I tried. 

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!