Lovecraftian horror isn’t usually synonymous with found footage, nor is it terribly gory. It may be gross, but not antichrist-level blood, if you know what I mean. The nature of the subgenre technique makes the possibility of cosmic horror preposterous. How do you film the indescribable, the unthinkable and the unfilmable? Robbie Banfitch’s work of almost unique horror lovemaking manages to do just that. If you ever wanted to know what an hour of Event Horizon’s blood orgy sequence would look like, The Outwaters is the answer. Brought together in three separate memory cards; it shows what hell looks like and what it would do to the minds of those trapped there.
It’s neither pretty nor appetizing, but for those fans of found imagery, it might be the answer to the tired tropes. It’s a mind trip of interlocking horrors that mess with the mind throughout disorienting playtime. The Outwaters is the kind of movie where you look around to see if anyone else knows what to do when it’s over. On first viewing, it is as confusing to the viewer as the unfortunate souls we see descend into hell. That begs the question. What did we just watch and what really happened in The Outwaters? Here’s everything you need to know.
A group of four people, including Robbie (Banfitch doing triple duty), Ange (Angela Basolis), Michelle (Michelle May), and Scott (Scott Schamell), hike to a remote part of the desert to shoot a music video for Michelle. to take. They planned to camp for a few days and then return home for assembly. They are hopeful and have a comfortable chemistry that reads like time-tested. Our unfortunate will be given a generous amount of run time to establish who they are. It makes the back half of the movie, when things move really damn fast, that much more impressive. The last half of The Outwaters is a chaotic nightscape of confusing imagery, horrific violence and self-mutilation that has to be seen to be believed. It’s literally hell.
It’s presented as found footage, so the typical device that had it all in their heads doesn’t work. In a recent interview with writer/director Robbie Banfitch, he alludes to the fact that everything we see happened in one way or another, but that even the filming equipment may have changed because of where they were and what happened. Supposedly, the horrible place they were in changes perception, time, and matter.
What happened to the four people in the desert could be interpreted in many ways if this wasn’t a found footage film. The shooting angle means that everything we’re viewing is actual footage shot during their time in the desert. It is not for interpretation or discussion. We see what actually happened and was captured on camera and stored on memory cards. The emergency number actually happened. Things like they all took something they shouldn’t or they were exposed to a toxin and hallucinated everything can’t be the explanation.
This once-optimistic group somehow stumbled onto hallowed ground, and the devil or Gaia drove them mad, pursued them and killed them or made them commit suicide. This explanation is the most obvious, but requires the added element of a time loop to make it work. Small details that are hardly registered on the first viewing support this theory.
People could have fallen into this hell forever. That’s why no bodies are ever found and why the gas mask and downed street sign take on such a strange focus in the film’s final act. That was to help us orient ourselves to the fact that this is not the same place in time or place. It looks the same, but it is constantly catching up with itself and has probably been making victims for a long time. Depending on who you think wields the axe, it could be a previous victim of the place, a demon, or Robbie himself from a later time loop, like in Christopher Smith’s time-winding Triangle. Banfitch uses the red water and the physics-defying starry sky to interpret Robbie’s journey through time. If he’d had enough opportunity, he might have found his way home. We will never know.
Robbie’s mom, the plane and blasts into the desert in The Outwaters
So many of the film’s terrifying details remain unexplained. Are the explosions the group hears tearing one world apart into another? Since Robbie sees his own group walking before all hell breaks loose later in the film, we know that time has already begun, the group is already doomed. Capturing Robbie’s former self on camera makes it clear that time is not linear here. Space seems to so distort their perception that it’s hard to tell where a messy mind desperately clinging to rationality begins and manipulation ends. Robbie’s heartbreaking scene with his mother and the poignant glimpse of his plane ride hint that this loop may have started long before the group was even in the desert. Maybe it started before his plane trip. Perhaps the earthquakes seen multiple times during the early parts of The Outwaters opened up something that should have remained buried.
Who is the man with the axe?
After what happened to our group, one of the most essential questions is who is the man in silhouette with the axe? We know Robbie gets hit in the head in the early moments of their nightmare and says his head is raining. He could have meant that it rang or that the blood from a head wound and trauma confused him. The Robbie then in existence could not have hit himself on the head with an axe, but a later version could. We know that he picks up the ax at one point, and the ax man stands over Robbie as he kneels on the floor, begging him to leave.
We never see anything other than bloody, abnormal-looking legs, so it could be anything from a demon to a later version of himself driven mad by his ordeal. In any case, this ax man attacked his friends and presumably killed them. Robbie catches up to each of them at different points in his ordeal, but by the end he is the only one left. It was never made clear who killed the other three and mounted their heads on poles. It could be another version of Robbie driven insane by being stuck in this loop or another person in a similar predicament. It could also be a demon from hell having fun.
It hardly matters who wields the axe, as this mesmerizing, dizzying, nauseating space is to be avoided at all costs. Robbie captures images of his early self and his group several times throughout the film, and it’s only after he collapses completely that we record what he actually saw. This is a looping hell of no escape. Similar to The Endless, only deadlier, this is an inherently bad place.
Banfitch, who wrote, directed and starred in The Outwaters, out today, has created a fresh take on the found footage subgenre. The narratively loose, surreal experiment proves that indy horror is the future of horror. Whether it’s the childhood fears of Skinamarink, or the female identity fears in Huesara The Bone Woman, something exciting is happening in horror today led by these micro-budget pioneers who aren’t afraid to take risks.
It’s hard to describe The Outwaters without warning viewers. This is not the Blair Witch Project. This is not a slow burn either. It’s fifty minutes of character setup, followed by almost an hour of pure mayhem and gonzo gore. Never before has a movie confused me so much on first viewing. However, later watches provide more clarity. The Outwaters hits theaters today and will stream on Screambox later this year. Watch it on the big screen first to really appreciate this stunning experience.
As editor-in-chief of Signal Horizon, I enjoy watching and writing about genre entertainment. I grew up on old fashioned slashers, but my real passion is television and all weird and ambiguous stuff. My work can be found here and Travel Weird, where I am the editor-in-chief.
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