Horror in the High Desert (2021)

directed by Dutch Marich

USA

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

So this movie was made during the pandemic, but if you didn't otherwise know that, you wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, because I don't want this to be tagged as a Pandemic Movie for the rest of time. But the format of it is such that nobody needed to be within six feet or even the same room as each other - it's set up like a focus piece, not a "pure" found-footage film; nobody claims to have recovered and pieced together the footage a la Blair Witch Project or anything like that, instead it's edited together, with background music and dialogue cards like a longform local interest news story. Everyone does a great job acting like non-actors, and even the newscaster who's on screen for about thirty seconds really nails the "newscaster" tone, which is surprisingly difficult. All in all, everything about this is believable because it hits the right emotional notes only when it needs to and avoids hyperbole entirely. It's not afraid to be totally flat and uninteresting in the spots where a real documentary would be, and as a result the payoff is all the more potent.

The story follows a man in his 30s who disappeared in the Nevada desert and the bizarre events that he recorded in his video journals leading up to his disappearance. The people interviewed are his sister, a news reporter, the missing person's roommate, and a fourth guy who, forgive me, I don't remember how he was involved. Again, everyone seems genuine and there is no extraneous material in this film whatsoever - we briefly find out about the relationship between the missing guy and his sister as well as the relationship between him and his roommate, but at no point does it ever feel talky or like we're being teased for stuff that will be important later on. In fact, the faux-documentary format allows Horror in the High Desert to not force us to eke out meaning from small hints at all. The film can tell us about how the sister held a little resentment for her brother when she was forced to raise him after their parents died while they were both young, in an incident that he indirectly caused, and it does nothing apart from provide us with background on him. In a film with a traditional narrative, this episode from his past would be his motivation, and we'd see how it influenced the way he reacted to events. Here, all it does is make him feel like an actual person who we might meet in real life.

I was also extremely fond of the missing hiker's video journals, because they don't make him out to be a self-absorbed vlogger or a savvy survivalist-type. He is entirely just a guy who's passionate about the wilderness and enjoys sharing his genuine love for hiking with an audience, who, from the sound of it, he admires and appreciates instead of just flaunting his life like a consumable product to followers that only exist as a number. It's established that he's not even really that good of an outdoorsman. He just does it because he loves it. In the end I was left liking him immensely and feeling a lot of empathy for everyone involved.

I've mentioned a few times that I generally am not moved by horror films that aren't supernatural in nature anymore; it's not that I don't like them or that I think they're all bad or I have any real moral or ethical problem with them, I just very rarely manage to get engaged with slashers or other horror films with a human antagonist. It is a me problem. Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, this movie is one of the rare ones that hit that perfect spot where it doesn't matter if the horror is paranormal or human, because the way it's shown to us is so deeply unsettling that there's an inherent aura of almost supernatural danger to it anyway. Halloween is the ur-example of this: Michael Myers is a person, but there is such a mythos built up around him and he's so enigmatic that he feels more like a creature than a human. This is relevant to Horror in the High Desert, I promise. There is ultimately nothing truly ghostly going on here, but it just feels like something is so, so not right.

Much like the way it lays out the background of its subject's life, but doesn't use those details for anything more than creating depth, this film also divests itself of context in its terrifying final 20 minutes, giving us no more knowledge than the unfortunate missing hiker would have had. With my usual disclaimer in place about how sheer scare factor isn't the best thing to judge a horror movie on, I have to admit that I really did not want to look at the screen during a lot of the final moments of this film. A good horror movie doesn't have to be scary, but for a movie as bare-bones as this where 90% of it is just boring and uneventful discussion of a missing person, followed by the most intense and nerve-wracking 20 minutes I've seen in a long time, to be able to create scariness within such a mundane atmosphere is an obvious sign of talent.