Char Man (Kurt Ela, Kip Tribble - 2019)

A friend once said, "Being a horror fan is like prospecting for gold. You dig through the mud and muck, looking for flecks of gold, and you find enough of those, to make it worth it, but it takes work. You have to watch a fair amount of shit. Then, once in a while, you come across a whole nugget, and that's why you watch all that shit." Never has a truer thing been said about the labors of a horror fan. The excitement of finding one of those nuggets of gold gives meaning to the hours spent wading through shit. To my mind, Char Man is one of those nuggets of gold.

Having decided that this Halloween season I was going to try to catch some of the found footage/first person POV horror films I've missed, when I heard the hosts of Blerdy Massacre mention Char Man positively during their podcast, as well as seeing some positive mentions of it on social media, I thought I'd check Char Man off the list.

Found footage and first person POV aren't always the same thing. A film can be first person POV, without being a "found footage" film, though at this point the term found footage is used to describe basically all first person POV films. Char Man, is a proper found footage film though. It begins with a standard, "The footage you are about to see was found on a hard drive and assembled with consideration for time..." set of text cards.

The premise is that two men and a hired camera man are attempting to make a "mockumentary" or a fictional documentary, initially about "the Ojai Vampire," a piece of folklore from Ojai California. Things don't go as planned, obviously.

Kurt Ela and Kip Tribble do something interesting with this premise though. The haplessness and unprepared nature of the two characters they play makes for a few decent jokes in the early part of the film. Their ignorance to anything like an efficient process and labor of filmmaking is simultaneously pitiful, annoying and funny. The depth of the arrogance is at times near infuriating, by design.

This lasts exactly as long as necessary to give an idea who these characters are, but it also lulls the audience into a sense of security. It sets itself up as if it's going to be a Christopher Guest variety of mockumentary, watching some eccentric incompetents attempt to fulfill a goal their eccentricities and their arrogance have left them utterly unprepared for. What you feel you're going to see is two arrogant men, bouncing off of each other and the degree to which they don't seem to have done even basic research into narrative filmmaking.

Yet, at the same time, it begins to sow the seeds for something else, and then takes a turn when these documentarians stumble across an even more interesting piece of local folk lore, the Char Man. Those seeds begin to bear fruit in the form of genuine, well crafted suspense and unease. What it's also done, in a covert way, is make the characters feel authentic, which is of the utmost importance to a found footage film.

The result is a thirty minute climax that is impressive in the elegance of its simplicity that produces something far more effective than the first two thirds of the film suggests is possible. With very little, Char Man succeeds in ratcheting up and sustaining real suspense, while also tossing in a few images that are creepy and unsettling to a memorable degree. In having created authentic characters, even as they may be somewhat annoying in the earlier part of the film, that authenticity evokes connection to what they're experiencing, and a desire not to see them come to some terrible end. There's also an understanding of genre tropes, and subverting them, which is admirable.

It's frankly shocked by how enjoyable this film is, how well conceived and executed it is, and how deeply creepy it is. That said, the last five minutes are something of a disappointment, but its also the only real ending the film could have, and is only a disappointment because of just how well constructed the tension and suspense is in the thirty minutes prior.

One of the things this Patreon is for, is to celebrate work which deserves it. Char Man is a great example of low budget filmmaking being compelling and invoking a response that seems like it should be outsized, compared to how many much more well financed films fail to reach it. This is a very fun, smartly made horror film that is perfect for the season.