In short: Wekufe (2016)

Students Paula (Paula Figueroa) and her boyfriend Matias (Matias Aldea) travel to the Chilean island province of Chiloé, where she is planning on shooting a report – as some kind of college work, I suppose – about the very high percentage of rape, incest, sexual assault and unwanted pregnancies on the island. People say it’s all because of the incubus demon dwarves roaming the forests of the place; others, like Paula, rather prefer the inheritance of colonialism, poverty, and the cultural, social and economical gap between the descendants of the initial native population and those of the colonialists as an explanation. Matias, on the other hand, just wants to shoot a found footage horror movie, demons or politics be damned.

Which is indeed what he’s going to do, if a rather more real one than he probably wished for.

Turns out you still can add some new elements to the ole POV horror formula and easily make it a bit more lively and contemporary. At least Javier Attridge’s Chilean example of the form does this rather well, managing to tell a folk horror tale that is also sceptical about some of the forms and tropes of its own genre. That may sound a bit too much like having one’s cake and eating it too, but Attridge’s script is clever enough to still make this work as a horror film. Mostly by not treating groups of people with comparable backgrounds as a single group-thinking body, realizing that this sort of homogeneity simply doesn’t exist in reality.

The filmmaker manages to turn Wekufe into an effective little horror movie that does hit quite a few of the expected tropes – but with mild yet important variations – and keeps things well-shot and well-paced, both not always a given in POV horror, as we all well know. There are even a couple of wonderfully creepy scenes, shot by daylight with everything important clearly visible. The only element about Wekufe that didn’t completely work for me were the scenes early on where the characters poo-poo the usual clichés of POV horror. That sort of thing does tend to feel twee rather than clever to me.

Of course, if that’s the biggest criticism I have towards a POV horror movie, it is rather successful at what it does.