With the unceremonious canning of Roland Emmerich's The Zone, some speculated that the found-footage horror genre had had its day. At the very least though, we've still got Area 51, **Apollo 18 **and Paranormal Activity 3 on the way. And there's also Grave Encounters**, the trailer for which has just gone online.
The film shares its name with a fictional paranormal-investigating TV series: the reason that Sean Rogerson, Merwin Mondesir, Ashleigh Gryzko, Mackenzie Gray and Juan Riedinge are filming inside the Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital. Previously a Bedlam-like insane asylum, the institution is now suposed to be abandoned, but it seems that some of its former residents were reluctant to leave...
Cue everything you'd expect, in grainy shaky-cam, as the crew remain determined to keep documenting what looks to be their final episode. Locals provide ominous interviews, windows open of their own accord, and there's even a seemingly deliberate nod to The Blair Witch Project's standing-in-the-corner ending, leading to quite a lame CGI-face scare. Filmmakers, take note: CGI-face scares are always rubbish.
Despite obvious similarities to the BBC's Ghostwatch - the infamous 1992 Hallowe'en event, presented as a live documentary on the "Enfield Poltergeist" that many latecoming viewers were fooled into thinking was real - this does have a good set-up. There are few things more eerie than an abandoned asylum, and like the PA films, this seems certain to make creepy use of silences and empty spaces. We'll just have to hope that directing team "The Vicious Brothers" kept the good scares out of the teaser clip.
Grave Encounters has no UK release date yet, so currently has "Kim's Video Dungeon" written all over it.