Found Footage: Silver Plume
A story of OSINT, horror and high school.
Behind me in my temporary makeshift garage-office, the door flew open, blasting me half out of my chair.
“Can I open it?!” Clare, my wife and partner in crime, gasped at me, holding a large box in her arms.
“Jesus christie on a gluten-free cracker!” I exclaimed, white-knuckling the arms of my rolly-chair.
“Sorry, sorry, but can I open it? I think it’s the VCR!” Clare beamed over the box.
Now you see, this box was shipped from Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and was packed by a human instead of hydraulically dry humped off an Amazon warehouse shelf. It was special, and its payload even more so.
“Yes, of course!” I exhaled back, still waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal.
And like that, Clare was gone, disappearing into our living room with a giggle.
Found Footage
In recent months, I have begun building ‘Clareflix’, a home media server that compiles Clare’s favourite movies, music, and television shows from the 1980s to the present day, though arguably that great content dwindles over time. It involves a lot of eBay hunting, DVD ripping and manual file organization. We love it.
At the same time, as somewhat detailed in An OSINT Lesson in Grief, Kennedy asked if I could digitize VHS tapes, something her family hoped to use for a funeral slideshow and to simply have in their collection. While I did not have the equipment on hand, I had it all browser-bookmarked and eagerly offered to purchase it. Clare had discovered some old VHS tapes herself, and she wanted to get them digitized for her family.
The justifications for purchase were unveiling themselves like a horror film protagonist around every corner.
I, too, had more selfish reasons for the VCR purchase. You see, it was a relatively recent discovery for me that there are oodles of boxes of VHS tapes just simply rolling around eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. Tapes whose contents are often unknown.
The thought of real found footage both excited and frightened me. While I would guess that many of the tapes for sale would contain anything from commercials to nothing at all, you don’t know if there’s buried treasure under the ground until you dig, right? The same goes for VHS, in my opinion.
Plus, what if you pop in some old unlabelled tape and some real Sinister shit starts happening?
In my opinion, Sinister is a landmark found footage horror1, but you can’t utter the phrase ‘found footage’ without discussing the 1999 film, The Blair Witch Project. While Blair Witch is technically not the first found footage film, it definitely set the genre fully alight.
I remember going to it with my friend, Laura, at the Lloydminster, Alberta movie theatre and being scared absolutely shitless by it. But the movie was nothing like the terror of the drive home to our family acreage, miles from the nearest town.
We rattled along through a layer of thick, dusty darkness that only a rural backroad can furnish, the high beams of my mom’s four-door, cherry-red Ford Tempo casting a glow that was never quite enough for me. Even the slightest rise and fall in the road or bend around a heavily treed corner would have me nose-to-the-steering-wheel, slowing to a crawl. Only to hammer the gas again when the road would straighten out, lest I spend too much time out there in that darkness and She gets me. Whoever She was, since you never do see any monster, witch, or otherwise in the Blair Witch Project.
Looking back on it, found footage wasn’t just asking me to suspend disbelief like a regular horror movie. It was blending up my reality, my rural roots and a fictional film into a mental frenzy that was new, frightening and foreign to me.
I won’t tell a lie, I was shook that summer night in 1999.
But found footage means different things to everyone. For some people, it was the Blair Witch lore from the movie’s website that creeped them out the most; the movie was just the cherry on top. I, for one, didn’t even know the movie had a website until years later. Yet, I was just as scared by the same piece of art as everyone else that night.
Context is important. And it is the context upon which the footage is found, and the folklore or history that goes with it, that frames the experience. It’s the context that makes ‘found footage’ something fun and celebratory, like a high school volleyball game (in Clare’s case) or something terrifying like the Blair Witch.
Or something in between. Something more… unnerving.
And that’s where we turn next.
St. John The Evangelist 1999
You may recall my previous jaunt through the exorcist archives of Father Trabold, and how tracing relationships, communications, and records can be incredibly fruitful during investigations. Civil, criminal or paranormal, baby. We got you covered.
One of the very fruits of my Trabold research was a video titled, “St. John the Evangelist 1999 Reunion_Ghost film.MP4”, which the St. Bonaventure—where Trabold taught and resided—archivists had helpfully provided to me.
I was nervous. I don’t particularly like watching things when I have no idea what their contents might contain, but I also really like it at the same time. You can see my conundrum.
I hit play.
The video spins and jerks, the sound whirrs from unintelligible to its proper speed until it focuses on a church.
It’s here that the found footage feeling begins for me. I don’t like blurry, shaky-camera, and I get really unnerved by slow-dragging audio. It reminds me of when people used to play records backwards in the 1980s and 1990s to chase the subliminal or Satanic. While I never heard the Dark Lord issue any instructions through Skinny Puppy, my body wholeheartedly rejects the sound and feeling of music playing in reverse. I have no idea why, but my whole being knows something is wrong, and it wants it to stop now. The beginning of this footage makes me feel the same way.
The video cuts from the exterior of the church to a gathering of folks. Silver-haired, friendly-faced folks are carrying around styrofoam cups of coffee, laughing and greeting one another. It appears to be 1999, and they are having a 50-year high school reunion in a town and place I haven’t yet identified.
Then the tape cuts from the larger gathering to a man sitting alone on a couch who explains, well, what I was about to see on the rest of the tape:
Jim, obviously, last time you saw me, I didn’t have a moustache. But I wanted to get on the film here and explain to you what we’re doing here. I made a dub of our class reunion, and uh, it’s on the front of this tape.
Now, following this will be a dub of my brother’s ghost tape, now I gotta explain it to you…
The unidentified man goes on to describe how, around 1989, his brother was selling property in Silver Plume, Colorado and had been taking video of the area when he captured a ghost smoking a pipe in an antique store.
By this time, my nose was an inch from my screen, and my hands were sweating. The video continued with cuts to the same footage where the camera operator is zooming into the local antique store, allegedly, in Silver Plume.
I didn’t see anything. It felt like one of those 3D sailboat images that I could never squint just right to see.
Then the audio started dragging, and the tape cut to an exterior shot of a home, along with what appeared to be features of the home. Then the audio starts again. Classical music?
…Canon in D?
This is where my throat started closing up, and my ears started ringing. The video continued, with what was the eeriest real estate report I’ve witnessed to date. Scene after scene, with wobbly classical music, we get shots of the property that is up for sale, and some local attractions.
Really look at these photos.
Click on them. Go ahead, zoom in. I can’t spot the ghost that the man is referencing in the introduction. I can’t see anything paranormal, no matter how many times I look.
But everything feels wrong.
The reunion. The ghost tape. The Pachelbel. The low-quality feel of the recording, from a time when things were truly analog and not an After Effects plugin. The fact that this tape was sent to an exorcist in New York, and I’m here now, decades later, watching it from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I mean, just, all of it.
Just look at that slightly ajar pantry door in the kitchen photo. Really look at it.
Empty tables. Empty rooms. Empty streets. An empty antique store allegedly haunted by a ghost.
Therein lies the horror for me, perhaps. In that liminal space where I am expecting something really bad to happen, to shatter the stillness of nothingness. To jumpscare me out of my chair like an eager partner bear-hugging a Betamax from Weyburn.
To deliver tension relief, like any good horror director knows how to execute perfectly.
Yet, when that endorphin release never comes… you’re just left with… nothing.
But I haven’t seen anything, so what release is really needed?
I don’t like this tape.
I can’t tell you why.
I am sure some purists would say it’s not found footage but rather includes found footage as part of the movie’s plot devices. Whatever, dude, that’s just like…you’re opinion…man.