Scary found-footage movies can and do get better than this enthusiastic DIY horror from married-couple directors Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti. Their zero-budget feature is fun for a while, but in the end it’s just not scary enough. There is nothing to make jump out of your skin or frighten you out of your senses. Kempt and Toti also star in the film, playing fictional versions of themselves: Rachel and Nick, horror-obsessed film-makers living in Kirksville, Missouri. Things go wrong after they buy a house on the cheap to shoot a haunted house movie. (Which sounds unrealistic, but you can actually buy a fixer-upper in Kirksville for less than $30,000)
The idea is that we are watching behind the scenes documentary footage shot by Nick, who provides a forlorn voiceover: “I wish I never filmed any of it.” At first, the new house seems the perfect setting for a horror movie: there’s some satanic graffiti inside, a door that looks as though someone has taken an axe to it, even some creepy little portraits of stern-faced Victorians. The pair’s easygoing, self-satirising banter is good fun as Rachel considers the ways in which their haunted house might actually kill them: “We are literally inhaling rat faeces!”
It’s all fairly entertaining until the scary stuff starts happening. As if the movie were coated in Gore-Tex, the frights simply don’t permeate the surface. After Nick films Rachel and her best friend Christian holding a seance in the house, a disturbing image appears on a wall. Strangers in hoodies start gathering outside in the dead of night, standing motionless and staring in. The longer it goes on, the more obvious it becomes that this isn’t going anywhere particularly interesting, and time drags as it gets there.
• It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This is in UK cinemas from 22 October.
