE SAME WELL
In the meantime, I would like to talk about a different film that ALSO claims to follow the tradition of the Blair Witch. The film? Hunting Matthew Nichols.
The Internet provides the following plot synopsis, and it’s perfectly serviceable as an introduction to the film, so here you go: “Two decades after her brother mysteriously disappeared, a determined woman sets out to solve the case. When a disturbing piece of evidence is revealed, she starts to believe that he may still be alive.”
Let’s start with what this film is, a mostly-fun little found footage flick that tells you from the start that they are doing a Blair Witch pastiche. It then sticks to that formula by giving us two narratives to chase. The first is the disappearance of Matthew Nichols, which is the primary focus of Matthew’s sister, Tara, who is our protagonist. She is the one financing and directing this film and it is her vision that we see up to a point.
The second narrative is our narrator slowly losing control of the situation until everything spirals out of control.
We follow Tara as she goes through the usual found footage tropes: forgotten tapes belonging to the missing person, strange occult objects found among the detritus left behind in the boxes of evidence, hints at strange folklore (this time relating to First Nations mythology which I found to be a refreshing addition to the film.), all leading to the place where Matthew apparently did something incredibly horrific. I’ll give one guess as to the locale…
Did you guess “forgotten cabin in the woods that should not be there but is?” If so, you win a prize!
This movie is a solid FF entry that definitely pays homage to The Blair Witch Project while doing its own pastiche. It was entertaining and worth a gander when it comes to streaming.
So what is wrong with it? While it is a good found footage flick, it falls far short of being a GREAT found footage flick. The pastiche is too close to the source material at times and the plot does some weird contortions to get us from place to place at times. The presentation of the documentary as a slick production (think Hulu or Netflix style) also hurts the idea that this is a found footage flick. Not that high production value is a bad thing! It works for other FF flicks (see: Strange Harvest) but here, where the idea is that what we are watching is also an unfinished project where the film crew met an ambiguous and potentially horrific end, it gives the film a sense of wrongness that is more bug than feature. Also this gloss adds too much to the film in a bad way as it makes the film feel so much longer than it actually
So which should you choose if you had to pick one to watch today? I would take Hunting Matthew Nichols over Undertone any time. Both films fall victim to the contortions necessary to make a found footage flick work and both, at times, have successes with their respective presentations but the overall story and lore given to us in HMN is far more cohesive, coherent, and fascinating. The endings of each film are both batshit but I felt that HMN’s was more earned and made far more sense, especially the final shout out to the Blair Witch that they managed to slip in. Undertone’s ending was more intense, but less coherent in a lot of ways.
So enjoy what these two are offering, and I will return soon with some films in the same vein that are far superior or more enjoyable as I institute FOUND FOOTAGE FRIDAYS. Coming soon to A Horror Blog!
Faces of Death arrived to much fanfare from horror movie sites and much confusion from normal movie goers, reflected in the film’s poor box office performance. A friend of mine wondered why they would re-release the film after all these years and then, after reading the plot synopsis, asked, “Why?”
I understand that reaction and I understand why the filmmakers decided to requel (thanks SCREAM for that term) this film series (yes, there were more than one! There were 6, with the most recent one I can remember coming out in 1996. These films and the Guinea Pig series from Japan (and also the American versions) were some of the films I built my horror foundation on as a film viewer growing up.) and I don’t fault them. It’s a good approach to making a “mainstream” FoD film and it works, to a point.
So where does it work? The film’s decision to recreate the original deaths from the first film was a good call and making it about content moderation at a terrible social media company was a solid call. We have all seen the pieces on various news sites or on our social feeds that talk about how awful these jobs can be and it works very well here as a social commentary too boot. The acting is solid, and the actors all commit to the bit and the effects were top notch (except for the acid bath scene…that reeked of unfinished VFX).
Where does it fail? The writing continually deus ex machina’s the plot to make it work out for our protagonist. From the VHS of Faces of Death (which according to the film is the only place it can be seen, but you—reader—can watch it now on TUBI!) being just to the right of her couch at home when she needs a copy of the very hard to find controversial and underground film to the misuse of narcan to prevent an overdose before an overdose was administered (it works to counteract the drug but it does not work like that!), it is just bad plotting. And the characters are all obnoxious. All of them. I was actively rooting for the heroine to die and the villain to triumphantly rule the internet by offing himself on live stream too, King of Pigs style. It was not to be though and the annoying protag did protag stuff and won the day. But that is not FoD26’s biggest problem. Not even close.
The biggest problem with the film is that it cannot compare to real life. For decades now, I personally have been exposed to far worse things than anything this film can summon. I’ve seen people commit suicide, be macheted to death in acts of cartel violence, die in horrific car crashes, shoot themselves in the face, etc. and that is just on YouTube and regular social media (Instagram is home to 1,000,000 deaths before breakfast each day and those make it through moderation which is something the film utterly fails to critique). If you want even more extreme stuff, you can visit Best Gore (yes it is still around!) or whatever passes for steakandcheese.com these days. FoD26 has nothing on what I have witnessed just being a person on the internet. So I imagine the only audience that will appreciate this requel are people who enjoyed the originals.
