I have an almost uncritical love of the found footage genre - in part because it is a style of film-making that offers the pssibility of replicating, in vsual terms, some key aspects of Lovecraftian horror: both the use of a first-person perspective in which the ultimate horror is only hinted at, spied tangentially or at a distance; and the unravelling of a terrifying narrative through the discovery of various documents and accounts - Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu being a classic example, along with other genre classics such as Machen’s The White People, Bloch’s Notebook Found in a Deserted House, and Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. Today’s offering is part of an occasional series which looks at found footage films with explicit Lovecraftian content, or with strong Lovecraftian overtones.
2014’s Banshee Chapter is a reimaging of Lovecraft’s From Beyond in light of government conspiracies, the creepy mythology of numbers stations, and the CIA’s MK-ULTRA secret drug-testing programme. Interestingly, Banshee Chapter also mirrors a more recent conspiratorial narrative which has been making the rounds since the 2010s which is a revisioning of the classic notion that the US government has made a secret treaty with extraterrestrials, but which in this new, somewhat desecularised version of the myth holds that government agencies have made contact with otherworldly/interdimensional beings through the use of occult rituals.
In any case, Banshee Chapter effectively builds up a sense of creeping dread - if not outright cosmic horror - and is a strong recommend as far as Lovecraftian cinematic horror is concerned. One key point, though: whilst Banshee Chapter has elements of/is filmed in a found footage/documentary style, it isn’t, properly speaking, a found footage film (there is no acknowledgement of the cameraperson as part of the narrative). I’m not sure if ths has been picked up on in many reviews, but it adds another layer of mystery to an already strange film: if the protaganists are being filmed, but don’t realse this is the case, exactly who - or what - is filming them?
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