The Forbidden Files (1989)

directed by Jean-Teddy Filippe
France
95 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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The Forbidden Files can be taken either as a whole movie or as a series of short segments, which is the way it was initially presented when it was first aired on an Australian television channel. It is often cited as one of the earliest examples of found-footage horror, and not only is it one of the earliest but also one of the best. In fact I'd go so far as to say it could be the best found-footage film I've seen thus far, and among the most effective (if not the outright greatest) horror films of any format.

It uses the clandestine "footage recovered after the death/disappearance of its subject/s" format that's still common to see in horror today, but it does several things that modern found-footage movies tend to neglect, most prominently the attention given to the backstory on each segment. Although they range in length from around four and a half minutes to over thirteen, each one of them gets an established background and atmosphere. All of the situations depicted are disparate and relatively unusual for horror; things like a man adrift in a small boat for over forty days, a commune of Russian men who were given enhanced abilities but then forgotten about after the Cold War, and several instances where the focus is on some impossibility arising (quite literally) from the sea. The establishment of a solid background contributes to how effective the horror is overall- in modern found-footage there's basically only a handful of scenarios to choose from: "couple on vacation", or "teen filming a documentary", or "teens breaking and entering", and it's only around the fringes when movies distance themselves from these stereotypical plots that things tend to get interesting.

The other reason it all works so well is because it's so subtle that you can barely tell there's any hype. Again, this is something modern FF horror gets wrong: It's all rife with scare chords and swells of dissonant strings, and while that does prime a person for something to jump out at them, it gives away too much. In The Forbidden Files, if you look really closely, you'll see that it's all hype- the narration constantly tells you to look closely, and informs you of the extraordinary circumstances depicted in the film- but you only notice it if you're deliberately looking for it. To a casual viewer it comes off clinical and drab, which makes the appearance of the unfathomable all the more startling.

And really, the unfathomable is the only subject this movie deals in. It doesn't posit that the occurrences within the segments are paranormal or just normal in nature, and in fact it doesn't posit anything at all. It shows us these bizarre situations and leaves the cause, the after-effects, and the underlying mechanics of it to the viewer's imagination. This is the first rule of horror: The monster you don't see is always scarier than the monster you do.

I'm a bit conflicted about how to view this in keeping with the rule I try to follow about not letting the scariness of a horror film dictate my perception of its quality, because in this case its success in creating an eerie atmosphere is directly tied to how good it is. That it has the intelligence to know when and how to absolutely terrify a viewer without the use of obvious tricks is what makes it such a formidable watch. Each of the segments is roughly the same in terms of quality, but if you're pressed for time I'd recommend The Witch, The Shipwreck, and The Ferguson Case, the last of which is genuinely one of the most frightening things I've ever seen regardless of length or genre.