Moreover FoD26 cannot even compete with television as far as shock value and gross out value goes.
Now here is where I make a confession, the horrifying picture at the top of the article? It’s not from the film I am reviewing here. I’ll give you a second to guess where it came from.
Did you guess the HBO hit series, The Pitt? If so, good job and if not what are you still doing here? Go watch The Pitt and do so now! Why? Every episode is far more shocking than FoD26.
Every. Single. Episode.
And no, I am not being hyperbolic. It is a fact. Take the image above. It comes from the absolutely batshit emergency C-section that I saw the night AFTER watching FoD26. I watched in terror and horror as the doctors carved open a woman and pulled a nearly dead infant from her open womb. Guess which stuck with me long after the credits rolled…
So I say again, this film is just ok. You don’t need to watch it and you aren’t missing out on some great horror flick by passing. If you really want to watch it, wait for FoD26 to show up on TUBI (it will someday) and in the meantime watch The Pitt instead. There are two seasons that will leave you shaken and deeply affected.
On May 31st I went to a 10:20 pm showing of Bring Her Back. Despite the late hour—which would have caused me to at least doze off—I was alert and awake for the whole film. Moreover, since that day I have thought about this film often: the themes, the story, the tragedy and grief and horror on display stuck with me and resonated with me on a deep, deep level. It stirred up emotions and thoughts that I had not realized were logjammed in my emotional state.
The film is grief incarnate, and the story from the get go—a cult committing suicide on fuzzy VHS, kids finding their dead dad—-lets us know that there will not be a happy ending to this. That is ok though because what the filmmakers spend the runtime doing from that point forward created the single most memorable theater experience I had in 2025 (closely followed by the joyfulness brought on by The Toxic Avenger and the Nazi massacre of Silent Night, Deadly Night). Every scene of the film drips with anguish and dread and anxiety as the newly orphaned kids try to navigate the circumstances that they find themselves in. Then the plot adds an incredible supernatural element and we have one of the most effective horror films of the 2020’s and the best film of 2025.
I read a few reviews that critiqued the film for its brutality and intensity, and I read others that claimed the film made no sense. I find both kinds of reviews to be reductive and silly. The brutality was the point, and the film made perfect sense. It was a masterclass in story telling and in cinematography. It was incredibly acted. The sound design was immaculate. The FX were top notch and gnarly. So why was it left out of the awards season?
It is too hard to watch.
It is a legitimately scary movie.
Not since The Exorcist have we had a film that was that hard to watch win an Oscar, a film as bleak as The Exorcist is not going to get a nomination any time soon. Especially not with the political climate being what it is, and so we got the crop of cathartic nominees that we got. I understand why it happened but I hate that it did happen. I mean Sally Hawkins at least should have gotten a nod beyond the Chainsaw Awards from Fangoria.
Her performance was incredible. She haunted my nightmares for weeks after the credits rolled and while I did love Weapons and Sinners I did not have the same reaction to those films that I had to Bring Her Back. I am well aware that my reactions to a film do not merit an Oscar but I suppose that my visceral reaction is what is fueling this article. I had a deeply emotional reaction to this film and I imagine that everyone who watched did too and I think that made everyone very uncomfortable. Uncomfortable films don’t win awards. Films in which everything turns out alright are the ones the Academy wants front and center right now and I can’t say I blame them.
Stay tuned for a massive article that is part review and part rumination on the themes and films of last year, important I think because we are headed into the thick of blockbuster season and there is a dearth of new horror on the way. We should look back to see if the powers that be and the zeitgeist have moved on or if they are still locked into last year’s themes.
The new season of Monarch dropped last week and I am thrilled. I have seen people online speculating that the new season will finally give us what we’ve wanted forever: Godzilla vs Cthulhu! But those people are wrong. What we are getting is even better.
It is Dagon.
Dagon as a kaiju is something that has already been done. In Lovecraft’s story of the same name, In the narrative, a sailor comes across a strange monolith on a strange plain that depicts some gigantic fish man eating a whale. Shortly thereafter, said whale eater (aka Dagon) slips and slithers its way up the monolith:. Here’s how Lovecraft wrote it: “With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds.” and Dagon is worshipped by these horrifying fish people and strange abyssal crustaceous things that drove the narrator mad. Here’s Lovecraft again: “I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.” The idea of this happening is so dreadful to the narrator that he decides that as soon as the opium wears off, he’s killing himself. The story ends on a bit of a ridiculous cliffhanger as the narrator writes about a monster trying to break in as the monster is trying to break in, kind of like the live tweeting your own murder sequence in Scream Queens.
Fast forward and Lovecraft revisits the idea of Dagon in the Shadow Over Innsmouth only this time we are treated to a rotting, downtrodden fishing town full of fish folk hybrids because the townsfolk worship—you guessed it—Dagon and the women folk of Innsmouth love themselves some ichthyomorphic peen. There’s a cult in the town, and that cult worships Dagon, and fornicates and cavorts with Dagon, and in return Dagon lavishes the town with gold and nets full of bountiful catches, riches in equal measure. The story tells us about a guy on a journey who stops at Innsmouth, finds out about the cult, and is summarily chased out of town by said cult. It later turns out that our narrator is actually part fishman himself! WOW!
