There Are Monsters (2013)

The by now proverbial student filmmakers are road tripping through a not particularly sexy looking part of Canada for what looks like a pretty boring series of interviews, shakily shot.

In the background, there are signs of strange troubles brewing: the TV news report about curious happenings at CERN and a new infectious disease that appears to attack the middle ear and leave the infected either aggressive, creepy. or totally passive.

Things start going badly in the background closer to our protagonists, as well: they witness people just standing and staring with their faces to walls for hours, while the grins of others grow disturbingly wide, and more and more people appear to become convinced some of their loved ones have been…replaced by things that look like exact copies of them but are not at all human.

Despite the student filmmakers and the shakycam Jay Dahl’s There Are Monsters isn’t a POV horror film, it is just shot and edited like one, with shaky verité cam that often goes right into the actors’ faces and a jittery quality to its images. At first, this lends the film a veneer of the amateurish but the longer it went on, the more impressed I became by how clever and well thought out many of Dahl’s directorial decisions actually are. The camera shakes and jitters for a reason and carried by an eye that gives it meaning; Dahl’s framing of shots is often fantastic, and again, leading to shots that are highly composed while giving the impression of being not composed at all. This, as it does with really good straight-up POV horror, lends the film a particular feeling of reality that crashes nicely into how unreal its world starts to become..

For Dahl very cleverly scratches on the borders – and increasingly the centres – of this reality with a Weirder version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and traces of rage zombies, as if the edges of reality were really rubbing away and monsters coming through. Particularly in the last act, the film is full of singular, bizarre imagery I found genuinely unsettling.

If one were of a complaining mind, one could bemoan that the acting is more on the local theatre level as that of fully professional screen acting, but the actors always rise to the occasion when they really need to hit a beat for the film to function, so I’m not terribly bothered by the occasional stilted line reading.

This is really a fantastic movie, for formal reason mostly championed by found footage enthusiasts, yet one I believe everyone who is interested in indie horror should take a look at.