Banshee Chapter (2013)

directed by Blair Erickson

USA

87 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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"Can we go already? It's 2:45 in the morning and my eyes are bleeding."

I decided on Banshee Chapter for my Halloween night watch this year because having just seen The Thing in a theater got me in the mood for another movie that involves unknown entities puppeting human beings around. This movie has been an old favorite of mine since it came out, and it's one of very few movies that I've seen a multitude of times and have yet to get tired of - I might be mostly used to the scares at this point, but I still enjoy them.

Banshee Chapter is upfront about its basis in reality: from the outset the movie purports to be an exploration of what really went on during the U.S. government's MK-Ultra mind control experiments. Watching this in November of 2025, I unfortunately found the government's involvement to be the weakest part of the movie, to the point where it almost killed my immersion - maybe in 10 years, if we somehow have a semi-sane government, it'll be scary again, but right now, the government is openly doing things that are arguably far worse and much more materially detrimental than non-consensually summoning Outer Ones into the bodies of its citizens. That aside, though, if we can get past the concept that it's the government doing these experiments, the backbone of Banshee Chapter is scary as hell.

One of the highlights of the film is the video of protagonist Ann (Katia Winter)'s friend just before he (or his body, at least) went missing. We'll discuss the movie's quasi-found-footage style in a moment, but this part is shot as genuine found-footage. In the midst of research for his novel about MK-Ultra, James (Michael McMillan) gets his hands on a sample of the drug that was used in the original experiments and ingests it himself, with a friend filming the whole thing. This sequence of the movie is creepy from start to finish, but the thing that really bothers me about it is that it makes it very clear that the drug doesn't solely effect the person who ingests it. When it kicks in, James's radio starts picking up weird signals that his friend who's filming him can hear - as in, the drug summons something to the general vicinity, not just into James's mind. This right here is the really terrifying part of Banshee Chapter. If you take a drug and it makes beings from another plane notice you and come possess your body, then whatever, sounds like a you problem. But if you take a drug and it makes beings from another plane come and haunt your entire house and everybody else who happens to be in it, instead of just restricting itself to you, that's a little more serious.

As I just mentioned, the filming style is sort of a mix of found-footage and otherwise, and the camerawork has a kind of loose, handheld style that isn't quite Cloverfield-level shakycam but also feels like it could easily just be somebody accompanying Ann with a camcorder. You do keep expecting her to turn to whoever's holding the camera and make remarks about the film, but it never happens. The result is that we feel like we're seeing everything unfold in real-time, even though there are the normal cuts and time-skips between scenes that we expect from a typical narrative film.

Most of the scares in this movie are jump scares. I never thought I'd be in the position of having to defend jump scares, because for the most part I'm of the opinion that a lot of horror movies don't know how to use them properly, but in this case Banshee Chapter happens to be really adept at knowing exactly how much of its horror to show (and when) to create a sense of consistent unease that lingers even when the disturbing imagery is not on-screen. It's a really brilliant move for a low-budget horror movie, too: show a few cumulative seconds of the creepiest shit you've ever seen and spend the rest of the movie having people trip out of their minds and talk about horrifying things. That being said, though, one of the scariest scenes in the whole movie is actually not a jump scare: when Ann is in the abandoned experimental facility and sees something shambling down the hallway towards her, my god, that was freaky. We don't see enough of it to make it out - all we can see is the outline of something that's stretching out its human costume like a tall man trying to wear a too-small shirt.

As effectively scary as this movie is, it feels like it's destined to forever be one of those things that doesn't really get a lot of mainstream recognition and mostly relies on word-of-mouth to be seen at all. Every so often I hear people talk about it, and the tone is always mild surprise: usually something like "Hey, have you heard of this thing? I went into it blind and it's, like, really creepy". It's not a perfect movie, and I think I might be starting to see more plot holes now that I've seen it so many times, but it remains distinctly unsettling in a way that a lot of horror movies fail to be.