Just when found footage horror was beginning to look as obsolete as the grainy VHS that characterised its aesthetic, along came internet culture to jump start the tired old beast. What the prevalence of live streaming has brought to the sub-genre is a sense of immediacy, of being a participant – or perhaps just being complicit – in the events taking place. Earlier found footage films by contrast were normally positioned as documents or artifacts; The Blair Witch Project being the most celebrated example. There has been a deluge of these films in the last few years – for better or worse depending on your tolerance – like Host, Dashcam, and Spree, with elements finding their way into the likes of Bodies Bodies Bodies and the excellent Sissy.
Joseph and Vanessa Winter‘s Deadstream takes the format and pours it into an entertaining Evil Dead II-style slapstick haunted house movie. It doesn’t threaten to match that classic, but there’s a jittery energy and committed central performance that work in tandem with a fully convincing evocation of the livestreamed experience.
Shawn Ruddy (co-director Joseph Winter) is an internet celebrity known for carrying out various dumb pranks, framed as a series of videos where he faces his fears. After being booted off YouTube in disgrace for some unspecified act, he attempts to make a comeback on another format with his most elaborate stream yet. He’s going to spend the night in a haunted house and broadcast the evening live. As a self-confessed coward, once at the house he removes the spark plugs from his car, padlocks the door, and then disposes of the key. All so he can’t just leave and drive away. He sets up cameras all over the house and waits. It’s not long before it’s clear that this attempted comeback is a very bad idea.
A lot of your mileage with Deadstream will rest on your response to the character of Shawn. He’s a largely charmless individual by any metric, and fueled by a misplaced sense of grievance and victimhood for his current status of persona-non-grata. Winter commits utterly to the role – smarmy, self-serving, and wheedling – and a large part of the joy of this increasingly frenetic film is seeing such a clattering arsehole get his just deserts.
Winter the actor is matched by Winter as co-writer and director with the excellent and quite innovative use of the streaming technology. One instance sees Shawn trying to sneak past a spectre that is only visible through the tablet linked to the room’s camera. There’s also a clever use of additional actors playing viewers of the stream, offering periodic ‘expert’ opinion and advice; a neat way of providing exposition without resorting to an info dump. Add some endearingly lo-fi creature effects and a perverse sense of humour entirely at the expense of its hapless anti-hero, and you’ve got rather a grubby, grimy treat.
Deadstream certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but gets some extra mileage from it. The Winters have managed to stamp their own identity on both the found-footage and the haunted house sub-genres.
Screening on Shudder from Thu 6 Oct 2022