Horror in the High Desert (Dutch Marich, 2021)

Faux documentaries or mockumentaries, are a choice of structure and storytelling conceit I find interesting. Somewhat like found footage, when they work well, they work really well and can invoke significant emotional responses, as well as being extremely creepy or frightening. Also like found footage, there's a certain section of the audience, filmmaking community and critical community which tend to dismiss it, referring to it essentially as a cheat. The sentiment is, "You couldn't make a real narrative film well enough, so you use this cheap conceit to give it a sense of reality." This is unfair, and wrong. The faux documentary is just another way to tell a story, no better and no worse than the straightforward narrative approach. To my mind, Lake Mungo is the high watermark in the form, because it does manage to be deeply emotionally effective throughout, with a number of seriously creepy sequences at different points. It's a film with something to say, that says it really well, and is better served by using the faux documentary format.

Horror in the High Desert doesn't reach those heights. In fact, the rough edges are very apparent in a few ways. What's also apparent is that Dutch Marich, the writer/director, has a good grasp on the form and has a good story. What he obviously doesn't have is a budget, and someone he'll listen to if they tell him his scripts needs some polish. There are a few places where either he should have recognized or someone should have told him there was too much repetition. It's not a terrible script, but it's clear he could use a set of eyes which are going to be critical and hold him to a slightly higher standard. It's clear at a few points that we have footage of characters repeating themselves in order to try and draw out a sense of suspense. This seems to have been a seven or eight person production, so it's understandable some of this is going to slip by.

There's another issue of a few instances of the characters/actors contradicting themselves/each other within ten or twenty of seconds. As in, "I was completely destroyed" to "I was fine and I was able to walk in there and do _______." They're talking about a traumatic event, and a short period of time, as in no more than an hour or two. This could be a script issue or it could be an editing issue, either way, it jumped out at me as I watched, and there were a few instances of things like it. Again, Dutch Marich obviously has a good grasp on this form of storytelling and it's pretty clear he could make something quite good with it. It's also obvious he needs more help. In this case, someone who could point out these instances of characters contradicting themselves/each other so close together is confusing, and it draws some of the sense of investment in the story away.

There are two reasons for this, which overlap. First is that there's a mystery at the center of the film, and second is that audiences who are going to watch this are going to be familiar with the way mystery is used in this format. When there are contradictions which are as apparent as they are in Horror in the High Desert, audiences/viewers jump to this being a "tell." They expect it's either going to be addressed immediately, even if it's a variety of red herring, a dead end or that it's going to come back later and either complicate things for one of the characters or play into the mystery somehow. Here, Marich blows by them, so I was wondering whether they were going to come back later, until it was clear the film was headed into the close, and nothing else was going to be revealed.

The ending of the film works really well. Everything in the first hour or so of the run time is basically there to set up this last section, and it does pay off. It's also clear when the film ends, that's all the first hour of the film is, and this is essentially a short film, stretched out to eight two minutes. Considering the number of feature length horror films which come about because they are successful shorts then expanded to feature length, there's nothing wrong with this. However, there needs to be more meat on the bones of that first hour. The suspense, dread and horror in the ending are really strong. Marich clearly knows how to construct a good scare sequence, and it is effective. Making the rest of the film stronger, focusing on building the characters more, giving the audience more to hook into around the character the mystery is concerned with, would make that ending even stronger. It wouldn't feel so obvious that everything else was more or less an excuse to get audiences into that last sequence. Adding some more emotional depth could have put this film over the top into one of the better entries in its sub genre.

What Dutch Marich has done with so very little shows he's capable of crafting a very good, maybe even great horror film. That he seems to have been doing this in rural Nevada, with very little help is genuinely impressive. If you're willing to forgive some of the rough edges that comes along with ultra low budget filmmaking, this is worth checking out, even if it's just for the closing sequence. Marich should be proud of what he's achieved here.

You can catch Horror in the High Desert on Amazon Prime right now.