Using a found-footage approach is a pretty good strategy for taking shots at our social media obsessed culture. It is certainly not a reach to believe that some entitled “influencer,” who only cares about likes and follows, would make sure a camera is pointed at them no matter the circumstances. Even if their life could be in danger. The found-footage horror movie Followers is a fitting combination of story and style. It takes a handful of image and status focused college students, sticks them in a haunted house and looks on as they make bad decisions in the name of fame. It is entertaining, even if it only succeeds part of the time.
As horror, Followers is almost entirely a miss. It isn’t scary. The jump-scares are obvious, there is hardly any tension and the twists are too unbelievable to be effective. Haunted house movies can sometimes get by based solely on creating a creepy location. This is just a basic rooming house. There is no real sense of space, as the characters simply wander between two or three largely empty rooms, while hearing weird noises. There is nothing ominous about it. The production doesn’t use lighting or sound to startle its audience either. It is exclusively jump-scares or the occasional vague ghost-sighting. There are a few strong visuals, especially near the conclusion, but nothing that will stand out for genre fans.
As a sort of social satire, mocking millennials and the quest for social-media popularity, it hits a fair amount of the time. This is a case where making its main characters a collection of ignorant, oblivious, wannabe-celebrity clichés works in the story’s favor. They are a group of strangers, living together to save money, who see dollar signs when they begin to suspect that their house is haunted. Predictably, they proceed to make every wrong decision they possibly could. That actually makes sense here, because they are all shallow enough that it is easy to buy that they would intentionally attempt to antagonize whatever spirit is residing there, merely to get extra clicks. Their self-absorption fits the story and genre.
This is amusing, at least for the first half. When Followers is establishing its characters, their relationships and the situation they find themselves in, it is kind of funny to watch as they insult each other and post silly ghost reaction videos to the internet. The character types are familiar and well-chosen, with personalities designed to collide with one another in dramatic (as well as mildly comedic) fashion. Then, as it gets closer to the end, it leans too heavily toward horror and loses much of what made it entertaining in the first place.
Found-footage for horror movies tends to be more miss than hit these days. However, Followers, when it is at its best, shows that some stories are genuinely improved by it, particularly when it is being used to mock our modern desire to get everything on camera. It doesn’t really click as horror, so things fall apart a bit by the end. Still, it uses its conventions decently enough that you can see what could have been if it had been cleverer in its second half, instead of relying on weak scares.
—Ben Pivoz