For all of its inventiveness and innovation, thehorrorgenre’s purpose can largely be summed up with one mission: scare whoever is watching.
And while all of the medium’s many subgenres excel at this to different degrees, few are as haunting as found footage films, those projects that use simple cameras to put the viewer into the character’s space and grant them intimate insight into the terrors they’re experiencing.
There have been many attempts to experiment with this subgenre, yet it’s shocking how few creators have tried whatOren Peli’sThe Riverdid more than a decade agoby bringing the found footage style to television.
Image by Nimesh Niyomal
This series focuses on a team searching for an environmentalist who’s gone missing in the Amazon rainforest, with this group of enthusiastic yet slightly unqualified individuals quickly learning about the horrors that may have caused the man to go missing in the first place.
Each episode is scary on its own,yet it’s how the series drives the core aspects of this subgenre that makes it such a successful (and deeply unnerving) program.The Riverunderstands that found footage is so scary not only because of its horrific images but the disquieting closeness it grants audiences to the people suffering onscreen, and by taking even more time to play with that proximity and thrust watchers into the mystery at its center, the series shows how to truly make found footage horrifying.
You Don’t Want to Visit ‘The River’
While so much of The River’shorror revolves around the fear of nature and insidious supernatural elements, the show first unnerves viewers with a much more grounded fear: what if someone you loved went missing?
Audiences are faced with this terrible reality in the premiere when they learn that this universe’sSteve Irwinstand-in, the famous explorer Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood), was lost along with his crew while investigating the secrets of the Amazon, leaving behind his heartbroken wife Tess (Leslie Hope) and son Lincoln (Joe Anderson).
The pair decide to launch an expedition to find their lost family member (with a producer promising to bankroll the project if they record every minute of it) and recruit a team to go on the same journey Emmet did, embarking on a run-down boat to hopefully discover what happened.
This premise in itself is intriguing, playing on concepts like familial strife and the terrors of celebrity to deepen the environmental fear at its center, yet the series goes even further with its ideasbecause it has the one thing most movies don’t: time.Eight episodes, to be exact, and it takes every second of that plentiful timeframe to not only flesh out its world but to unnerve viewers as they learn more and more about the horrors that made Emmet go missing.
So much of the found footage genre’s fear revolves around intimacy, as audiences are granted a much closer look at the main characters' experiences than your usual scary movie would allow.The Riverbuilds on that with the aid of being an episodic series; it has a combined runtime of almost six hours across its first season, meaning that not only was it able to set up numerous plot threads and twists to appear throughout the show, but it had the space necessary to truly develop each character.
Whether it be primary characters like the desperate Tess or relative side characters like the shy daughter of the ship’s repairmen, Jahel (Paulina Gaitan), the series grants each person a level of depth that makes their purpose for being on the mission much more understandable to viewers before then using that understanding against them.
It’s scary enough to see things like abominable creatures take a stab at drag researchers away or ghostly apparitions using a person’s deepest insecurities against them, but it’s made even worse when viewers know what the people facing these atrocities think, feel, and hope for.
Found footage as a medium excels at using audiences' care for characters against them like this, but by taking the season’s runtime (an amount most stories could only hope for) to truly investigate both these people and the horrors they go through,The Riverpushes this subgenre to horrific limits it has never seen before.
‘The River’ Is What Found Footage Should Be
WhileThe Riverwas exceptional in playing up its subgenre’s core aspects, the show still fumbled thematically in many ways.
Like most found footage projects, it often failed to rationalize why people were still so focused on filming while in deadly situations, and the series' mechanic of flashing between the current expedition and Emmet’s doomed one often created confusing storytelling for the audience.
But in spite of these issues,The Riverstill thrives in every area that mattersfor an exceptional found footage project.
It uses the specialized view to put audiences into the places of these characters, using each episode to draw them deeper within its story and the people who made it up.
It would then punctuate this authenticity with a level of terror fans may be shocked to learn made it on web link television, creating a perpetual cycle of watchers falling in love with charactersonly to grow more terrified at the things the titular river made them endure.There are countless found footage projects that play with the different aspects of this medium, but if fans really want to learn about what makes this subgenre so great and see a program execute each aspect horrifically well, then they need to watchThe River.
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The Riveris available to rent from Amazon Prime in the U.S.
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