I first became aware of Robbie Banfitch's shoestring "found footage" horror film The Outwaters last October when I saw that it was being lined up for a screening at the Lambertville Halloween Film Festival (LHFF). I wasn't able to make it to that screening, but my regional loyalty to a Jersey boy independent and a smattering of cryptic D.I.Y. promotions ensured that the flick would stay pinned to my watchlist.
Even so, I was both surprised and delighted that The Outwaters, which turns out to be a small and rough picture indeed, should be starting out on a limited theatrical run so soon this year, its distribution being handled by Cinedigm Entertainment Group. The early months of 2023 are turning out to be a banner moment for so-called "experimental" horror films, with the Canadian film Skinamarink seeming to dominate word-of-mouth, and Paul Owens' own LandLocked quietly carving its own path from festival to V.O.D. Just as a jadedness and malaise seems to be descending on the cycle of so-called "elevated" horror films that has cornered obsession and enthusiasm about genre cinema for the last decade, here comes a more rugged and unpolished cohort of underground fantasy filmmakers whose works are catching embers of that dying fire.
By and large, these films may be experimental, in some sense, but are really only called "experimental" because our media journalists and critical consensus is either very bad at, or feels professionally obligated to not describe form or interrogate new norms of exhibition, distribution, and mixed media. These films are portrayed as "experimental" because they emphasize atmosphere over explicit content, unconventional and implicit narratives over exposition, and long stretches of uneventful incidences or impressionistic sketches with the camera over action. Which is to say, these films are called "experimental," even though they are not experimental films, just debatably creative ones. An experiment, and an experiment in cinema, should be qualified by unusual rules and controls. The Outwaters, and the emergent D.I.Y. fantasy movement of which it is a part, is defined not by unusual controls, but rather by unusual spontaneity and impertinence of both the narrative and aesthetic kind. These are films defined by a generation of filmmakers enmeshed not in the darkness of the theatrical experience, but rather in the hyper-accelerated unfolding of digital spaces and its dark webs of possibility for artists and storytellers, now "content creators." These "internet brats" are precocious, devoted, obsessed, and increasingly run in an age cohort so young that it would have shocked even the "boy wonders" of Hollywood's golden age. The popularity of a series of horror video shorts uploaded to YouTube called The Backrooms has even resulted in its 17-year-old creator Kane Parsons being tapped by A24 to direct a feature-film adaptation, with principal photography slated to begin when Kane is let out of school for summer vacation. The creative visions of these projects are swamped by the influences of viral "proof-of-concepts" for aspiring visual effects artists like Kane, or jump-scare games, or Creepypasta short fiction passed off as real urban legends to both the impressionable and willfully gullible alike.
But the horror niche is just a fraction of what the new underground fantasy film represents. Whereas experimentalists of the past had to scrape by and make their commercially invalid art pieces for themselves and their own edification first and foremost, the internet brats have never known a world in which every photo, every video, every reel uploaded to the cloud - even ones not expressly intended to build up one's portfolio - is not subject to a test audience and their digital comment cards. Whether they acknowledge it or not, they become attracted to their own art by the promise of virality, and the subliminal assurance of the infinite, hyper-accelerated unfolding, not of discrete pieces or formal experiments, but of media itself as the second and total life of the aspiring artisan. What most critics describe as "experimental" qualities of these works are really just allusions to the obvious cheapness of their production, and, thus, to the exceptional exploitation and squeezing of labor that major and independent studios alike dress up as young striver success stories. But if these D.I.Y. exercises are inevitably conformed to the structures of a feature film, they are nonetheless the most reflective of their decidedly unstructured vision, rooted in the rootless decentralization of their technical origins. Whereas modernity brought us the film that we were constantly aware of, and postmodernity brought us the film that was constantly aware of us, the post-postmodern circumstance of the internet brats spawns the cinema that is on its own aware of nothing, whereas we are aware of everything everywhere all at once. These ersatz-experimentalist genre movies can never be whole in and of themselves. They are crippled by their own endemic, pathological allusion to an infinity of hoax urban legends, gambits at viral fame, and the systematic monetization of narcissism and self-abasement.
Told exclusively from the perspective of a single digital camera, the plot of The Outwaters, in as much as there is one, concerns four thirty-somethings who venture out into the middle of the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video. Banfitch, in addition to directing, writing, producing, editing, and serving as both cinematographer and sound designer for his film, also stars as a self-insert videographer named Robbie Zagorac. His co-stars and collaborators on the apparently improvisational project include Michelle May as Michelle August, the singer and star of the music video who has recorded an arrangement of the traditional lullaby "All the Pretty Little Horses" in homage to her deceased mother; Scott Schamell as Scott Zagorac, a writer and Robbie's estranged older brother; and Angela Basolis as Ange Bocuzzi, Robbie's longtime friend who tags along to provide costume and make-up for the video.
