Over 1600 people have gone mysteriously missing in our national forests and a group of friends, while filming an amateur survival web series, encounter the thing that’s responsible.

As someone who recently got into camping, She Walks The Woods is enough to keep me out of the wilds for quite a while. The horror of watching people being slaughtered in a situation that you could easily be in is no doubt unsettling, and She Walks The Woods plays into this notion very well. Writers/directors John Crockett and Brian McCulley worked with a cast comprised of newcomers, a metal musician, and podcasters in order to create a movie that ends up showing the folly of man thinking he has mastered nature — if you are a fan of found footage or B movie camp it’s a good romp in the woods.

Four friends — Dennis (Jason Potter), Hope (Vivienne Edridge), and brothers Brad (Scotty Bohnen) and Mike (Danny Bohnen) — venture out into a national park with a goal to film another episode for their web-series, Ultimate Survival. The show’s purpose is to build survival skills, so they decide to rough it in Hope’s family cabin which has no running water, electricity, and of course no cellphone reception. The group drives deep into the backwoods to begin filming, and after setting up cameras around the property, the crew begins capturing their camping adventure, including setting traps, roasting hot dogs, and sharing intimate moments. Their weekend is interrupted by an animalistic scream that prompts them to go in search of the sound, thinking that it is a mountain lion that they can scare off. Instead, the friends find that the animal is much more ravenous than a mountain lion, and supernatural too.

These fools brought a whistle and cameras to a fight for survival? Though there were sometimes discrepancies in the logic of characters’ actions, the classic horror films that She Walks The Woods pays homage to makes this movie a play by play of genre tropes and found footage. Similar to The Blair Witch in casting and premise with a memorable moment dedicated to I know What You Did Last Summer, the final moments of She Walks The Woods are so scary that I wanted to look away but I simply could not. Holding back visually while utilizing unsettling sounds like the gurgling last breaths of a gruesome death or the terrible screeching of the creature were effective uses of sound to establish fear and force my eyes to watch, however, I believe it would have been a better ending if they had continued leading with sound and not have shown the monster. Though the monster’s practical makeup was okay, its use detracted from the raw aesthetic that the rest of the movie was done in which had allowed my own imaginations for a monster to go wild, up to then.

She Walks The Woods is a fine addition to the found footage genre, but there are some definite missteps. It is a campfire horror that uses folklore, the antics of very immature bros, commitment to POV camera-style, and great sound mixing in order to create an authentic found footage experience. It’s no “Blair Witch” as the acting and performance choices were sometimes off-putting, but their chemistry of camaraderie is good enough that their joyous adventure together being abruptly halted by a killer creature adds sadness to the movie. There is not as much suspense from impending doom because the film sticks a prelude onto the front of the movie, which unfortunately gives a mini version of the film with hunters in place of the four unsuspecting millennials. Since the audience knows what is going to happen, fear is taken away from us, but besides these faults, She Walks The Woods makes for a fun found footage watch, especially in the last 20 minutes when shit gets real.

Much of what makes good found footage is the filler — the dialogue and banter that makes the movie seem real as the story unfolds towards the inevitable deadly end. She Walks The Woods could have been great, but its questionable acting and dead giveaway prelude take away all too necessary fear and tension; you have to sit through a lot of immature filler when you already know what is going to happen from the prelude. Its use of tropes and premises from other classics would attract found-horror genre fans and B-movie appreciators, but may not satisfy audiences looking for the intensity and measured pacing of those same classics. Unleashed upon audiences this past October, She Walks The Woods is available on Amazon via Prime, rent, or own.