Man Finds Tape

A YouTuber finds surveillance footage of a strange death in his hometown of Larkin, Texas, and enlists his sister to help him investigate, which leads to them uncovering a supernatural mystery involving a local reverend.

Man Finds Tape is a “Found Footage” Film.

A Found Footage film is subset of the POV (Point of View) genre of films. POV films are what you call a movie where the camera is being operated by one of the characters in the movie. It's often used by small budget films because then they maybe don't need to pay for a crew, because the cast can carry all the equipment, and they no longer have to hide that they are filming in their shots. It’s not just a cheaper way of making movies either, it’s also an easy way to heighten the film’s tension by aggressively controlling what the audience gets to see, when they get to see it, and how.

Sometimes, these POV films will pretend to be real-life documentaries like Troll Hunter, or Borat, or Lunopolis, and sometimes they adopt the conceit of being real documentaries, but in a funny way. These are "mockumentaries" like This is Spinal Tap, or What We Do In The Shadows, or even tv shows like The Office or Modern Family. Other times, the idea is that they're a kind of "last broadcast" kind of thing, like Grave Encounters, Rec, The Wicksboro Incident, or Late Night With The Devil. These kind of films are part of the “Found Footage” sub-genre. The hook of these kinds of films is usually something along the lines that what we are watching was “found” somewhere, maybe it was buried, or just hidden somewhere, maybe it had been languishing, forgotten in an evidence room or in some storage closet, and now we’re watching it in order to find out what happened to the people who filmed it… usually with the understanding that whatever it was that happened to the people in the film, they are all now dead, most likely as a direct result of whatever it is that happens in the film. This is a popular kind of POV Film. The Blair Witch Project. Paranormal Activity, Exhibit 8, Cloverfield. There are tons of them.

So, Man Finds Tape is a little from Column A and a little from Column B in this genre. It’s a fake POV documentary, all about the events that followed after a man finds a tape with some very strange footage on it. The set-up of Man Finds Tape is that this is Lynn Page’s documentary about her brother, Lucas Page.

Lucas is a well-known YouTuber known as “Man Finds Tape.” He gained notoriety due to some viral videos he released after he supposedly found a tape in his family barn with his name on it. The tape was of him as a child, woken up in the middle of the night by a shadowy figure, who feeds him something, and then he goes back to sleep. REcognizing that is him on the tape, and having no memory of this event, or any understanding of what was even happening or who that shadowy figure was. Lucas turned to the internet for help. This was the beginning of what was generally believed by the public to be the “creepy pasta” storyline that Lucas shared on the internet.

“Creepy Pasta” is the catch-all term for modern day user-generated urban legends that can be found on the internet, which are usually intended to frighten readers in much the same way as old campfire stories. They can be short little blurbs, or even multi-entry tales that last for years. The subjects vary widely, but they will usually involve ghosts, cryptids, aliens, murder, secrets, strange game-like rituals, and/or haunted pieces of media.

But as Lucas’ investigation into the tape’s growing mysteries deepens, gaining him fans online, Lucas begins to unravel, to grow paranoid, and he starts throwing out accusations involving real people, and inevitably it all blows up in his face, and he is exposed as a fraud and driven into hiding by trolls and internet assholes.

This is when Lynn gets involved.

The siblings aren’t exactly estranged, but ever since the untimely deaths of their parents, Lynn and Lucas have grown apart. Lynn moved away years ago and has her own life. Lucas stayed on the family farm, rattling around the old homestead. She's a little salty at him as Lucas has always been a bit of self-destructive asshole whose life often crashes into her own, and his recent viral fame was no different, as Lucas' weird internt fans started disrupting her life too, and it was a huge hassle.

So when Lucas wants her to look at a new tape, Lynn is wary.

But then Lucas shows her footage that appears to be from a surveillance camera that shows the main street of their small town. It’s a normal day, and several locals can be seen going about their day. But as she watches, everyone—including Lucas, who is watching the tape with her—suddenly freeze in place, their heads drooping, and their arms hanging slack. A man had been crossing the street. He now stands frozen in the middle of the road. Then, a van slowly and inexorably rolls into view, the driver obviously catatonic too. The van runs over the man frozen in the middle of the street, killing him, leaving a streak of blood on the concrete. No one reacts until after everyone on the street wakes up a few moments later. In the aftermath, no one is charged, and now, the whole town seems to only vaguely remember the incident, and when asked, treats it as nothing more than a pretty common, everyday tragic accident.

Later, already concerned about Lucas, when he suddenly stops answering the phone, or her texts, Lynn drives home to Larkin. She finds him passing out at his computer over and over, locked in a looping video of a local church service, which shows the paster and parishioners all similarly passing out at the same point in the tape as Lucas does, then, like Lucas, waking up with seemingly no idea that they had just been briefly catatonic. Unaffected by whatever it is in the video that is affecting Lucas, she stops it, breaking the cycle. The two agree to work together, dig into the mystery, and to film their progress.

Who was the man in the video of Lucas as a boy? What did he feed young Lucas? And maybe most importantly, why does Lucas, and seemingly the entire town of Larkin, Texas, go strangely catatonic at times, and with no memory of it happening either? Soon enough, they uncover some disquieting connections not just to a local public-access preacher named Rev. Endicott Carr, and Lucas’ ex-girlfriend Wendy, who is currently carrying the Reverend’s baby as a surrogate, but to their deceased parents too, who died years ago at about the same time from a mysterious illness, and the security and video recording business they used to run. And during all of this, there’s also a mysterious stranger with a old-timey physician’s valise skulking around Larkin. This man, much like Lynn, is unaffected by whatever it is causing the catatonia that otherwise seems to affect all of the town’s residents.

