In short: Webcast (2018)

Warning: a couple of second act spoilers follow!

Having been transplanted from the City to a rural community by her mother so they can better take care of her stroke-damaged grandfather (for whose state she clearly feels some guilt), teen Chloe (Samantha Redford) has started up a web cast channel. Probably to fight off boredom more than anything else.

She’s not without ambition, though, and decides to make a documentary about the disappearance of her aunt from exactly the house she is now living in thirty years or so ago. She has a useful helper in form of her friend and flame Ed (Joseph Tremain) who has come to stay with the family for a time.

While out and about, Chloe becomes convinced there’s something very fishy going on with their direct neighbours, something she feels may be vaguely connected to her aunt’s disappearance as well. As a matter of fact, the neighbours are practicing some form of witchcraft, and they do not appreciate teenagers sticking their noses into their affairs at all.

Paul McGhie’s Webcast is an undeservedly neglected entry into the humongous canon of POV horror. It is also, pleasantly, a POV horror movie that doesn’t seem to want to hit the exact same plot beats and plot points of your typical “young people in the woods”-style affairs. There are some scenes taking place in the woods, mind you, and at least one of those is wonderfully creepy, but this is not a wood runner movie, but stands more in the tradition of the investigative arm of folk and occult horror (one could probably argue long and hard about the proper subgenre for this one, or just not) that’s all about a couple of people trying to solve a mystery and getting rather different answers than they wanted.

While clearly realized cheaply, there are quite a few cleverly staged and/or shot moments, and even some bits of great sound design (an aspect many of the cheaper POV horror films tend to ignore beyond the noises of somebody stepping on vegetation). Even more atypical, Webcast puts some energy and time into its characterisation, making Chloe’s obsession with her project even when most people would run believable enough to work. McGhie also repeatedly shows a daft hand at the creepy or weird detail that makes a good movie witch cult of the nasty persuasion work, with some effort clearly having been put into the iconography and style of the cultists, which not just turns the antagonists into a more believable, but also a stranger and nastier threat.

All of which turned Webcast into a very pleasant surprise for me.