To think there was a time when audiences thought found footage was a compelling style of cinema. Coming into adulthood in the aughts, we were living in the cultural wake of The Blair Witch Project, which is still the only great found footage film. Many directors tried unsuccessfully to mirror the success of the 1999 classic, but nearly all failed because pulling off a double illusion cannot work on viewers. We know narrative stories are fake, so why add another layer of superficiality that just makes the viewing experience less pleasant? All these movies amounted to was fiction dressed up in the aesthetic of amateurism.
Still, if one goes in with good faith and tries to put oneself in the shoes of someone “finding” the footage you see, it has the potential to be fun, at least in an archeological sense. Invoking Yell, a Chilean horror flick from Patricio Valladares, is likewise compelling on its face. Tania (Macarena Carrere), Andrea (María Jesús Marcone), and Ruth (Andrea Ozuljevich) head into the woods in 1997 with a cheap camera to film a ritual that will serve as excellent advertising for their black metal band, a genre of the aggressive music that takes the form of something more sinister – at least to these Chilean diehards.
“…three women head into the woods with a cheap camera to film a ritual…”
The metal-heads are walking to the site of a tragic accident in the forest in the hopes of summoning spirits and channeling them into some badass music. It sounds like this is going to be scary, right? If only. For a found footage offering, Invoking Yell is astonishingly short on scares. 90% of the runtime is the three women chewing the fat while the camera operator appears to do somersaults as they traipse through the woods. At the hour mark (in an 84-minute film, no less), we’re still watching and listening to these women ramble on without any narrative propulsion. Pacing, pacing, pacing.
Another insurmountable barrier to enjoyment is the found footage aesthetic. The VHS-style footage that reminds us of the well-worn tapes we used to abuse is neat for about fifteen minutes. At some point, though, viewers appreciate visual composition and polish if they aren’t getting a plethora of action. All build-up and no release (at least not until it’s too late for us to change our minds about the movie) makes for a bit of a slog when we’re battling motion sickness.
When The Blair Witch Project is your obvious point of comparison, you’ve got to step it up a notch. There are definitely times when I appreciated the throwback to Gen X culture, and it was clearly a labor of love for Valladares and his crew. The Satanic Panic that metal music helped to amplify (to eleven, perhaps?) was largely an illusion, but the reverberations are still felt today. Diehard metal fans or those who seek out every found footage film may find something worthwhile in Invoking Yell, but the rest of us are better served by listening to Slayer. It might be scarier.
"…I appreciated the throwback to Gen X culture..."
