A version of this review first appeared on a (sadly now defunct!) website called Horrified Magazine, which I used to write for. To save the text from oblivion, I’m reposting it here.
Found footage horror movies are, to put it bluntly, a mixed bag. They’re cheap to make, but the financial returns can be astronomical, which means there’s been an awful lot of them.
As early as 2011, the Guardian’s Philip French was rolling his eyes at “that moribund branch of the genre, the ‘found footage’ picture.” A year later, The Devil Inside made a hundred times its budget, despite having only a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “The scariest thing about ‘The Devil Inside’,” wrote Manohla Dargis for the New York Times, “is that a major studio like Paramount Pictures… may be able to squeeze more profit out of a tedious, tediously exhausted sub-genre.”
But when it’s good – and it sometimes is good – found footage can be irresistible. I’m firmly on the side of Luiz H. C., who made a passionate case for the technique at Bloody Disgusting: “I’m willing to wade through a sea of low-effort found-footage cash-grabs,” he wrote, “just to find those rare gems that prove all you really need to make a movie is a camera and an idea.”
Which brings us nicely to The Borderlands (2013) – or Final Prayer, as it was called in the US. Among connoisseurs, it has a reputation for being terrifying; even veteran critic Mark Kermode wasn’t immune to its horrific final act. “In the last fifteen minutes,” he said, “I started to think, ‘Blimey, this is really getting to me, this is really getting under my skin. I actually think I may have to leave the cinema.’ At the same time, I thought, ‘What a horrible feeling but what a wonderful feeling. How great to have a movie that’s genuinely creeping me out…’”
The premise is a fertile breeding ground for terror. After hearing reports of “miracles”, a Vatican team descends on a rundown Devon church to investigate. The inspectors are Brother Deacon, a dour Scotsman; Father Mark, a pompous Irishman; and Gray, the agnostic English cameraman. As you might expect from this trio of nationalities, there are laughs along the way, but the film’s punchline is far from funny. Earlier, I put the word “miracles” in quotes because I would’ve sent for an exorcist (and possibly a clean pair of pants) before I gave the miracle squad a ring, and Father Mark has a wonderful line to the same effect: “If you can tell me which one of the awful events we’ve witnessed constitutes a ‘miracle’,” he says dryly, “I’ll be sure to inform my undersecretary.”
The film is a brilliant example of how found footage can work and what it looks like when it does, but the makers knew it had a toxic reputation. “It was one of the few things that was part of the brief initially,” said producer Jennifer Handorf, in an interview with Electric Sheep, “and when the film was finished, the sub-genre had become so passé that the distributor was begging us to distance ourselves from it in any way possible.” Wisely, the script pre-empts a common complaint against found footage, which is the nagging question of why anyone would be filming a particular scene. In a cold opening, Deacon exposes a fraudulent “miracle” at a church in Belém, Brazil. When he gets to Devon, Gray is wearing a headcam and makes him do the same. Apparently, during a review of the previous case, there were “massive gaps in the timeline”, so they’ve been ordered to film absolutely everything. Later, Father Mark blames Deacon for what was evidently a fiasco in Brazil: “[He] likes to edit the story to make himself less culpable.” As a result, they spend the whole film wearing their headcams, to try to avoid another murky debacle.
This means we get to watch a number of unremarkable character-building moments that no one would choose to film, without stretching credulity. Deacon (played by Gordon Kennedy) and Gray (played by Robin Hill) have a fine rapport as the film’s “odd couple”, and the headcams show this in the round. “Rob [Hill] and I just got on, right from the off,” said Kennedy, speaking to Filmuforia. “The first 20 minutes could be dull exposition, but we worked on making the characters believable.” Film journalist Matt Glasby has observed that, “for the most part, it’s the interplay between these two lively, lived-in characters that holds the interest.”
But The Borderlands is also a horror film, so let’s discuss the horror. In an early fright, a gang of youths burn a sheep alive in the grounds of the team’s cottage. To begin with, we don’t know what’s happening, so the audio is truly alarming. Immediately after, we cut to Father Crellick – the local priest who’s been cheerleading the “miracles” – praying alone in the church. The shadows and ambient sound are frankly terrifying, and it’s no small relief when we cut back to the cottage.
One of my favourite sequences comes at the halfway mark when Gray fills the church with analogue radios. The resulting set piece has elements of the British TV classic Ghostwatch, and it’s a superb horror sequence, setting a tone that darkens as the film progresses. The finale itself is one of the great moments of British horror, and arguably an all-time highlight of the found footage genre. Deacon asks his mentor, Father Calvino, to conduct an exorcism in the church. “All that remains,” Calvino says optimistically, “is the finishing ritual” – and from there… it all goes horrifically pear-shaped.
As I said earlier, by the time they finished making The Borderlands, the filmmaking team knew that found footage had a poor reputation. Handorf even asked friends and fans why they hated the sub-genre. “A lot of the time we just got back: ‘Everything, why would you bother? It’s a dead (sub) genre.’” But the resulting film demonstrates incredibly effectively why one would bother. It combines likeable characters and genuine scares with a truly horrifying dénouement. The same story could have been shot as a traditional feature, but it’s hard to imagine it having the same visceral impact or creeping sense of dread. More than a decade later, I still recommend it extremely highly – provided you have the nerve to sit through it!
About the author
My name is Ellis. When I’m not reviewing movies, I write short stories about ghosts.
21st Century British Horror 
Great write up. This film preyed on my mind for a long time after seeing it. I still don’t think I’m quite over it.
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