Defiantly modern and collage-like, Dutch Marich’s found-footage series looks into the darkness of Nevada’s wilderness and refuses to blink
Much like the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland, the barren plains and disused railway yards of North Nevada have accrued their own aura of extremely bad vibes throughout the Horror in the High Desert films. Begun as an early-Covid lockdown experiment by indie filmmaker Dutch Marich, the first installment popped up on Tubi without much fanfare in 2021, but it quickly grew a cult fanbase that latched on to the film’s irresistible new urban legend. Taking the form of the kind of amateur true-crime documentary you might stumble across on, well, Tubi, the film unspools the fictional story of outdoorsman Gary Hinge (played by affable unknown Eric Mencis), who went missing in 2017 while on an excursion into the Nevada plains. But that’s just the starting point for an ongoing saga of abject terror that, two sequels on, has ascended to the top ranks of contemporary found footage and become a worthy spiritual successor to The Blair Witch Project.
Nowadays, it’s harder than ever to make a found-footage horror feature that effectively captures the attention of an audience that’s inundated with often shocking examples of the real thing 24/7 on social media feeds. Too many of the numerous titles that come out each year fail to really engage with the subgenre’s distinctive aesthetic and instead view it as little more than a budget-conscious way to make a traditional horror movie. The first Horror in the High Desert, on the other hand, is a defiantly modern and collage-like cinematic investigation. Gary is a YouTuber who shoots videos of his expeditions for his wilderness survival channel, and his footage is combined in the film with talking head interviews from friends, loved ones, investigators, and reporters involved in his case. The film proffers an account that feels unexpectedly veritable. And with Covid mandates at the time of shooting meaning that no two actors ever share the screen, a relatable sense of online isolation permeates the proceedings.
Most importantly, Horror in the High Desert is also just really fucking scary. The first film delivers a climax that will have you squinting through your hands no matter how well acquainted your eyeballs are with found-footage frights. As the recovered video from Eric’s final night in the desert is revealed, the film plunges into an intense stretch of sustained nocturnal fear, refreshingly free of the usual sudden-loud-noise-fueled jump scares. Marich’s camera refuses to blink, peering into the darkness for an agonizing amount of time as Eric desperately attempts to track down the source of some faint blood-curdling echoes heard in the distance. While we may only get a brief glimpse of the threat in the end, it lingers in the mind for the number of tantalizing questions it poses.
Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva (2023) doesn’t offer up much in the way of definitive answers. Instead, it pivots to present two new incidents: the mysterious death of the eponymous Minerva Sound (Solveig Helene), a student newly transplanted to the area, and the disappearance of young mother Ameliana Brasher (Brooke Bradshaw), both of which occurred along the same stretch of remote Nevada highway. As clues emerge that suggest a link to the prior vanishing of Gary Hinge, the overall mystery deepens and expands. Then, in the third installment, Firewatch (2024), we follow intrepid YouTuber Oscar Mendoza (Marco Antonio Parra) as he attempts to retrace Gary’s steps on that fateful night. Gradually, we too begin to feel pulled into the desire, no matter how terrifying, to journey out into the Nevada desert and simply confront whatever’s lurking there once and for all.
Regardless, the way that the Horror in the High Desert films engulf us in their intrinsically spooky environments certainly makes us feel as if we’re there already. Hailing from the Nevada region himself, Marich, who had already experimented with shooting the area for his previous feature Reaptown (2020), knows that simply wandering around the seemingly endless terrain in the dark for grueling, extended periods of time is enough to generate some serious dread. The fact that Marich and his bare-bones crew would venture out to these remote spots to film while not completely aware of what they might encounter themselves also adds a nervy fourth-wall-breaking aspect.
The second and third installments of Horror in the High Desert up the ante on the bone-chilling finale of the first by featuring protracted nighttime explorations of abandoned railway buildings and, in one particularly claustrophobic sequence, a winding cave. Marich continues to show incredible restraint in these sequences, guiding us into a state of seized fear in which anticipation is everything. Instead of lazily jumping out and shrieking “Boo!”, the monsters of Horror in the High Desert take root in the depths of our imagination through the sheer will of Marich’s lo-fi audiovisual immersion. When the concrete-thick tension finally does break, it’s akin to the end of an amusement park ride — one that you want to immediately jump back on to try and determine where the fear was even coming from.
But it might be Horror in the High Desert’s strong emotional core that ultimately holds the entire series together, placing it alongside heart-rending classics of the genre like Lake Mungo. Throughout the series, Marich displays a deep empathy for anyone who feels like an outsider in the world. Gary, Minerva, and Oscar all deal with unique internal struggles that place them at a remove from the surrounding community, one that exhibits varying degrees of prejudice and bigotry towards them. Gary, for instance, faces the wrath of online bullies who see his findings as nothing but a far-fetched story concocted by someone seeking attention. This only drives him further into his obsessions, determined to prove his naysayers wrong, while Minerva and Oscar similarly look deeper into the abyss than others who aren’t already living on the fringes might.
With both a fourth and fifth entry in the series already in production, clearly there’s a much larger web that Marich is gingerly and diabolically spinning. Only time will tell whether we’ll eventually get any definitive revelations as to what exactly is prowling the Nevada desert throughout these tales. And if we don’t, it’s probably for the best. Common horror knowledge states that things are scarier the less seen they are, a fact that The Blair Witch Project understood and exploited perfectly. Likewise, Marich has already suggested enough unsettling ideas in the Horror in the High Desert films to keep our nightmares well-fueled until he uncovers the next small piece of this terrifying puzzle for anyone brave enough to take a peek.
Watch Horror in the High Desert and Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva on Tubi
Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch is available on Amazon Prime
Find the complete October Horror 2024 series here:
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