Horror in the High Desert Is Scariest When Its Not Trying To Scare You

Publish date: 2024-10-10

The Big Picture

I’m a horror fanatic, but I’m also a nervous viewer. I love watching horror films and I'll finish them, but I will still be absolutely petrified. An area of the genre that I feel the most comfortable exploring is found footage. I’ll watch just about any found footage film and through my extensive watching, I’ve observed a certain formula. With films such as Unfriended, Paranormal Activity, or Lake Mungo, there are little to no visual frights throughout the film — until the very end. Don’t get me wrong, the rest of the film can still be terrifying, but there are no gory or disturbing visuals until the final moments or towards the end at least. Laura Barne’s vicious demon is the last thing we see in Unfriended; same goes for Katie in Paranormal. And the big scare that Lake Mungo builds towards finally happens within the film’s final ten minutes. That’s what I love about these films. They rely mainly on tension and buildup to scare the audience. No cheap jumpscares or buckets of fake blood — just the intimation that something awful could happen at any minute is enough to make some horror lovers (including me) hide their eyes with their fingers. It’s a powerful cinematic tool, and no film uses it better than Horror in the High Desert.

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Your Mind Is Scarier Than Any Horror Movie

I remember one of my film lecturers in college saying to our class that you are doing yourself a bigger disservice by looking away when watching a horror film because what you’re imagining could happen is worse than what is actually in the film. I never agreed with this as I’ve seen some truly disturbing visuals from horror movies that my brain could never conjure up. However, I found this idea to be proven right whilst watching Horror in the High Desert for the first time. When I say found footage films rely on tension, High Desert is that times a thousand. I’ve never seen a film that relies on it so much to scare. Out of the 82-minute runtime, I’d say there is a total of 20 seconds that contains a disturbing visual.

What Happened to Gary Hinge?

The documentary-style film tells the story of the disappearance of hiking enthusiast, Gary Hinge, in the Great Basin Desert in Nevada. The film is comprised of interviews with four people: Gary’s sister, Beverly; the private investigator she hired during the case; Gary’s roommate, Simon; and a journalist. These are interspersed with videos of Gary documenting his many excursions hiking out in the wilderness. We know from the get-go that Gary has gone missing, and it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that he didn’t slip or hit his head. He’s been met with foul play, so you spend the first 90% of the film trying to figure out what could have happened to him while you hear the four interviewees recount their experiences with the case.

The Less Horror, the More Terror

High Desert is the closest film to sitting around the campfire, being told scary stories the old-fashion way: by mouth. A lot of the film is just someone telling you a story as they look into a camera. You don’t see any blood or gore, no opulent, spooky mansions, or intricately-designed aliens or monsters. At the heart of this film is just a very unsettling story. As the film progresses, the case becomes more bizarre. Gary’s car is recovered with bare footprints that don’t belong to him. And then, the big reveal. Gary’s video blog, which the audience has seen clips from throughout the film, was kept hidden from his closest family and friends, despite it having 50,000 followers.

The big clue to what happened to Gary has finally been found. It turns out that Gary stumbled upon a cabin that gave him a palpable sense of impending doom and dread. He ran out of there as quickly as he could and he tells his followers this in a video from the safety of his own home. Even though we’re told that the video is just Gary sitting at his desk recounting this story, the film cleverly hides the video from the audience, leaving them with an even stronger sense of dread. We’re only shown the one screenshot that has been kept from Gary’s video, and even though it’s just a young man at his desk, the fact that we can’t see the whole makes us feel like the video is more sinister than what it appears to be. Horror by omission.

After Gary’s video was released, his viewers turned on him, accusing him of lying and encouraging him to return, to prove that this haunted cabin does exist. In his next video (and his last), we see a clearly terrified and disturbed Gary vowing to go back to the cabin, this time with a camera and a gun. When a couple out camping finds Gary’s backpack purposefully placed outside their tent, they hand it in to the police. In it, they find Gary’s camera with a memory card that contains footage of Gary’s final night at the cabin and presumably, his final moments.

'Horror in the High Desert's Most Effective Tool Is Buildup

Before I get into the grand reveal, I want to commend the film in how effective a job it has done to build up fear and tension up to this point. The pacing is slow and excruciating, it never offers a quick answer or an easy explanation. Every twist in the case is dragged out as the explanation is passed around four different people. What this results in is an absolute state of anticipation and fear by the time the footage of Gary’s final moments roll around. It was at this point that I had become so overwhelmingly scared that I actually couldn’t watch the final footage. I tried for the first minute or so, but it was so painstakingly tense, I couldn't handle it. So, I disconnected my phone from the TV, read up what happened on Wikipedia (I know, I’m a bad movie lover), and then decided I could handle the rest of the movie on the comfort of a smaller screen. So I watched, again, through my fingers, on my phone and… it ended up not being as horrific as I expected it to be.

What Happens at the End of 'Horror in the High Desert'

Gary’s final footage puts the audience right into the dark, open wilderness. Think The Blair Witch Project night scenes combined with the night vision scene in The Silence of the Lambs. Gary is behind the camera, it’s dark, and we can barely make out what’s in front of him by infrared light. I knew that it would probably be a disfigured human-like monster from the bare feet clue. It turns out to be a yes, disfigured man, but from the blurry footage, he ends up looking more like Scarecrow from Harley Quinn. The prosthetics are pretty dreadful and his body is just like any other human. I was expecting a wild, mutilated human-tiger hybrid that could run at high speed and rip anyone’s throat out with its razor-sharp teeth. And then I realized, I was expecting the Mama monster from Barbarian. The words of my college professor came rushing back. I had indeed, imagined something far worse than what ended up being in the film.

The fact that the movie gave me no indication of what was to come made my mind run loose, formulating an ending based on other, scarier (but not better) horror films. I was expecting the monster to jump on Gary, making the video roll into an oh-so-perfect angle documenting Gary’s attack. But no, with one final (and obligatory) jump scare, the disfigured man pops out of the corner but the video freezes on his blurry face. And that’s it. A lot of horror fans would surely be disappointed by the lack of bloody spectacle. I personally hate the idea people have that the quality of a horror film is based solely on how much it scares the audience. I, for one, think what High Desert did here is a stroke of genius. It spends so much time slowly building up to this grand finale, leaving the audience with so much time to formulate their own ending, that they actually end up being more afraid by what they created in their own heads.

It’s a beautiful reminder of the limitless possibilities of horror. To scare people isn’t just to present them with a disturbing image. It’s giving them the nudge to make their minds run wild.

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