Tag: Found Footage

Hop Along Lovecraft! Why Frogman Returns Is an Epic Cryptid Romp…

Anthony Cousins and John Karsko’s cryptid sequel, Frogman Returns, trades DIY roughness for polish, with a Lovecraft twist and a rival cryptid hunter in Ghostbusters gear. It’s camp, it’s creepy, and it might be the perfect Halloween watch.

Frogman Returns Movie Poster
Screened at Toronto After Dark, Sun, Oct 18th Cineplex Scotiabank Theatre

* Spoiler Alert

Anthony Cousins and John Karsko’s sequel, Frogman Returns, raises the bar for campy parody while delivering a love letter to all things cryptid. What makes this film such a solid sell is how the story captures why we love cryptids more than ghosts. With Halloween approaching, there’s all the more reason to seek this film out!

Although familiarity with the original helps, this sequel works reasonably well as a standalone film. Still, I didn’t think it was fair to review it until I’d tracked down a copy of the original to watch, too, allowing me to make comparisons. Hence the delay to this review. The first film tries to be serious, with very strong The Blair Witch Project influences.

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See No Evil, Hear No Evil… Where’s The Wisdom The Mouths Have To Speak Anyway?

Takashi Shimizu’s The Mouths transforms a cemetery legend into a nightmare involving a cursed tree, cicadas, and a ghoul? Spoiler Alert. You have been warned:

The Mouths Movie Poster
Played on July 26, 2026 at Fantasia Film Festival at the Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU

If you’re a fan of Ju-on or any of Takashi Shimizu‘s works, The Mouths (口に関するアンケート) will certainly scare you! That’s because once the synopsis revealed there’s a suicide tree, I half expected this film to be about Aokigahara Forest rather than a random hunk of wood located in a dilapidated cemetery. When the legend of the said park overshadows any other urban legend, what’s presented feels like a partial set of short stories, each tied to why four young adults have come here to find the spirit reputed to haunt this tree!

In what begins as a simple truth or dare, it ends up being a challenge of the human spirit against nature. In this case, it’s to see if the curse attached to the said tree is true! And when none of the individuals invited it home, there’s cause for concern! Should this entity not follow its victim(s), it would never feed.

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Who’s The Dream Eater? When The Mythology Isn’t Wholly There.

Alex and Mallory flee to the woods to film his parasomnia, but Dream Eater never fully awakens its Lovecraftian or mythological promise. A found-footage descent into dreams and madness that teases Phobetor yet forgets his purpose.

Dream Eater Movie Poster 2025Alex suffers from a strange case of parasomnia in the movie Dream Eater, and he’s headed to the woods with his girlfriend to assist in his therapy. Their plan is to live in a cabin while she records his moments. The hope is that someone can study the footage and understand why this is happening. With Mallory Drumm and Alex Lee Williams not only starring but also writing and directing, I can’t help but wonder if taking on too many roles behind the camera is part of the film’s problem. Even Jay Drakulic, who has a minor role, shares a directorial credit.

Somewhere in a quiet corner of Quebec, the couple faces more than the usual relationship woes. They’re getting on each other’s nerves as Alex descends into a deeper psychosis. His inability to tell whether he’s dreaming or awake drives most of the film’s tension. The genuine fear lies in what he might do when his subconscious refuses to stop him. It’s a compelling hook, at least in theory, to keep audiences invested.

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When Pranking is a Ghost Game, How is That Fair to the Victims?

Ghost Game (2024) Movie PosterNow available to stream/rent on VOD

The ominous tone that exists in the movie Ghost Game is enough to make me think twice about squatting in a haunted house! That’s never good; and in a film directed by Jill Gevargizian and written by Adam Cesare, perhaps it’s best to hope content creators Laura (Kia Dorsey) and Adrian (Sam Lukowski) get their just deserts! They believe spooking new homeowners is funny, and when their boss, Mr. Wattley (Aidan Hughes) likes the idea to include demonic possession (it’s a ratings winner), that’s a sign for disaster.

The reason is that these podcasters don’t realise the history of the house they’re “infesting” will endanger everyone, themselves included. To pile their shenanigans on top is guaranteed to cause things to go south fast, and when they don’t care about the lives they’re affecting, that’s disheartening. Although the story really pulled me into the drama, this film is one of those rare instances where you’ll either like these protagonists or hate them.

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When Prosjekt Z is More About the Movie Making Process than The Horror

Anyone having the post-Halloween blues may want to check out this hybrid Prosjekt Z as it’s not always about the terror, but the blues.

Prosjekt Z Movie PosterComing to DVD/VOD
Nov 3, 2023

Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken‘s Prosjekt Z is a rather strange hybrid that doesn’t quite know what kind of movie it wants to be. When it’s hitting select theatres after All Hallow’s Eve, just who will be anxious to see this must be for folks craving anything postmortem. Here, the story is about a group of students out to make a zombie film out in the woods. But there’s much more going on, since we also get something akin to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes going on later on.

If that’s not this work’s premise, then the Rocky Horror moments even get curiouser and curiouser–minus the music. That is, there’s a couple who’s out in the woods and after having a bit of a spat, find themselves in front of a lone mansion. They’re just characters to a story within a story where afterwards, a meteorite comes zooming through and crashes! Its radiation is turning the locals into the walking dead.

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The Man Behind the Madness of Site 13. Nathan Faudree on Finishing This Found Footage Film 20 Years Later.

Sometimes, a movie must be finished despite all odds, and Nathan Faudree talks about why Site 13 had to be made and why H.P. Lovecraft’s vision matters.

Nathan Faudree HeadshotSite 13 is now available on VOD.

Nathan Faudree is a man who wears many hats in the entertainment industry, and his work isn’t limited to genre films. He started in theatre and appeared in many performances of William Shakespeare’s plays, like Hamlet. And from there, worked his way into appearing in films to eventually became Fangoria Radio’s Scream King of 2006! From there, he’s had a blast playing cult heroes, terrifying monsters and even did monster noises for Troma’s Poultrygeist. This New York based actor has done a lot.

But to know him also means getting to talk to him, and chatting with him about why he wanted to revisit Site 13, a movie that was filmed two decades ago which never got finished. What he did to make it contemporary is a good thriller, which is Blair Witch meets H.P. Lovecraft.

For our readers who haven’t seen your past work, what can you recommend?

I’m a co-writer of A Wounded Fawn, which came out last year on Shutter, and we were nominated for Fangoria’s Chainsaw Award and made the top 20 list. Prior to that, I was in Kottontail, where I played a killer Easter Bunny.

About your theatre days, did you leave it all behind to work on film?

Actually, I knew that if I didn’t have something lined up to do after playing Macbeth that, I would be catastrophically depressed because that’s the role everyone wants to play. That’s when Site 13 came in. It’s been a few years now, and I miss that world. I’ve appeared in Hamlet, Alls Well, etc., Here, you have this automatic response with the audience and whether that night’s show went off well. You don’t get that with making movies. It’s only just now I’m seeing what people are thinking about my latest.

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