At the end of the last century, “The Blair Witch Project” popularized the notion of idiots in horror movies filming every second of their own imminent demise. A deliberately unpolished subgenre was born: found-footage horror, cheap to make (with some higher-budget exceptions, “Cloverfield” among them), profitable in a flash.
The latest of these is “The Gallows,” shot for a buck-eighty-three in Fresno, Calif., by the writers-directors Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff. Picked up by “Paranormal Activity” and “Insidious” producer Jason Blum and distributed by Warner Brothers, this minimally clever addition to the existing pile of scares, fright and videotape doesn’t seem likely to become a “Paranormal Activity”-type phenomenon. Then again, neither did “Paranormal Activity.”
Lofing and Cluff have a couple of sound ideas in their favor. “The Gallows” is set mainly inside a Nebraska high school, in and around a cavernous auditorium after hours, in the dark. There’s something innately scary about the locale — the hopes and dreams of the stage colliding with the supernatural. The story concerns a fatally ill-advised revival of a play. Anyone who has endured an especially bad stage revival or two over the years may go into “The Gallows” screaming, as I did. Eighty minutes later I came out shrugging, but time and the opening weekend will tell how the target audience responds.
The movie begins as most found-footage horror movies begin: with found footage that has become forensic evidence. It’s 1993, in nondescript Beatrice, Neb. We’re watching camcorder tape of opening night of a play called “The Gallows,” which appears to be a gory variation on the thees-and-thous realm of “The Crucible.” The stage is dominated by a scaffold and a noose. “They did a great job on the gallows!” a voice behind the camera says.