Any notion that this production constitutes a professional work, as opposed to an excuse for the foursome to get some R&R, or in fulfillment of a host of possible ulterior motivations on Robbie's part, is belied by the exhaustive, scattershot, and meandering structure of much of the film's first half. Many found footage horror films are predicated on the gimmick that the dramatizations we are watching represent materials recovered from some mysterious death, disappearance, or cover-up, and The Outwaters abides by that classic formula. But Banfitch's film immediately distinguishes itself in terms of its more calculated and demanding attempt to present its faux-documentary materials as an unedited, chronological expose of evidence that describes events, but has not been edited or interfered with in order to tell a story after the fact. Which is to say, almost the entire first two-thirds of this 100 minute film (which feels much longer) does not feel like the first two acts of a film. The Outwaters does not guide us through an establishment, set-up, and series of escalating complications. Rather, it presents itself, diegetically, as exactly what it is: The record of a group of creative millennials going on a road trip and then poncing around in the desert for a couple of days, with Robbie as character and filmmaker clearly adhering to a general outline, but otherwise working with his fellow cast and small invisible crew to construct a film from free-association.
Of course, with a hint here and there that something "isn't quite right" in the prehistoric lake where the friends make camp, shit, as they say, hits the fan. And though Robbie's guidance of the project maintains an improvisational affect, those who find their patience over-burdened by the extent of his and his friends' frankly uninteresting meanderings in the sands may nonetheless also find themselves duly rewarded by the film's climactic devolution into a phantasmagoric and quite gory delirium that alternately suggests time travel, subterranean monsters, or a portal to what some would call Hell, but never settles on a definitive answer. The Outwaters plays largely as a total subversion of the found footage genre, with Banfitch demonstrating infinitely more seriousness than most of his predecessors or contemporaries in playing with the ways in which the exclusive and explicit perspective of a limited subjective camera problematizes more conventional approaches to fiction storytelling in feature films. People always complain that the camera people in found footage movies are always recording when any normal person would have booked it long ago, but that's the least of a filmmaker's worries when it comes to verisimilitude. With less classical mechanisms at their disposal to describe cinematic space, to observe characters, or to establish motivations, found footage filmmakers frequently have to "cheat" in more apparent ways in order to telegraph what their story even is. It's not just that the camera is always on, but that it's always on at the right time, and that everyone is always saying the most relevant things when it's on. Banfitch doesn't bother with any of that, and thus disturbs the spectator via the alienation between what is recorded and what we actually know; not merely about what is going on and why, but also about the characters and why, in a thematic sense, these things are happening to them. The appalling mundanity of the first two-thirds of the film ultimately works out to a kind of endurance test, building up conspicuous absences in our sense of story and character, with a bloody-crying-screaming free-for-all finale serving not to answer questions but rather, ostensibly, to provoke reconsiderations of the previous material, the audience expected to invest in the now purely symbolic nature of the film's spectacle, and coming away with their own interpretations. I, for example, came away with the take that the whole thing is basically about a young, frustrated director who isn't so much interested in shooting a music video as he is in creating a pretense to get closer to a girl he wants to hook-up with. (This is not an under-handed inference about Robbie Banfitch, who is gay.)
But when I describe The Outwaters as "disturbing," I do not necessarily mean that I think it will be distressing to most people. It could just as well be one long annoyance and, unfortunately, Banfitch's respectable vision and multi-hyphenate technical accomplishments are deeply compromised by the immediate sense of the film's obtuseness. This is point-blank what I mean about how erroneously the term "experimental" gets thrown around these days, where many are inclined to describe The Outwaters as "experimental" when they mean it appears improvisational. Experiments require controls and disciplines that go beyond infatuation with expressing one's own talents, and while Banfitch is certainly talented from a technical perspective, he is decidedly mediocre as a storyteller and as an actor. Even confining ourselves to just the first two memory cards of evidence that structure the narrative of his film, if he had wanted to present these sequences as unedited evidence, he should have filmed and then edited them as unedited evidence. But from the drop there are dead giveaways of interventions in the soundtrack to overlap audio between apparently disparate shots, non-diegetic music, and, as we get into the ominous desert, sounds that would have been recorded on a separate device with a separate memory card that would have to be synced with the footage by some other character at some later point. Found footage movies traditionally also exploit tensions between the audience and the invisible editors who prepare these rescued materials for them, but Banfitch's decision to abide by certain technical interventions that are a cliche of the genre all the more heightens the feeling of simple pretense in his own. Because now I'm not content with the notion that I am merely being presented with an exhaustive sequence of evidence; now I'm asking, "Who edited this evidence, and why the Hell were they mucking around with the soundtrack instead of cutting down on all this bullshit?" This isn't experimentalism, it's just navel-gazing and laziness.
