Man Finds Tape: Found Footage in Texas

In Larkin, Texas, social life largely revolves around the church and the barbecue roadhouse. It is about as red as the meat proprietor Winston Boon serves up, but this film still invites sympathy for the community. Something sinister has been secretly preying on the town for years. A brother and sister struggle to expose the bizarre truth in Paul Gandersman & Peter S. Hall’s Man Finds Tape, which releases this Friday in theaters and on-demand.

Believe it or not, the director-screenwriters breathe new life into the found footage subgenre, precisely by embracing its limitations. Lucas Page is a notorious paranormal influencer, who built a massive following with the mysterious videos of his childhood an unknown someone reportedly delivered to him. The first allegedly depicts a shadowy figure standing over him while he innocently slept. Ominously, it clearly was not his parents.

Page would later admit he faked the subsequent tapes in hopes of drawing out the mysterious party. Consequently, his sister Lynn is skeptical when Lucas video-calls, asking her to watch more of his dubious footage. However, when he passes out mid-call, she reluctantly returns to Larkin, out of concern.

Having left town as a teenager, after the untimely deaths of their parents, Ms. Page seems immune to whatever plagues the locals. Clearly, it is not just her brother. Her former bestie (and Lucas’s on-again-off-again girlfriend) Wendy Parker willing goes on-the-record and on-camera to discusses her experiences. Boon also sits for a few interviews, but he is far less willing to face the creepy phenomenon. However, a strange outsider (conveniently referred to as “The Stranger”) obviously understands what is happening, but he clearly has not come to Larkin with altruistic motives.

Man Finds Tape works so well because it uses our disbelief against us, jujitsu-like. As the primary narrating voice, Lynn Page constantly expresses skepticism. Essentially, she even invites the audience to compare her ostensive film to presumed hoaxes, like the Patterson-Gimlin Big Foot tape. The horror itself is also initially hard to define. While it inspires fear and paranoia, it also takes on subtly Lovecraftian overtones.

Gandersman and Hall create a potent atmosphere of dread, which steadily escalates. Even though Rev. Endicott Carr is unambiguously implicated in the uncanny skullduggery afoot, Man Finds Tape still feels highly sympathetic to its small Texas setting.

Man Finds Tape also represents one of the rare “found footage” films that serves up terrific performances. Kelsey Pribilski and William Magnuson truly dig into some fraught family history and thorny sibling dynamics as the Pages. Likewise, Nell Kessler surprisingly humanizes Parker, elevating her far above a mere “friend” role. Plus, genre fans will appreciate seeing Graham Skipper getting profoundly freaked out as Boon.

As a genre, found footage often gets a bad rap, because so many of its movies look and feel interchangeable. That is not the case with Man Finds Tape. It really is its own film. It just happens to also be found footage. Highly recommended for horror fans, Man Finds Tape opens this Friday (12/5) at the Lower Manhattan Drafthouse.