In Our Blood: Found Footage Horror Worth Finding

Emily Wyland should leave family reunions to the Waltons and awkward family documentaries to Sarah Polley. Instead, she drags her camera guy down to record her homecoming in Las Cruces, New Mexico with her former (hopefully) junky mother Sam. Unfortunately, they quickly suspect some sinister horror movie business is afoot, preying on the meth gangs and illegal aliens whose deaths wouldn’t be reported. It is not a great advertisement for Las Cruces tourism but the techniques of found footage horror are unusually well-executed in Pedro Kos’s In Our Blood, which opens today in theaters.

It had been years since Wyland last saw her mother. Their attempt at Thanksgiving dinner is not exactly a success either. However, Sam volunteers to make a long, cryptic “confession” on-camera. She certainly seems to feel guilty about something. Wyland hopes to extract more specifics the next day, when they arrange to visit the homeless shelter where her mom volunteers, but her mother no-shows. There are also no signs of her at home.

As they investigate her disappearance, Wyland and her creeped out cameraman Danny Martinez start to suspect it involves the local biker drug-gang, several of her aging hipster artist colony friends, and paranoid schizophrenic client of the homeless shelter.

Before long, they are deep in the trust-no-one horror-conspiracy weeds. It is definitely bad, but somehow Kos and screenwriter Mallory Westfall will probably manage to surprise a lot of experienced genre fans when they finally reveal the wizard behind the curtain.

The found footage conceit also really, really works for this film. Maybe there are a few times when you just have to accept that Wyland was also shooting footage, but that is relatively easy to look past, compared to the cheating you can see in most of its less ambitious sub-genre brethren.

Frankly, based on In Our Blood, Kos should stop working on documentaries and focus on horror. Of course, it helps that he has a real cast to work with, unlike most Z-grade found footage movies. Brittany O’Grady (from The Consultant) is highly credible as the angsty daughter. Likewise, E.J. Bonilla (from The Long Road Home) is refreshingly easy to relate to as Martinez. For extra added realism, several real-life clients of the Las Cruces multi-purpose social services center play minor supporting roles as characters presumably based on themselves.

This is an unusually tense found footage film, even before Kos and Westfall confirm the nature of the horror. The is also a vivid and tactile grunginess to the film that distinguishes it from the pack. Highly recommended for found footage fans, In Our Blood opens today (10/24) in theaters, including the AMC Kips Bay in New York.