So, what is happening in Larkin?

The answer is much much stranger and much more dangerous than either one of them could’ve possibly imagined.

A very Lovecraftian, body-horror story, with a little bit of commentary on how Christianity is a parasite that eats the souls of white Americans, while also being the tool through which they look away from and ignore or “not see” the horrors being perpetrated in their midst, Man Finds Tape is a pretty well done little film. It's effective in the way that most POV horror usually are. I enjoyed it, even if it does drag a bit, despite only being around 90 minutes.

Using a variety of kinds of footage to tell its story, from video shoot by Lynn and Lucas, to surveillance footage, to FaceTime calls, to voicemails, text messages, old home movies, and clips from local public access shows, the film begins by asking why there isn’t any clear footage of the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot, or UFOs with such a proliferation of ready cameras. It suggests that perhaps those monsters were just distractions, and that the real monsters are the ones in our midst, the ones that most people seem incapable or unwilling to see. It goes on to remind us all, just because people refuse to acknowledge the monster, that doesn’t change the fact that the monster is there, and that they have caused damage.

The film lays all of this out in the opening.

And while I’m not denying the truth of what the film is saying here, in fact it’s literally one of the main reasons that everything is falling apart right now, I don’t see how it applies to this film. I mean, I do. I get who they are referring to in the film when they’re talking about the “monsters in their midst” and how people are “unable to see” that particular monster in their midst. It’s the literal situation in the film, I get that. But this situation is not the metaphor that it implies. There’s no “Privileged Turning Away” from the events of this film. The characters in this film can't see what's going on because they literally can't see it, and it's because of what amounts to basically magical reasons. They don't have any agency here. They don't get a choice. No one is deciding to ignore the harm being done in their community. There’s never a moment when the townspeople acknowledge that they know what’s going on, and then choose not to do anything about it.

I mentioned earlier that this film has a “little bit of commentary on how Christianity is a parasite that eats the souls of white Americans, while also being the tool through which they look away from and ignore or “not see” the horrors being perpetrated in their midst” but even calling it a “little bit” honestly feels like I’m overstating the case a little. There’s no commentary here on overt complicity in this film, and you can only allow some the subtext in the broadest of terms.

So, I’m not really sure what the film thinks it’s saying here.

This isn’t really a problem though, it’s just something that annoys me a little bit. The main problem with this film is the way the limitations of the POV film genre are undeniably apparent here in such a way that the film needs to use info-dump style voice-overs in order to explain large and very necessary chunks of its story, because the requirements of the POV genre prevents it from doing so in a natural, more organic way. The other problem is the same one inherent to all those “radio play” style, serialized "docudrama" podcasts about strange horror/sci-fi mysteries like Tanis, The Black Tapes, Limetown, or Rabbits. It’s the same one that the Star Wars Prequels had. It’s the fact that we are unavoidably aware that anyone being interviewed in this documentary who is discussing the aftermath of the events of the story are in zero danger during the depiction of those events, and anyone who isn’t being interviewed in the film discussing those events… has died. It's like how, the first time we all watched the Prequels, we all knew right away that Mace Windu was going to die, because we already knew the fates of every other character. Now, to be fair, in a well-told prequel or POV/Found Footage ”documentary” this isn’t always the kind of problem that breaks a story. It usually does, but not always, and that's often the dividing line between a decent POV film and a great POV film.

Here, unfortunately, it just kills the shock and bogs things down.

Plus, at a certain point, the inevitable question that plagues all movies in the POV genre: “Why are they still filming and not running?” is simply too big a question to ignore. But to be fair, that’s basically an unavoidable problem with the POV genre. It’s been said that the scariest part of any horror story is “going up the attic stairs and opening the attic door,” that the act of doing this is always much scarier than actually seeing whatever it is behind the attic door, because once you actually see what‘s behind the attic door, you can understand it, you can categorize it, you can deal with it. It might still be scary, obviously, but at least know you know what it is. And that’s the entire trick to the POV genre in a nutshell, aggressively controlling what you see and when you see it, basically trying to keep you on those attic stairs for as long as possible, because once you open the door, meaning… once shit gets so wild that you start to question why the idiot holding the camera is still filming everything going on, instead of dropping the camera and running like their ass is on fire, then the gig is up, it’s all over.

The whole trick is to keep the audiences from noticing this.

Unfortunately, you not only notice how long you’ve been "stuck on the attic stairs" in this film, you also notice the complete lack of resolution after finally opening the attic door. The film just ends, no answers, no redemption, no justice, and also, no loss of justice either. Nothing. The film is literally like... "What happened? Well, we don't know. What does it all mean? Where did the bad guys go? What happened to all of us? We don't know. It sure was weird though, huh?"

So, yeah, I enjoyed Man Finds Tape, it was decent, with some good performances, but it dragged a bit, and it ultimately kind of disappointed me. I feel like this would have been a better movie if the Found Footage gimmick had been dropped, which is too bad. In the end, this otherwise entertaining little film unfortunately turned out to be too much Hat and not enough Cattle, if you get my meaning.

Save this one for when you have to time to waste.