The Prescient Fake-Documentary Horror of ‘The Final Broadcast’

Welcome to The Queue — your day by day distraction of curated video content material sourced from throughout the net. As we speak, we’re watching a video essay that explores the groundbreaking and underseen discovered footage horror movie The Final Broadcast.

Right here’s a enjoyable query for all of you sickos on the market who love style semantics: what’s the distinction between discovered footage horror and a horror mockumentary?

For my cash, I believe the hot button is that most horror mockumentaries use discovered footage, however not all found-footage horror films are mockumentaries. Perhaps some examples will assist. 2008’s Cloverfield is a discovered footage kaiju movie the place the footage was “discovered” by the US Division of Protection. In the meantime, movies like Noroi: The Curse actively faux to be unfinished documentaries, salvaged below mysterious circumstances. Maybe it’s honest to say that “documentary” is without doubt one of the extra common ways in which “footage” will get “discovered.”

1999’s The Blair Witch Challenge is certainly essentially the most well-known discovered footage mockumentary. However it completely wasn’t the primary.

Which brings us to the subject of at the moment’s video essay: The Final Broadcast, which was launched an entire 12 months earlier than its rather more profitable successor. As an archived modern Videomaker article notes, The Final Broadcast was the primary movie created on solely consumer-level digital tools. This endows the movie with an eerie realism that no quantity of studio cash can replicate. (For what it’s price, The Final Broadcast was made for one thing within the space of $900.00 USD).

With out giving the ending away right here, the movie follows David (David Beard), a documentary filmmaker investigating a sequence of unsolved murders revolving round a magical public-access TV present. Whereas the movie is pointedly dated (the scenes that includes very, very early web boards have to be seen to be believed), the movie has retained a chilling relevancy with respect to documentary agendas, bias, and notion.

Be cautious that the next accommodates spoilers.

Watch “THE LAST BROADCAST: The Groundbreaking Discovered Footage Movie Everybody Forgot”

Who made this?

This video, The Final Broadcast, is by Ryan Hollinger, a Northern Irish video essayist who focuses on horror movies. Hollinger’s evaluation often takes the form of a private retrospective. Indulging in a wholesome dose of nostalgia, Hollinger’s movies are contagiously endearing, entertaining, and informative. You may also take a look at Hollinger’s podcast, The Carryout, on SoundCloud right here. And you may subscribe to Hollinger’s YouTube account right here.

Extra movies like this

• Need to see extra of Ryan Hollinger‘s work? Right here’s his video on the Nineteen Eighties nostalgia of the Canadian eldrich horror flic The Void.
• Right here’s one other pattern of Hollinger’s work: a video on how the found-footage catastrophe image The Bay unpacks the horror of inaction throughout a public well being disaster. This video has floated into my thoughts about as soon as per week over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Which, given the movie’s parasitic subject material, is…acceptable.
• And right here’s yet another video essay from Hollinger on Dan O’Bannon’s tragic horror-comedy zombie movie The Return of the Residing Useless.

Associated Subjects: Discovered Footage, Horror, The Queue

Meg Shields is the common-or-garden farm boy of your goals and a senior contributor at Movie Faculty Rejects. She at present runs three columns at FSR: The Queue, How’d They Do That?, and Horrorscope. She can be a curator for One Good Shot and a contract author for rent. Meg might be discovered screaming about John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’ on Twitter right here: @TheWorstNun. (She/Her).