Director: Robert Livings, Randy Nundlall, Jr.
Writer: Ben Groves, Robert Livings, Rob Macfarlane, Randy Nundlall Jr., and Peter Paskulich
Stars:Brenda Yanez, Samantha Laurenti, and Norah DeMello
Synopsis: While sorting through their late friend’s belongings, two women discover VHS tapes showing them in haunting, unfamiliar scenes, each one drawing them into the grasp of a mysterious, malevolent entity.
There’s a beauty to found footage/anthology horror films in which the rawness of a discovered video changes the course of events in the fictional world in which it takes place. It creates a microcosm of multiple stories within stories, a Decameron taking place in the land of the macabre. With the recent surge in low-budget horror making significant box office successes and shifting audiences’ attention toward a different formula for scary movies, there has been an openness for new frightening feature experiments.
For starters, this is what Conjuring Tapes is about: two friends who discover a set of tapes with themselves as heroes of morbid stories. A seance gone wrong, two influencer ghost hunters who meet more than they bargain for, a haunted therapy session, and a creepy cult set in the podcasting world. The further they dig into the tapes, the more they discover, not only about the events unfolding, but also about a malevolent entity that may or may not hold all the threads to their existence.
The film, as faithful as it is to its source material, starts with a slow burn. Too slow at times, but it is a significant precedent to the horror that happens later. The indie setting allows for a low-key, laid-back atmosphere. The unknown actors make the eeriness of the situation more believable and the horror more significant. The multiple roles that actresses Brenda Yanez and Samantha Laurenti play bring so much to the table as they go back and forth between characters and storylines while retaining the personalities of the original protagonists as they weave all the stories together. The beauty of their acting works in the film’s favor despite the script struggling to keep up, and it complements the dread that anticipates both the characters and the characters they portray in the VHS metaverse.
The camerawork is the highlight of this feature. Robert Livings is the co-director -along with Randy Nundlall Jr.- as well as the cinematographer, and he deserves all the credit for creating a pulsating, shaky screen that never lets the viewer rest with his magical handheld camera work. The biggest obstacle in this horror piece is that the narrative doesn’t hold up to the visual work, so there seems to be a disconnection between the two; while one elevates the game, the other drags it down. The jump scares are fantastic, but the build-up to them is what the script struggles with, for the most part.
One of the main reservations I have about this horror flick is its tameness. Imagine it with gorier, more brutal storylines and some scenes that will stick in your mind like glue. This one relies more on psychological horror than on explicit gore and sadistic violence. While some found-footage anthology horror films use that element to perfection, this feature, directed by Nundlall Jr. and Livings, needs a bit more spice.
Does this take away from the fun? Absolutely not. There’s a spark of creativity in this film that calls for not only fans of the genre but also avid admirers of horror family dramas, engaging them in a puzzle-solving game, interacting with the stories unfolding one after the other like Matryoshka dolls. Surprisingly -or not- Conjuring Tapes works perfectly as a horror family drama where the horror lies within the family dynamics and the interactions between characters: traumas resurfacing, old grudges and wounds dug from shallow graves, etc.
Conjuring Tapes feels like the film someone shoots in their basement. Indie horror filmmaking at its finest might work for some, while others won’t necessarily connect with the stripped bare aesthetic that makes it more like a home video footage without the cinematography prowess of films that use found footage as a formulaic cinematic medium. It’s still fun, though, and very spooky, in a way that will most definitely leave fans of the genre satisfied, regardless of relating to the meatiness of the film.
