Found-footage freaks will want to put Creature of the Pines on their watchlist immediately. Playing this year’s Panic Fest, the film, co-written and co-directed by Tyler Transue and Chris Ruppert, makes camping scary again. It’s easy to draw comparisons to The Blair Witch, but that’s simply reductive. Creature of the Pines uses its 1999 predecessor as a stepping stone, leaping into something far more interesting and, quite frankly, terrifying. There’s just something about the woods that the creative team utilizes that drives nails into your fingertips and makes you actually frightened that the crunch of leaves and sticks you hear comes from a real-life monster.
Footage cuts between the past and the present. Pine Hollow carries particularly creepy folklore. There have been countless disappearances in the area, evidenced by numerous recovered videotapes and memory cards. The film presents batches of footage to impress upon the audience the high stakes of the situation. In the present, cops pick up a young man walking deliriously on a back road, unaware of his surroundings and seemingly in a trance. An officer drags him down to the police station, where he’s interrogated for hours as they try to unravel the disappearance of his friends.
Once the film sets the stage, it delivers the meat of the story. A documentary crew heads out to the woods to uncover the truth of Pine Hollow and what could be lurking in the shadows. The darkness that falls releases an evil so dark and twisted that no one could possibly survive. The group seems like your typical mythbusters on a mission to prove or disprove the belief that something wicked wanders the woods. There has to be something to the rash of disappearances over the years, right? RIGHT? One by one, the group comes face-to-face with a human-creature hybrid that stalks and slaughters for the hell of it. Bodies will hit the floor, that’s for sure.
Transue and Ruppert create a found-footage film so incredibly masterful and tension-filled that the audience just might sleep with all the lights on. There’s an honesty to the production that feels both grounded and otherworldly. The way the woods are lit and shot makes for some of the most unnerving experiences of most contemporary found footage stories. The co-writers and co-directors rely on crafting scares that douse your eyeballs in pure evil. It’s as though you’ve opened your eyes in a pool of needles. Several moments lean into what you don’t see, or show the creature only in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it images. The real terror comes from the human mind, and Transue and Ruppert give you permission to dream up whatever you like. And that’s far scarier.
Creature of the Pines pushes the gas pedal and never lets up. It ventures so far into the subconscious that you can’t possibly find your way out again. That’s the mark of a great found footage film—to let the viewer fill in the cracks of the lore and what’s barely out of frame. You don’t get much better than this.
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