Savageland (2015)

directed by Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, David Whelan

USA

81 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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To kick off October, I decided to rewatch something that became one of my favorite horror movies immediately after I saw it for the first time. Despite the love I have for it, I only ever managed to see it once until now, because it was hard to find for several years after its release, even though it was decently popular at the time. I still feel the love I had for it the first time around, but I did see something about it that bothered me, which I will address in this review. That being said, I do still feel comfortable calling this a five-star film.

The story Savageland tells is of a very small fictional town on the U.S.-Mexico border called Sangre de Cristo, where in a single night all 57 of its inhabitants were slaughtered by an unknown force, save one migrant worker living just outside town who escaped the bloodbath. This might not technically be a found-footage movie, since its presentation is mostly as a collection of interviews and graphics explaining the events, but the most crucial parts of the film (the interview with the survivor, Francisco Salazar, and his photographs) are literally footage that was found, so I suppose you can call it that. Salazar is quickly blamed for every single thing that happened in the town that night, despite the fact that it would be physically impossible for one person to commit every murder and in as brutal a fashion as we're told it happened. He describes uncanny, unnatural things; people dying and then coming back to life as inhuman creatures. But all evidence pointing to his innocence is deliberately dismissed in favor of the convenient explanation that someone who the police want to paint as a violent criminal is indeed behind everything.

Racism is one hundred percent the core of this film. It is unapologetic about the way it depicts the attitude of southwestern white Americans towards the perceived plague of "illegals" moving up out of Mexico. Salazar only gave a single interview, which was not widely disseminated, if at all, during his trial, and we're told he became catatonic from trauma afterwards. So all of the inferences given by the white interviewees about his motives, his physical abilities, his psychological profile, the minutiae of what supposedly happened that night - all of this is invented, the projection of a terrified white populace on a brown face who they see as their enemy.

Savageland is no simple racial allegory. It is also the story of an event which, isolated from all context, is one of the most deeply unsettling things I've seen in a horror film. A clearer, less biased picture of what Salazar went through on the night of the killings unfolds throughout the film, aided by maps of the route he took as well as his own photographs of the event. You can tell that the people who made this film must have had a completely fleshed-out scenario in their heads, and a lot of detail and planning went into making this feel like a real recounting of something that happened in a real place. The film itself was obviously made on the cheap - I'm pretty sure stock photos were used for a lot of the pictures of the victims and other instances where a name and face was needed but not a live actor. But at least they had the money to buy the stock photos without the watermark. And when it's important, like the pictures of Salazar as a child, you can also tell that they do actually use childhood pictures of the actors. The rough edges fit with this as an unpolished, "the truth must be told"-type documentary, and really it's the concept that matters here, not the aesthetic.

To me, absolutely the most integral part of this movie is Salazar's photographs. They made a deep impression on me the first time I watched this and I never forgot them. I'm not sure I can explain why they affected me so much. During the night, Salazar had a camera with him as he ran through Sangre de Cristo, with which he got 36 shots that, combined with his single interview, show what was really happening while he was supposedly on a murderous rampage. We are told early on that he was a photographer, and not just a casual one but someone with a dedication and a focus on the odd and macabre; pictures of roadkill frequently come up and we're given an anecdote where he apparently took a picture of a sandwich a friend dropped on the ground. This is important to establish because we know that he already had an eye for strangeness, and it gives us more of an idea why he might have held his camera so close during such an unbelievable experience. The white-majority media of course tries to turn this against him as well, saying that entirely normal photos he took of the daughter of a family he was close to were somehow evidence that he was a pervert, even though the pictures are totally innocent.

So, the photos. We as viewers know they are obviously photoshopped, but it doesn't matter. They have this surreal, hallucinatory quality to them. You know that joke about how pictures of Bigfoot aren't blurry, it's just Bigfoot itself looks like that? That's the feeling I get looking at Salazar's photographs. I feel like if I were witnessing what was depicted in them, all the motion blur and artifacts from the film would be there in real life. Like there's something so awful in them that the eye can't choose any one thing to focus on. They show people bent into forms that leave humanity behind and begin to shift into something demonic. Glowing eyes, teeth like shards of glass, distorted expressions, grasping arms tearing people apart. Every single photo in itself is some of the best horror artwork I've ever seen. There are no cliches here, just a singular expression of complete terror that I've really never seen achieved.

I'm very emphatic that this is not a zombie movie. Salazar tells us that the things in his photographs are people he knew who were dead but walking. But the bits of context we glean through forensic reports and Salazar's interview and photographs point to something that, I feel, goes far beyond what a zombie outbreak has ever been depicted as on film. One of the interviewees keeps saying that something "moved through" Sangre de Cristo - I particularly like that as a description of what happened, because it puts in mind this force that came over a whole town, something otherworldly, that drove them all to cause such chaos. I realize that this may come off as a little corny but I think about the Bible passage where Jesus casts a demon into a herd of pigs and they run themselves off a cliff. That's what this felt like. Just evil in a way that horror film doesn't usually show it. "Something primal and horrible" is how it's described. "It was like hell". Even Salazar didn't witness the full scope of the pandemonium, but we learn from forensics that whatever the non-affected townspeople were seeing was so horrible that some of them chose to jump off a water tower rather than endure any more of it.

Now... I didn't see this the first time I watched the film, and I don't even want to talk about it because, selfishly, I don't want anything to put a damper on one of the best and scariest horror films I've ever seen. The exact cause of the town tearing itself apart is never elaborated upon, but there are hints, in the form of further reports of unexplained, supernatural violence spreading "north" as well as a border patrol agent saying that he sees increasingly strange things, that imply that the source of the phenomenon is indeed somewhere in the south. I think at one point they even try to imply that some of the wounds on the undead bodies may come from having ripped themselves apart scaling the border wall. I really just hate this in a childish and petulant way. I don't want this to ultimately be a story about dark forces from the evil, mystical country to our south overtaking red-blooded American life. With all it has to say about racism and how viciously, unflinchingly real its depictions of racist media and police are, I don't want the end message to be "but something evil came up out of Mexico anyway". I would love to hear the filmmaker's intent here because I'm left wondering and it is unpleasant.

But just the story of that one night in Sangre de Cristo, the documentary evidence, the sheer ghastliness of it, that on its own is one of the most unique and horrific scenarios behind a horror film that I've yet seen. The soundtrack by :zoviet*france: does wonders for it. The acting all feels authentic as well; the spirit of everyone who is interviewed being just regular people is captured perfectly. I hate that I now have qualifications when I call this an incredibly good movie but that's just how it is. I would still recommend this to anybody who likes horror, but I would recommend knowing that there's questionable things about it too.