There’s an endearing auteur-amateur nexus to found footage horror. Aspiring film directors often can’t realise their visions due to budgetary constraints or a lack of industry connections. Since found footage is low budget by definition, it can provide aspiring directors with a showcase for their idiosyncrasies. So it is with Horror in the High Desert. Indie director Dutch Marich did virtually all the work on the film – writing, directing, producing, editing and cinematography – and in doing so provides us with a remarkably unique and fully-formed aesthetic, both generally and in the way it manipulates the tropes of the found footage genre. The narrative revolves around Gary Hinge, an extreme hiker played by Eric Mencis, who disappears somewhere in the vast backwoods of Nevada. The screenplay builds steadily towards Gary’s last known recording, while alternating between insights from Gary’s sister Beverly (Tonya Williams-Ogden) and housemate Simon (Errol Porter), along with private investigator Bill Salerno (David Morales) and investigative reporter Gal Roberts (Suizey Block).
When found footage first emerged at the turn of the millennium, it dramatised the most visceral form of media available at the time – camcorders. Since then, that direct address has been siphoned off into all kinds of other live and online media, especially with the rise of smartphones in the late 2000s. That emergence bookends the classical era of found footage between The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, and marks the hybrid fusion of traditional home video footage and other types of “found” media as one of the hallmarks of our current post-classical silver age. Horror in the High Desert is particularly adept in this respect, nesting its kernel of found footage within two more contemporary forms of media. The first of these is survivalist media – the ballooning of YouTube, Instagram and TikTok channels dedicated to extreme tourism, along with cinema’s response in documentaries like The Dawn Wall and Free Solo about the relationship between film crews and thrill-seekers.
In Gary, the film presents us with a survivalist who is likely somewhere on the spectrum. He kept mainly to himself, spent most of his time indoors compiling videos of his hikes and working on his model railroads, and repeatedly observes that he prefers the company of animals to people (although interestingly, Marich avoids cliché by also hinting at Gary’s relationship with a previous boyfriend who was closeted and therefore unwilling to participate in the documentary footage). Gary is a character enigma in the same way as Alex Honnold and much of the speculation around his disappearance boils down to what attracted him to survivalism in the first place. For Gary himself is keen to emphasise, in his videos, that he is not hiking but engaging in “multiple day survival excursions.” He’s particularly fascinated with being off grid and seeks out the most remote places, while refusing to specify their coordinates except that they are outside cell service. These spaces are quite eerie in themselves, most memorably a ghost town and graveyard that dates from the nineteenth century. While filming this location, Gary gestures to a distant mountain and explains that his truck is parked beyond it, emphasising just how far off the grid his exploration has taken him.
The second form of media that Horror in the High Desert draws upon is the Netflix reboot of Unsolved Mysteries and the true crime renaissance behind it. At eighty minutes the film is not that much longer than an Unsolved Mysteries episode and it features many of the key tropes of the Netflix series. There’s an acute attention to local textures (in this case, Ruth, Nevada), paired with crisp footage, talking heads interviews and copious usage of drone footage. Given that drone cinematography was one of the hallmarks of the early Netflix style more generally, the Unsolved Mysteries reboot tended to be most evocative when it revolved around cases with an aerial dimension, such as the trajectory of unidentified flying objects, or Rey Rivera’s infamous leap from the top of the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore. Hotel in the High Desert is similarly attuned to what might be described as the false omniscience of drones and digital technology more generally – their promise to provide an immediate access to the truth that actually turns out to be hypermediated, to borrow two terms from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Here, drones play a major role in the search effort for Gary, although one reporter notes that drones flatten the landscape, and don’t account for its complex reticulations at ground level, which stem from the plethora of abandoned mine shafts. The heat of the high desert is also a concern for Gary’s search party – he disappeared in the middle of summer – as the film pre-empts a more recent trend of people vanishing and then dehydrating to death; missing persons as uncanny symptom of a new era of extreme climate.
