A group of friends sneak into an abandoned prison with the intention of making a ghost hunting video, until they start to go missing one by one.

Low budget features are really hard to make. I mean, REALLY hard. And managing to pull it off and create a complete work with a micro-budget is a feat in and of itself. But there are a lot of them out there, and for first-time indie filmmakers, it is imperative to observe the competition in the rest of the pond, to see what has been done and what hasn’t, and without any kind of originality, your film will go completely unnoticed and all that work under a low budget will be for nothing. 

Unfortunately, Against The Night will likely suffer the same fate. Have you seen a found footage movie? Have you ever listened to Nickelback? Then this is exactly what this movie is like. 

In this shockingly generic film, an unlikeable, wealthy hipster dude named Hank (Luke Persiani) manages to convince several of his unlikeable friends with both persuasion and money (he must have been in a frat one time) to film a ghost-hunting video with him in a stunningly fascinating old abandoned prison that is hardly made use of. As they wade through the confines with a night vision camera, these unlikeable buddies are beginning to be killed off, one by one, and of course everyone points fingers. Who could POSSIBLY be behind the murders in a haunted prison?

The characters are as indistinguishable as a long line of straight, white fuckboys that are flipped through unceremoniously on Tinder. With the amount of cliches and archetypes assigned to each person, it might as well mimic the self-aware, self-mocking identities from Cabin in the Woods, one of which being the obligatory lesbian couple where we, the audience, are treated to some hot girl-on-girl action that is standardly included in the Heterosexual Male Horror Film Director Package™ (available in theaters near you). The suspense is mediocre at best, with jump scares that are more akin to the flasher skit from Monty Python, and watching each character being killed off is more of a relief than anything: 3 down, 6 more to go before it finally comes to an end. 

I mention the lack of observation of its competition not only as an indie film, but more specifically as a found footage film. Since the success of The Blair Witch Project (which I didn’t care for much, but I appreciate sincerely for shaking up the horror genre), the boom of found footage films soared, from the Paranormal Activity series, to REC/Quarantine films, to Cloverfield. 

And these are all from a decade ago. Any films in this genre are practically anachronistic at this point; the horror film industry has beat the dead horse of found footage films until it stopped coughing up money, and it’s time to move on.