What makes a film scary? Is it how dread is used to instill a mood and pull the viewer in, regardless of the story? Or perhaps it is the story itself, and being able to identify with compelling characters in a terrifying situation. It could also be the idea that’s implanted in your mind that makes you repeat over and over: “This could happen to me,” or “It’s only a movie.”
Horrormovies, and effective ones, don’t exactly run on a specific formula. But realism and realistic characters always help. Which is how the subgenre of horror called found footage and its offshoot, the mockumentaries, seem to always hit close to home. There are a handful of them that don’t exactly aim for a serious tone, and in those cases, the effect may be less permanent.
But almost always,mockumentaries do a very good jobof making the audience feel that what they’re watching is true, could happen to them, and, best of all, proves that horror may be more real than viewers thought.
Straight from Australia,Lake Mungoshocked American audiences in 2009, during the peak of the found footage craze. After premiering at some festivals, Lionsgate picked it up and showed the film at the After Dark Horrorfest, which brought indie horror to the mainstream.
Viewers were instantly enamored with the film, which added a powerful dramatic twist to the overused formula of horror movies that all resembled one another and didn’t provide anything beyond a simple scare. This one did. And after a decade,Lake Mungois still as alive as ever, with its deep-natured exploration of tragedy, the passage of time, and how trauma was eerily associated with the death of one Alice Palmer.
Undeniably one of the scariest film experiences in modern cinema,Lake Mungo,is often taken as afound footage flickthat terrified audiences back in the day, and still has that same power. Here’s why the film is one of the scariest mockumentaries ever made — if notthescariest.
The following article contains major spoilers for Lake Mungo
What is Lake Mungo About?
Lake Mungois profiled as a documentary being made about the Palmers, an Australian family who recently lost their daughter and sister, 16-year old Alice Palmer, while she was swimming at a dam in Ararat. At first her body is nowhere to be found, but after the search intensifies, whatever’s left of her is extracted from the murky waters. Her father, Russell, is the only one who can identify her.
Grief strikes the family. Alice’s brother Mathew seems especially afflicted by the tragedy, and it doesn’t help that he seems to catch images of Alice’s ghost in photographs he shoots inside the house. A psychic by the name of Ray Kemeney is consulted, and he has no explanation for Alice’sghost showing up in pictures, and videosas well.
But when Mathew shows up in some other videos taken by strangers, it’s revealed that all of Alice’s videos and photos were actually tampered with. He just wanted to convince his parents that they needed to exhume Alice’s body so that June, their mother, could convince herself Alice was really dead.
Related:10 Lesser-Known Found Footage Horror Movies That Need More Love
The thing is, one of the videos also shows a man looking for something in Alice’s room. It’s revealed that the image belongs to Brett, a neighbor of the Palmers whose family Alice worked for as a babysitter. Brett refuses to go on camera after June discovers a video in Alice’s bedroom, where she, Brett, and his wife are having sex. June digs deeper, and finally Ray admits that Alice met with him before her death. She was very troubled, and in hypnosis sessions, she saw her mother and her own dead body.
Alice’s boyfriend also speaks in the mockumentary, and gives the Palmers a video where Alice seemed very distressed while on a school trip. In the video, she is shown to be burying something below a tree, and this was the same night she lost her phone. The Palmers head over to Lake Mungo and search for the tree. Below it is a plastic bag, and Alice’s phone contains a video that’s very much related to her death. In that video, audiences experiencedone of the best-planned jump scares in cinema history.
Why is Lake Mungo So Scary?
The reason whyLake Mungois still as scary as it was years ago is very ironic. Here’s a film that’s admittedly a horror movie — marketed as such, sold as such, and seen as such. But in reality, there’s not much horror content in it. Yet, without a single drop of blood, it manages to be unsettling like no other.
An unsettling and disturbing horror film is always much more effective than a gorefest, because when you lie awake at night, it’s probable that gore isn’t the precursor to your nightmares. But it’s very likely thatthe image of Alice’s ghost will be.
Lake Mungocleverly throws around unnerving images of Alice’s ghost, and director Joel Anderson does anything but overexpose what’s already a creepy concept. He prefers to keep Alice blurred, in the dark, and doubtful. We know she has some matters to solve (isn’t that why ghosts show up?).
But more than that, the audience’s concerns and her family’s questions permeate the air in a film that feels extremely dense and dark. At some point, people tookLake Mungoas a happy-ending film, but is it really? The movie is certainly a fantastic exploration of death and grief, though it’s always been mistaken for a cheap found footage film with not so many creepy images.
Fortunately, audiences loved it back then and still do. It’sone of the highest-rated found footage filmsof all time, and it’s no coincidence that its cult status has massively grown throughout the years. Yes, a huge part of its popularity is because of the scare factor, which was exceptionally well-paced throughout the ghost film, which made the risky decision to be about something else.
Alice’s ghostly image is only the introduction. Her dead and bloated doppelganger raises the stakes and changes the viewer’s perception of what’s essentially a film about the mystery of death and how it gets observed by the craft of a documentary feature. Yes, a fake one, but it’s still an effective one.
A Great Horror Mockumentary That Plays Like Solid Found Footage
Certainlyone of the best Australian horror filmsever made,Lake Mungoplays like a nice case study of crafting horror through a very different medium than the formulaic jumpy vehicle that audiences are used to. Director Anderson designs a film that doesn’t go for the usual structure, because he doesn’t need to. It’s sad and filled with dread, but not the dread that comes from huge set pieces and artsy production design. Like other found footage films, it’s all about the realism that’s implied by what you can see and what the camera doesn’t manage to catch.
The Palmers are victims of something they can’t understand. And while Alice is not the helpful ghost that assists her family in trying to solve the riddle of her death, she manages to have one great contact with her mother that translates to death being inevitable, and in the case of Alice, it just came too soon. Did Alice know? Of course, and she did her best to comprehend something as irrational as dying at a young age because of an accident that she could have easily prevented.
Related:Best Found Footage Horror Movies of the 2000s, Ranked
Lake Mungoisn’t exactlyan influential mockumentarythat people regard as one of the best ever made. In fact, it’s looked down on when compiling films of this special genre, because it’s undoubtedly a horror film above everything. Nevertheless, horror is a universe of different crafts.
Director Anderson steps out of the comfort zone of indie horror filmmakers that readapt something they’ve always loved. He makes a very scary film that focuses on a grieving family who take that brave step towards exploring what surely can’t be explained, as they realize Alice will always be with them.
This year,Australia had one of its best filmsin recent times.Talk to Meblew audiences' minds with a solid ghosts and ghouls story that felt familiar in format but was cleverly done by talented young filmmakers who materialized their best ideas into a commercial product. But if you want to see something entirely different, with a scare factor that preys upon the audience from its very first frame, tryLake Mungo, the scariest mockumentary ever made.
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Considering how importantLake Mungo’s jump scare is, here’s a video about other movies that are all jump scares:
