‘Antrum’ Is The Found Footage Horror Hidden Gem You’re Looking For

The best found footage horror films, for me, are the ones that manage to evoke the sense that we really shouldn’t be watching what we’re watching at that moment. Cannibal Holocaust, the granddaddy of this particular subgenre, achieved this with a movie-within-a-movie approach that allowed us to see the horror through the eyes of a particular character. The Blair Witch Project, the patron saint of the subgenre’s 21st century boom, achieved it through a sense of raw, improvised terror and a brilliant marketing scheme that included things like “dossiers” at bookstores aimed at convincing people, without a hint of a knowing wink, that the film they’d heard so much about was a genuine artifact from a doomed expedition.

It’s hard to articulate now the weird spell Blair Witch held over me as a junior high school kid at the time. I wasn’t allowed to see the film at that point, but I remember the TV spots vividly, and have a clear memory of flipping through that dossier at my local Barnes & Noble when my parents weren’t looking. Even then, I knew from an intellectual standpoint that the film wasn’t “real,” but I couldn’t escape that impish little voice in the back of my head that kept saying “Yeah, but what if it is?”

To this day, even when I feel a little tired of the found footage format as a whole, a film that can convey a little of that dreadful magic – a little of that “Yeah, but what if…” glee – through the screen feels like something special, and takes me right back to sneaking horror films I’d borrowed from friends into my childhood bedroom at night. Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made did that for me, and if you’re looking for a recent found footage hidden gem, it might just do it for you as well.

I first found Antrum while scrolling through Amazon Prime Video, as I often do, looking for something that might surprise me. I was immediately hooked by the premise, and as I watched the opening minutes I found myself swept up in that old dreadful magic again. I purposefully did as little reading about the film as possible, and dove in. I was not disappointed.

The film is not a “found footage” movie in the way Blair Witch Project fans might think, but it still counts as part of the subgenre because of its compelling approach to the story of a cursed movie, a found artifact much like the footage in Cannibal Holocaust that, according to reputation, we really should not be seeing. In the world of this film, Antrum is a little-seen horror movie produced in the late 1970s that seems to kill just about everyone who sees it. A short “documentary” plays before the film proper and feeds us tales of a deadly movie theater fire, festival programmers dying under mysterious circumstances just hours after contact with Antrum, and tampering with the original negative by some unknown third party that clearly wanted to embed something dark and subliminal directly onto the celluloid.

Then, a narrator tells us that we are about to see the uncut, unrestored film in its entirety, and a warning screen with a 30-second countdown flashes before our eyes, giving us a chance to walk away.

It’s not easy in a post-Blair Witch world to get my brain to do that little “Yeah, but what if it is?” trick anymore, but in those 30 seconds Antrum managed to pull it off.

Once the actual film begins, Antrum plays rather authentically like something an enterprising group of people with a few hundred thousand dollars could have pulled off over a few weeks shooting in the woods in the late 1970s. It follows two siblings, a young boy (Rowan Smyth) and his older sister (Nicole Tompkins), as they venture out into the woods to a dig a hole to Hell, in order to say goodbye to the family dog. What begins as an ill-advised coping exercise devised by a sister to placate her grieving brother soon turns to something much darker, as the supposedly fake spells and rituals they perform on their little woodland outing seem to actually start working in a way they can’t control. The tone is somewhere between the unhinged rural nightmare of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the playful suburban dread of The Gate, and both Smyth and Tompkins rise to the occasion to carry the movie as it spirals downward into something hellish.

In the beginning, after the faux-documentary lead-in has faded away and the film itself is left to grab you on its own, Antrum manages to maintain its spell through the simple plausibility of its visuals and narrative design. It looks and feels like a film you might have found on a high shelf in a video store in the 1980s, but that’s not necessarily enough to keep the “cursed” narrative of the overall found footage conceit in play. For that, Antrum relies on moments, often very brief ones, that stray from the comforting nostalgia of its overall design. It’s in these moments, sometimes mere flashes and sometimes something more, that the illusion is able to persist, because it’s there that the film is able to prod you up and out of your comfort zone with things that are times merely startling, but sometimes dig deeper into flat-out unnerving. There is one shot in this film – a lingering, grainy image of a demonic face in half-darkness – that could have been filmed yesterday or could have been ripped from a reel of Haxan a full century ago. The camera stays on it for several agonizing seconds without flinching, and it’s something that will stay with me for years. It felt like something forbidden, like a peek directly into Hell that I wasn’t supposed to see. But, you know, in a gleeful, horror movie fun way.

If you love found footage high-concepts, Satanic horror, folk horror, or horror curiosities in general, Antrum is a movie for you. It works better if you buy the ticket and take the ride, so to speak, but even if you arrive to it with a healthy dose of skepticism, there are things in this special little film that linger in your head long after the credits have rolled.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire whose work has appeared at Syfy Wire, Mental Floss, Looper, Playboy, and Uproxx, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas, and he’s always counting the days until Christmas. Find him on Twitter: @awalrusdarkly.

Watch Antrum on Amazon Prime Video