Lake Mungo (2008)

Don’t watch this film alone in a hotel room with the lights off if you are susceptible to seeing objects out of place or figures hiding in your peripheral vision. 

This film has been referred to as found footage, but it’s really a multimedia feature. The distinction is important to understand what the film is and isn’t doing. I’m not a found footage aficionado, but I feel like we get a little loosey goosey with that term. The Blair Witch Project is considered found footage even though it’s presented as a deliberately made film within the frame of the film we are watching. And, OK, that narrative frame is like We found this footage from these dumb kids who got in way over their heads and were eaten by a witch or sent to the corner or whatever. And we trace that genre lineage back to Texas Chain Saw Massacre because of its documentary “The film you are about to see is an account of the tragedy” scrolling text and voiceover intro, which fooled some credible people into thinking their worst fears about Texas were true. However, the association with TBWP maybe has more to do with the on-location handheld camera immediacy of TCSM, which feels less like a dramatization than actual footage of something happening. Later we’ll get films that are primarily if not completely presented as security camera or bedroom monitor footage, or Zoom recordings and all that banal interface. Which we might not want to watch if we prefer movies that use the camera in more thoughtful, less rigidly formal ways. In any case TBWP suffers in comparison with TCSM, which uses the camera (and embeds cameras) in more artful, effective, and affecting ways.

But let’s go back to Lake Mungo (shiver), which is very much engaged with cinema technology even as it arranges non-cinematic materials like home recording devices (modern and anachronistic), phone videos, and photographs. And maybe that materiality gets us thinking about the found footage genre, though what we have here is more of a mockumentary. The film is an assemblage of forms and formats, even as it’s put together in a highly deliberate manner that unsettles us in a way we might not notice once we get into the terrifying game of peekaboo it sets up. That slippage produces low-grade terror. Which is also to say that even when a movie tries to suggest it’s not a movie, it has to have something else going for it besides What the fuck am I watching and where did this come from? (Sorry, TBWP fans, and I say this as someone who closely followed the hype leading up to that film circa 1999, willfully going along with the Is this real? bit, and was disappointed not because it was a marketing gimmick but because the film is mostly pretty boring and uneventful.) We don’t watch Lake Mungo going Did this really happen? though we do feel the tension within the film, as we track which characters think something paranormal is going on. Meanwhile, two important things are happening. One is that the film reminds us of the power film has to create the illusion of paranormal phenomena in the same way that other recording and broadcasting technologies like EVP and spectral photography do, while also keeping alive the possibility that we are seeing something genuinely paranormal. The other thing it’s doing in the background is unsettling us by presenting a documentary with fuzzy edges. When are we watching the documentary and when are we in the world the documentary presents? This instability is more nauseating than shaky camera work. Are we watching the assembled media artifact itself or a film that represents that assemblage? The overlap between world, artifact, and document is uncanny. This is similar to the game WNUF Halloween Special played in 2013, though both the stakes and artistry are higher with Lake Mungo, and we’re not losing any sleep over goofy (but fun!) WNUF.

Lake Mungo, though: you never come back from that. 4 plus 1 ghost sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson