Popular ghost hunting shows come in a variety of flavors with a universal appeal to cheese and camp. There’s the wildly popular roto-rooting Ghost Hunters originally airing on Sci-Fi and the bro-fest that is Ghost Adventures usually repeating every tired episode on Discovery+’s pantheon of channels. Even Ozzy, Sharon, and Jack Osbourne have joined the pseudo-scientific quest to prove what usually happens just slightly off camera. Shows like these all follow a similar formula. They are contingent on the audience’s willingness to blend our disbelief with what is manufactured on screen. By the end of the show there is still no proof of the hereafter, of residual or intelligent hauntings, or of demons who have chosen to just loiter in abandoned buildings for kicks. Viewers return from the spectacle safe from their tentative exploration into the outer limits of their knowledge. If the ghosts are not real, then at least we know the rules of our universe still hold, right?
I love everything about these shows–the cheap scares, bad effects, muddled voices through static, and insufferable hosts. As hokey as they are, these shows help me confirm (safely from my couch) what I already know about the world around me. Which, in turn, is what makes films like Grave Encounters (2011) so effective. The Vicious Brothers imagine a reality in which evidence of the paranormal is no longer just blobs on a night vision camera screen but very real and incredibly threatening. When watching Grave Encounters, we can’t just confirm reality by checking it against something obviously doctored. Instead, we witness the rules of the universe bend, twist, and break. The members of the paranormal team who so clearly rely on guile and pseudoscientific methods are likewise broken down into shells of themselves. They become an example of what happens to us when reality is not what we think it should be.
Grave Encounters, a spoof on the manufactured horror in Ghost Adventures, follows a team of paranormal investigators as they enter Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital for a “dead time” lockdown until six in the morning the following day. Things start off slow as the team, led by the perpetually washed-out Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), ham it up in the abandoned hospital. Preston is a perfect carbon copy of the real-life Zac Bagans from his strange enunciation and cadence, to the terrible faux-hawk hairstyle. Styled as the team leader and chief producer of the fakery, Preston guides the team in showing something that was “never seen before!” Until the real horror begins, when the paranormal team actually finds paranormal activity, we see the over-acting psychic, the over-explanation of the scientific tools and methods to capture evidence, and the playing to the ratings that fuels the show.
But then real noises echo throughout the abandoned hospital, doors slam, and voices ring clearly out from Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) recorders, causing the team to quickly move from investigation to panicked and angry confrontation with their environment. Human constants like time dilate causing food the team packs to inexplicably rot in minutes. Space distorts itself as the hospital’s layout shifts causing walls to block off entrances and exits. The laws of physics are upended endlessly all while the paranormal team is picked off one-by-one by exactly what they sought to prove.
As with other found footage horror, like The Blair Witch Project (1999) and the Paranormal Activity series, Grave Encounters presents the things we shouldn’t encounter in real life. The characters who see proof of the paranormal immediately lose their hold on reality. They cry, scream, kick maps into rivers, play with Ouija boards, call priests and demonologists, break down, regress, and finally die, or become possessed. But before all of this, they attempt to document and understand.
True horror lies in the tension between knowing and not-knowing. When presented with something that challenges our understanding, we check our reality by clinging to familiar explanations. Doubt of those explanations drives the horror. In ghost hunting shows, we know that most of the evidence can be explained. The face in the window? Headlights reflected from a car. The voice through the ghost box muttering a soft “help me!”? It must totally be our pattern-seeking mind stringing syllables together to their nearest reference. The orbs that totally aren’t bugs or motes of dust are truly just bugs or motes of dust, right? But the tiny whimper of “what if?” haunts us. This game of back-and-forth between doubt and explanation is fun precisely because it confirms what we believe to be true.
But films like Grave Encounters remind viewers that what they know is flimsy at best. Throughout the film, most of the scientific equipment fails, glitches, or becomes distorted. As a result the team is left only with their minds and their cameras in an environment that is constantly in flux around them. But despite the documentation, the team still dies. And we still watch.
Grave Encounters challenges our right to claim any ability to own the world’s phenomena. The scene immediately before the conclusion involves Preston bludgeoning a rat in the labyrinthian tunnels, only to eat it raw. This regression from master of the paranormal spectacle to opportunist hunter represents what happens when we finally give up trying to know everything in a way that prioritizes human-centric knowledge. We revert–return to the basics of who we are. We don’t have time to understand, just to survive. As Preston says briefly before the asylum breaks loose: “I’m just documenting stuff–people are gonna want to see this.” What films like Grave Encounters do is show us what happens when we finally get what we want. The catch is that we may not like it–or survive it.
Grave Encounters is streaming on Shudder.
Kyle Brett, Ph.D., studies nineteenth-century American literature and Transatlantic Romanticism. He is also a horror buff and avid weird fiction reader, and you can follow him on Twitter @burntcheerios. He has written previously for Horror Homeroom on Alma Katsu’s novel, The Deep, It, Cargo, Stephen Graham Jones’ novel The Only Good Indians, and Sea Fever and the working-class weird.