Another key feature of these later found footage films is a tendency towards nested narratives. This Gothic trope seems to be a way of coming to terms with the manner in which found footage has itself become nested within a much broader swathe of media platforms than the classic phase of the genre could have ever envisaged. As a result, late found footage brings us both closer to and further away from reality – in Bolter and Grusin’s terms, it is both more immediate and more hypermediated than the golden era of the genre. This is particularly acute in Horror in the High Desert, which not only buries its found footage within YouTube survivalism and the reboot of Unsolved Mysteries but beneath several layers of mediation in the narrative itself. For it turns out that Gary has vanished after a curious experience in the wilderness, in which he came upon a makeshift cabin, experienced an overwhelming feeling of dread, found fresh footprints around his tent the following night, and then had an unshakeable sense of being pursued on his three-day hike back to her car.
The thing is, Gary doesn’t film any of this. Moreover, the absence of any footage reveals a third platform that his sister and the private investigator were hitherto unaware of – a personal blog, where he details his adventures to over 50 000 followers. Since he nearly always provides video footage of his experiences, these followers turn against him when he fails to document the cabin, the footprints and the landscape where it all occurred. The fact that he never discloses the precise location of his survivalist expeditions makes these followers all the more outraged at the lack of footage. At the very moment that his sister and the private investigator discover this new blog, with its heightened immediacy and access to Gary, his final experiences are hypermediated through the absence of found footage, leaving us to wonder what this footage would have looked like had Gary managed to gather it in. Found footage thereby becomes an uncanny aporia at the heart of the film, a missing node of both immediacy and hypermediacy that renders Gary’s vanishing profoundly unknowable.
All of that is to say that Horror in the High Desert focuses on the sheer foundness of found footage as uncanny in an era when all images are available in the digital cloud. This crystallises when hikers discover his backpack, containing his belongings, his camera, and his cleanly severed hand attached to his camera. I still remember the eerie shiver that ran over my body in early advertisements for The Blair Witch Project that informed the audience that the tape had been found between some tree roots in the woods. Gary’s severed hand recovers that eerie sense of foundness, of the film as artefact. In turn, it recovers the strangeness of the footage, which only takes up the last ten minutes or so of Horror in the High Desert, and even then is only presented in the redacted form that was made available to the general public.
This short segment of footage is the epicentre of the film, and it delivers. For the first few minutes, Gary makes his way through the high desert. The whole thing takes place in pitch darkness, with Gary only finding his way via the night vision of the camera, so his sense of disorientation and terror is palpable. The camera is not merely a recording device but a navigation device, his only mechanism for situating himself in the landscape around him. These first couple of minutes are highly abstract, flickers of scrub, foliage and dirt, all converging on voids of utter darkness. Watching it, I realised that the horror of found footage often springs from an ambient gaze that is on the very cusp of being anthropomorphised. Gary feels watched by someone or something during these moments and yet their gaze never quite crystallises out of the surrounding nightsprawl, despite feeling more and more present.
That brings us to one of the most terrifying moments in found footage that I have seen. When Gary arrives at the cabin, he films it from a distance, then casts his eye around the small clump of trees where he is sheltering, before returning the camera’s focus to the cabin once more. Something ineffable has changed this time around, although the poor image quality makes it difficult to tell exactly what. Gary holds the shot of the cabin for a few seconds – and then what appeared to be a part of the structure falls to the ground, glinting with a pair of eyes. In this moment, Horror in the High Desert taps into the very quintessence of found footage, as a gaze hangs suspended somewhere between the night, the house, and whatever creature inhabits the house. None of these three entities are looking back at us and yet all of them are, so it’s almost a shame that this emergent gaze is eventually anthropomorphised in the form of a deformed hermit who, in his own way, is a more extreme survivalist. Still, that single moment endures, especially since the film is so sparing with its found footage, while Marich sets up the sequel around it, as Gary’s remaining fans set out to locate the cabin, and to situate themselves at that juncture just before this gaze attaches (or reduces) itself to a body.