If you had hopes the the found footage genre of horror would go away you are in for a sore future. It’s here to stay so you might as well embrace it. The sub-genre can offer up some fantastic scares if done right, but its over use in horror has been one of the biggest banes for the genre over the past decade.
The Gallows is the next found footage horror film to arrive and if you’re looking for something that breaks the mold you’re not going to find it here. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a decently scary film, but The Gallows doesn’t do anything new to make it stand out from the plethora of found footage horror films that abound. Let’s just say it’s fine to see once, but not worth hanging around.
That’s some gallows humor, right there.
The Gallows
Directors: Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing
Rated: R
Release Date: July 10, 2015
The Gallows had plenty of positive buzz coming out of the film festival circuit and it’s pretty easy to see why. The movie is scary and does try to shake things up here and there. There’s definitely something inherently scary about a high school at night, which is where our four protagonists find themselves. Reese Houser (Reese Mishler), Pfeifer Brown (Pfeifer Ross), Ryan Shoos (Ryan Shoos) and Cassidy Spiker (Cassidy Gifford) are trapped in the high school after sneaking in one night. Two decades before this a boy had died in a freak accident during the production of a play called The Gallows in the school’s auditorium. His ghost isn’t too happy about it and now he’s finally got a group of teens trapped at night that he can terrorize.
The plot is pretty basic for a horror film; a small group of people being tormented by a deadly ghost who has a flare for the dramatic despite the fact that he could kill them all with his mystical powers in a second flat. The found footage gimmick feels more like a forced hook than what the directors originally intended, though since the pair wrote the screenplay as well it probably wasn’t. Cluff and Lofing do do some clever things with it here and there, however. A few scenes in particular are fantastically constructed, especially one set in a hallway lit only by a red exit sign that fantastically uses shadows and off camera changes to build tension.
The directors also cleverly use the two cameras the teens have with them to play out scenes completely from one perspective and then jump back to show us the same scene from another. Ignoring montage in favor of this style actually works incredibly well, adding fear that wouldn’t be there to many scenes while still allowing for kills to play out on screen eventually. It’s a great balance between the belief that being scary means leaving something off the screen and the constant need to shock the audience with visuals.
Sadly, the plotting and pacing can’t keep up with the cool ideas and the film suffers for it. The movie falls victim to some terrible editing that is horrifically excused by the camera panning to the floor, shaking a bit, and then the teens suddenly being somewhere else when the camera swings back up. It rips the realism out of the movie, which for a found footage film is really problematic. There’s even issues with how exactly they’re filming at points, which allows for some great scenes but breaks the movie’s own rules. Not to mention the plot itself is pretty flimsy. The movie is more of a collection of really interesting horror scenes than a horror whole. Great ideas keep cropping up and scaring you, but they don’t accrue into a coherent whole.
Then there’s the film’s ending that’s supposed to shock you, but is both predictable and tacked on. In what is supposed to be a twist the movie jumps out of scary and into stupid in the blink of an eye. Since the film’s scenes don’t build onto each other the movie’s ending feels especially random. The movie makes no attempt to foreshadow what’s coming meaning theirs no build to the conclusion, but it also awkwardly pretends like it was a surprise when anyone whose understands how movies are plotted will see it coming a mile away. It’s too bad the filmmakers didn’t work this out as the ending could have been something people talked about if pulled off correctly.
For some cheap (well, as cheap as the movie ticket price near you) thrills The Gallows definitely delivers. There’s moments that show that Cluff and Lofing can get up to some pretty interesting stuff with the genre, but their lack of structure and the found footage style mean the film isn’t all that it could be.
