Found Footage: a Love Spell

Found footage: a Love Spell 

By Violet Burns 

You are the dark spell hidden in the corner cupboard of a wood-paneled basement. You are nestled in a taped-up garbage bag in a cobweb-swept garage. You are stained shag carpet. You’re a cigarette burn in the back seat of a cheap car. You linger in the musty, hidden places, the mundane. You reveal the horror masquerading as the commonplace, the darkness creeping underfoot amidst the humdrum of our daily lives. 

When you are done well, and you often are, no matter what your detractors say, you are intimacy and immersion. You are closeness. You are too close. You cradle us on the flat side of a knife, and we know the slice will come. We yearn for the cut as we stare, transfixed, at our distorted reflections, reflections of people we knew or know. 

You are familiar. Your detractors shout about production value, but that’s part of what makes you magic. You make it work. You show us accessible places that we rarely see in film, and you show us that they matter, that we matter. Rarely are you set in sprawling minimalist mansions with high glass walls that seem to be a dime a dozen in movie-land. Your sets are often lived-in places, worn with use and full of character: a well-loved ranch house with stacks of mail and lumpy sofas, low ceilings, that one Ikea lamp that everybody has, skeletons in the closet. You make us feel at home before you punch us in the gut. The hurt is better that way.   

You are in medias res. You are immediacy. Your cadence feels authentic. When we surrender to the conceit that you were filmed and found, you can eschew the hackneyed foibles that make some fully scripted characters feel artificial. You plunge headlong into the thick of things, and there we are, together. We know these people. We sink into their skins. This is really fucking happening.

You are the glow of static in a hallway closet, and I cannot resist you: I, moth. You, flame.