Man Finds Tape had its world première at Tribeca 2025, 8 June
As its very title suggests, Man Finds Tape belongs to that body of films known loosely as ‘found footage’ – which is less a genre as such than a mode of narrative framing, although the vast majority of its cinematic instantiations belong to horror. What unifies these works is that their stories are not told ‘objectively’, but purport to be pieced together from intradiegetic recordings either unearthed or shot by the story’s characters themselves. This produces an immersive reality effect that mimics not just the immediacy, but also the authenticity of a documentary being filmed ‘live’ or compiled from existing materials – and the realism of the presentation is often at uncanny odds with the increasing improbability, if not downright irrationality, of the content, as though the surreal and the supernatural were being captured, paradoxically, as cinéma vérité.
From the start, this feature debut from writer/directors Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman represents a particularly sophisticated package of found footage. For not only does it present itself as a documentary made by Lynn Page (Kelsey Pribilski) about an odd, upsetting series of events first half-uncovered by her estranged brother Lucas (William Magnuson) in their hometown of Larkin, Texas, but it also incorporates excerpts from Lucas’ viral vlog Man Finds Tape, which in turn contains the unsettling MiniDV footage he found – but cannot remember or explain – shot by someone visiting his bedroom when he was a little boy.
The documentary also incorporates family movies shot by Lynn and Lewis’ late parents, themselves once the town’s camera experts (from whom their kids caught the videography bug), and includes their parents’ filmed episodes of public access TV show The Salvation Hour featuring local avuncular priest Endicott Carr (John Gholson), as well as footage from the various CCTV security cameras that their parents had installed around various local establishments. This is a veritable maze of found footage, allowing viewers to get lost in a layered hall of mirrors in which the truth, however refracted, is implicitly concealed somewhere for anyone who can find their way through and make the right connections.
Truth and fiction are thematised right from Lynn’s opening voiceover, in which she discusses not only the iconic status of the so-called “Surgeon’s photograph” from 1934 of the Loch Ness Monster, or the Patterson-Gimlin film from 1967 of Bigfoot, but the likelihood that they are both fakes (the very name Larkin is of course suggestive of pranking), before contrasting the footage that Lucas found which caught a very different kind of cryptid – a monster which hid in plain sight and preyed, unnoticed, on the townsfolk for years. Lynn, who had moved to Austin shortly after both their parents succumbed to a mysterious illness, is drawn back to Larkin when Lucas sends her CCTV footage of something creepy in the town.
This monochrome sequence, shot wide by a fixed camera, shows a bizarre vehicular murder which took place in broad daylight in Larkin’s Main Street, but which no one present – including Lucas’ ex Wendy Parker (Nell Kessler) and local barbecued meats purveyor Winston Boon (Graham Skipper) – was able to see or remember owing to the blackouts that they all experienced at the time, and which even now Lucas cannot watch without being triggered into a slumping, narcoleptic unconsciousness. It is as though whatever has been transpiring in the town is so unspeakable, so unconscionable, that no one can face it, so they all carry on oblivious as though nothing has happened, unwittingly helping to cover up what is in their midst.
Only the outsider Lynn is able fully to review all this footage, and to see in it the Stranger (Brian Villalobos) who sometimes appears with his long coat and old leather bag – and as the siblings try to locate this peculiar person, Man Finds Tape becomes something akin to Stuart Ortiz’s Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire (2024), finding similar Lovecraftian weirdness beneath Larkin’s ordinary surface. At the same time, much as Lucas is willing to lie a little on his vlog to get to the truth, and even to trump up charges against Reverend Carr that the evidence does not quite bear out, one can easily discern buried in this film’s wilder fictions of parasitic demonology a more straightforward story of small-town secrets.
After all, this is an utterly ordinary scenario familiar up and down America: a community unable to let itself perceive the evil within and sleepwalking through the evidence before their very eyes; abuse leaving its scars everywhere and slowly sapping the life out of a place; and no one willing to acknowledge the obvious rôle played by the church in this insidious, serial outrage. So Hall and Gandersman’s film, while certainly a very effective horror, is also an allegory of an all-too-human kind of monstrosity, there for all to see from the very start, yet somehow remaining invisible, with a culpability that everyone denies.
strap: In Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman’s found footage, a community’s unwitting complicity and cover-up lets something Lovecraftian in to feed
© Anton Bitel