It would be one thing if our deliverance from what amounts to Banfitch's video diaries - the making of his film forming the bedrock of his film - was an interesting spectacle. Again, he deserves credit for being more serious than most for pursuing the inherent limitations of the found footage conceit (the limited perspective, shooting at night) to its logical extreme. But for every sensually accessible shot there's not much here apart from gore and screeching. This is a broader problem with American horror, I think. Even our would-be experimentalists, when tasked with making the grotesque into something evocative, only tend to lean on the same reductive sight of bright aesthetic red blood. Banfitch and other D.I.Y. horror mavericks ought to take a page from Philippe Grandrieux, who can craft scenes that are a thousand times more visceral than any castration, just relying on the revolting sight of snot and drool, and the indescribably uncomfortable sounds of a congested sinus or throat. For all the suggestiveness of it, the questions that The Outwaters raises via its spectacle just don't have any interesting answers, because their content is all too apparently derivative. I've seen not a few comparisons of the film to Event Horizon, which would be fine except more people should clarify that Event Horizon is a shallow movie that sucks. My money is on Banfitch drawing more from some combo of Hellraiser and Stalker, which would be all the more hilarious. As far as found footage movies about would-be filmmakers disappearing in the desert, Justin Barber's Phoenix Forgotten might not be the most original movie in the world, but its exceptional execution of a well-trodden formula exposes the fundamental misalignment between the pretenses of The Outwaters and its actual effect. Aiming for atmosphere over content, it yields neither. Aiming for suggestion over exposition, it actually proves far less evocative in its own attempts to blur boundaries between connotations of sci-fi tropes and those of religious awe and horror.
There is a decidedly apt moment early in the film when Robbie, the character and director, is having a video chat with Angela, the character and friend. Attempting to describe the costuming choices she intends for Michelle, she struggles to make a distinction between a genuine "hippie" look, and the cringey fashion of Coachella hipsters who wear $4,000 shorts. The characters, and presumably the filmmakers, want something that feels authentic, but are reflexively insistent upon the vague distinction between their legitimate art and the stink of the content creator and influencer. The problem is that if The Outwaters is about anything, it is explicitly about content creation and influence, and can only be said to be describing the type of certain internet brats who, necessarily, have to deny that they are cringe. The big mistake that Banfitch makes is that the authenticity of his project will be found in blurring the line between reality and fiction as much as possible. But as with the character he is playing, whether we're talking about shooting a music video or shooting a feature film, you are forcing the issue already. The circumstances are already artificial. The relationships might be genuine, but the motivation is prefabricated. Thus, it is not so much that Banfitch tries to present these elements of his film as an unedited video diary; it is that every creaking minute of it feels so unnatural and forced. It feels less like the raw composite of a person's final days with their family and friends, in a complicated web of closeness and estrangement, and more like the leavings of somebody's Instagram reel. Just as Michelle's music video feels perversely irrelevant to Robbie in the film (hence my reading), the film itself, The Outwaters, feels so irrelevant to the bigger project of Robbie Banfitch's artisan life. Are these aliens buried for millions of years that assail the characters, or demonic possessions, or post-nuclear mutations? Or is the panopticon of new media simply collapsing in on their influencer world, turning time and space into total abstractions, turning friends and loved ones into fodder for exploitation, and tearing them asunder in agonizing self-commodification and display?
Perhaps in my cruelty towards The Outwaters, I nonetheless discover my qualified appreciation for it, if not my liking. A Jersey boy can do way worse, and maybe the problem is that Banfitch has spent too much time in the California sun. To paraphrase our great John Gorka, Jersey people can surprise you, try harder, go further, because they never think they're good enough. Everyone in California already thinks their shit is fire, and the brain disease of that crumbling Sodom & Gomorrah will catch you if you're not careful.
Maybe that's another, final, resting take on The Outwaters. This is an artist's portrait of himself, the story about how he left his people behind for the Golden State and completely lost who he was.
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