Now take this idea and move it to Spain and you have Stuart Gordon’s take on the tale, a film called Dagon. Gordon tweaks the tale though and we get some good old fashioned giant monster doing giant monster stuff including dragging a beautiful woman into the depths to be his unwilling bride. But still in this film we get a group of Spanish fisherfolk who worship a giant monster, this will become relevant in a moment.
In the new season of Monarch, the group discovers a Spanish fishing village that worships a giant monster that “brings the bounty of the sea” to the village as reward for their faith, which includes hints of human sacrifice. This cult runs the town and keeps their god a secret. Our team has yet to be chased out and hunted by irate fisherfolk but it sure seems headed that way. Meanwhile our introduction to the new big bad kaiju for season two takes place in that weird between place where kaiju come and go and a day is a year on the surface. Shaw witnesses the emergence of this kaiju and what he sees is a mountain walking. Literally, the kaiju was inside a mountain and it shook the majority of the mount off of it when it woke up and head back to Earth. In the Call of Cthulhu Lovecraft describes Cthulhu as a mountain that walks. So there is a clear correlation and homage to Lovecraft and Gordon and Dagon. Even the design of the kaiju itself is clearly Dagon-esque and the beast is accompanied by a host of giant trilobite beasties, much as described by the suicidal narrator of Dagon the story. There is even a cave with a story depicting the god-kaiju and the villagers doing their worship thing! All things point to Monarch doing a Dagon!
So yeah, viewers are about to get a dose of Godzilla vs Dagon and it promises to be the heavy weight match up of the year.
Stay tuned for updates as the season progresses, but here’s hoping this post holds true!
That’s not the name of your new favorite movie*, but it is the name of your new favorite holiday. Taking place the week of the 15th of February, this archaic holy-day was celebrated by a little known sect of ancient Romans which featured all of the trappings mentioned above. Here’s the Encyclopedia Britannica excerpt about the holiday:
“Each Lupercalia began with the sacrifice by the Luperci of goats and a dog, after which two of the Luperci were led to the altar, their foreheads were touched with a bloody knife, and the blood was wiped off withwool dipped in milk; the ritual required that the two young men laugh. The sacrificial feast followed, after which the Luperci cut thongs from the skins of the sacrificial animals and ran in two bands around the Palatine hill, striking with the thongs at any woman who came near them. A blow from the thong was supposed to render a woman fertile. In 494 ce the Christian church under PopeGelasius I appropriated the form of the rite as the Feast of the Purification.”
Essentially a bunch of guys known as the order of the Lupeci stripped down sacrificed a goat, bathed themselves in blood, skinned the sacrifice, cut thongs to whip women with, and then—believing themselves to be wolves—went off to terrorize the countryside. The women they whipped were supposed to become fertile as a result of the beating. It is unclear if the women who were whipped also participated in the terrorizing of the countryside or if they were later invited to the inevitable orgy that would go down after all the terrorizing. That more I research older rites, the more I find that orgies were a big part of them, kind of like the key parties of the 70s, the handkerchief code that the LGBT groups used in the 70s and 80s, or the flamingos on the lawn in retirement villages in the aughts, 10s and 20s of the 2000s. Ancient folks really like their anonymous group sex! Odd times, the Dark Ages.
Other, darker stories about the festival have women being caught and whisked away to a cave, the home of the Order of the Lupeci, where wanton acts of sexual depravity occurred under the watchful eye of their god, Lupercus—a being said to both vulpine and cloven all in one. These stories are less willing orgy and moreso tales of rape and sexual assault, and more likely than not were spread by detractors of the pagan rites, but still it is worth noting that these rites often had a darker, more misogynistic bent to them than we often give credence to.
Lupercus was also very interesting. Associated with the great god Pan of the Greek pantheon or Faunus in the Roman tradition, Lupercus was different from both in that he was not just a god of fertility but a protector of farmers, shepherds, and sheep. This god lived in the Lupercal where Romulus and Remus were nursed and raised by a she-wolf, and this cave is where the darker rites mentioned above would take place. I imagine that the shapeshifting nature of Lupercus is what eventually led to the shapeshifting nature of the werewolves that haunted our lore and legends.
This of course ran its course and was co-opted by early Christians as written about above. Valentine’s Day is the newest mutation of the corruption of the Pagan holiday. The trappings of cannibalism and the emphasis on sex all speak directly to the trappings of the original holiday.
That was a joke earlier in this brief piece, that this will be a major motion picture someday but the fact is this HAS been depicted on screen at least once. The Howling (specifically part 2) gave us some crazed werewolf sexy time but the award for best Lupercalia depiction goes to a Halloween classic. Though not a rite performed in February, the finale of Michael Dougherty’s Trick r Treat gives us a fantastic idea of what a werewolf blood orgy might look like: shed skin, fur flying, and blood…so much blood mixed in amongst all the fucking. Hell of a way to go…
So tonight, if you feel an urge to howl at the moon go ahead and give it a go if only to sound the echo of a long ago, long forgotten rite.
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