Every exhausted cliche of the found-footage horror genre is paraded in this depressingly bad film: the screaming and running while miraculously keeping the important stuff in shot, the sudden cut to blackness and silence held for some seconds – with supernatural static bursts of audio fizz – even the female lead doing an eyeliner-smudged sobbing monologue to camera. Found footage often gives us good, unpretentious, naturalistic performances: but the acting here is just terrible. A smalltown US high school is putting on a play called The Gallows as a kind of community catharsis exercise, because 20 years earlier a terrible accident took place when this very same play was being performed: a student was hanged on stage, in front of the horrified audience. (There is, admittedly, a nice pastiche of 90s analogue home video showing this gruesome event, complete with milky indistinct definition and date/time stamp.) Now a football jock has taken the leading role, to the derision of his teammates – a sort of High School Musical tribal loyalty crisis – who sneak on to the stage at night, carrying a digital video camera, in an attempt to trash the set. But the ghost of the dead boy is still there. The fundamental premise is strained, and the supposedly scary stuff is nasty and dumb without being chilling.
