At least until movie number eight. Only the godhood of your choice – perhaps – knows how many more films in the series there will be in ten years or so.
As I’ve already said about the first entry in Turner Clay’s Blackwell Ghost series of all roughly sixty, seventy minute found footage/POV horror films, these films are comfort movies for people like me who enjoy this particular form of (horror) filmmaking with its specific clichés, tropes, and formal tics. Auteur Turner Clay, often the only actor on screen, carries the series even through the weakest films with a considerable amount of real person charm and the ability to sell the role of Turner Clay, accidental ghost documentary maker, ghost hunter and later serial killer puzzle solver, with an always natural and usually likable presence. He’s really great at providing the sense of fictional reality this genre needs to live and breathe.
Behind the camera, Clay becomes an increasingly surehanded low budget filmmaker during the course of the series, with clear ambitions on combining a variety of found footage styles to tell his story. He’s clearly thinking about the visual presentation and his films’ atmosphere quite a bit, and does know the limitations of his filmmaking style.
On the plot level, there’s not terribly much going on in most of these, and there is a tendency to drag one’s narrative feet to resolve pretty simple beats only two or three movies later. I’m also not too happy with the puzzle-loving, super-intelligent serial killer focus the last two films take on. In fact, the ghosts play no real role in the last two films anymore and appear to only have been included because, while this hasn’t been about the Blackwell ghost since film number three, they are in the damn title of the movies.
The serial killer business, the way its police investigation doesn’t actually ever investigate anything or treat our protagonist as the material witness and potential victim he is, as well as the increasingly Mary Sue-ish way Movie Clay is portrayed in the last two films does make it rather difficult to suspend my disbelief at that point in the series, his general charm notwithstanding. Ghosts, I have no problems with as being real in fiction, but our hero apparently being an expert on everything the plot needs, and the police – the FBI is mentioned only in one of the films – not even able to investigate tapes properly becomes a little too much.
However, this shouldn’t detract from the general achievement of a series that makes a lot out of limited material and limited means.
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