Taken on their own, the terms ‘found footage’ and ‘home invasion’ have long been enough to send many a horror fan into shivers of despair, not so much because they suggest a truly hair-raising 90 minutes, but rather because they would seem to indicate a been-there, done-that, wasn’t-that-great-in-the-first-place routine which we’ve seen all too often this past decade or more. So – put the found footage and the home invasion together, and what do you get? A new and potent cocktail of tired horror tropes, which gives both subgenres the injection of fresh blood they have long been screaming out for? That might be nice. Unfortunately, in this instance we instead wind up with Keep Watching (for which Don’t Even Start Watching might have been a better choice of title).
Admittedly, a case could be made for first-time feature director Sean Carter’s film not really being a found footage movie: we might call it ‘streamed footage,’ perhaps, given that most if not all of what we’re shown is meant to have been live-streamed on a snuff site. As such, it’s more along the lines of 2002’s My Little Eye and 2014’s Unfriended than Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity. None of this serves to make it any less samey, predictable and tedious.
An opening montage of TV news footage tells us that a mysterious group of Jigsaw wannabes masked killers are on the loose, with a very distinctive MO: they sneak into the homes of their unsuspecting victims, install microscopic cameras all over the place, then strike in the dead of night, playing mind games aplenty before drawing them to their deaths, whilst live-streaming it all. Because their site presents the whole spectacle as if it’s a horror movie, some of their viewers are apparently caught unawares, not realising they’re bearing witness to the real deal.
From here, we meet the next family lined up for the kill: the Mitchells, your classic well-to-do family unit who can’t stand each other, with dad Carl (Ioan Grufford) constantly talking business on his phone, new stepmom Nicole (Natalie Martinez) anxious to establish her place in the household, young teen son John (Chandler Riggs) either playing XBox Live or sharing hot photos of his stepmom online, and older teen daughter Jamie (Bella Thorne) doing the classic woe-is-me, life’s-not-fair routine. Getting home late one night from a family vacation, they’re briefly startled by the sudden appearance of their deadbeat stoner uncle (Leigh Whannell) whose girlfriend has apparently kicked him out; but rather bigger surprises are in store as the night proceeds. Well, surprises for the characters at least. For the audience, not so much.
There are moments here and there when Keep Watching threatens to become something more. The early declaration that viewers of the snuff site couldn’t tell it was for real and not just a horror movie is clearly too on-the-nose to be just left hanging; surely that’s in some way meant to inform what we’re seeing, suggest some wry commentary on media consumption in the Youtube/social media age. Surely the moments in which people turn out to be less dead than we’d thought implies there’s something more going on. Surely those brief but pointed references to Dad’s financial worries have some bearing on it all. Yes? No? Maybe? Alas, it seems the fact that the killers record their crimes using a drone rather than camcorders is about as much breaking of new ground as we can hope for. I’m not sure if it’s so much that Keep Watching lays out red herrings, or if I was just desperately holding out hope that it would prove to be more sophisticated than it seemed, but this might be one instance of a film in which what you see really is all you get.
As I’m sure most seasoned horror viewers have often found themselves pondering when watching the latest example of an over-familiar subgenre, the thought certainly crossed my mind that Keep Watching might have worked just fine if only I hadn’t watched so many similar films in the past. And indeed, it might play okay for a new, younger generation of horror fans who haven’t seen it all before. Certainly the film seems to be made very much with the teen audience in mind, particularly as the cast boasts a few actors who might be classed as contemporary genre icons: Whannell, almost an old-school horror star now thanks to both his on-and-off camera roles on the Saw and Insidious franchises; Riggs, doomed to hear “CARL!” shouted at him wherever he goes for many years to come thanks to The Walking Dead; and above all final girl Thorne, teen icon and scream queen of sorts after her roles in Scream: The Series, The Babysitter and Amityville: The Awakening.
Clearly there were doubts about the selling power of this ensemble, though, given that Keep Watching has bypassed cinemas and gone direct to DVD, here in the UK at least. While I’m not sure it would have necessarily been a box office bomb (ingenuity and innovation are by no means essential components of a hit movie), I can’t say I’m sorry that the cinema-going masses were spared this one. As I write this, a great many horror fans are rejoicing at the fact that Guillermo del Toro has just won two Oscars for The Shape of Water, whilst Jordan Peele has one for Get Out: while I wouldn’t take this as cast-iron proof that intelligent horror is now the norm, it might seem to indicate that the culture is shifting toward genre films which take greater chances, explore more challenging subject matter, and above all else make a bit more of an effort. If this means there’s less of a place for films like Keep Watching, I daresay this may not be a bad thing.
Keep Watching is available on DVD now, from Sony Home Entertainment.