Dis­cov­er the film that helped kick­start the found footage phenomenon

We know from the begin­ning how a filmed expe­di­tion into New Jersey’s remote Pine Bar­rens in search of the leg­endary Jer­sey Dev­il will end, because it has already end­ed. On the night of 15 Decem­ber, 1995, cable TV host Ste­fan Avkast (Ste­fan Ava­l­os) went miss­ing while doing a loca­tion broad­cast, leav­ing behind only his hat and a lot of his blood splat­tered near­by, while the copses of his bru­tal­ly mur­dered co-host Locus Wheel­er (Lance Weil­er) and their sound man Rein Clackin (Rein Clab­bers) were lat­er found scat­tered in pieces not far from the campsite.

Only their guest and guide, the magician/​clairvoyant Jim Suerd (Jim Seward), appears to have walked out of the for­est unscathed and con­fused, claim­ing to have no idea what hap­pened to the rest of the crew. After police found an item of cloth­ing in Suerd’s home splashed with traces of blood from all three of his col­leagues, the reclu­sive psy­chic was arrest­ed, tried, and sen­tenced to life impris­on­ment for Wheel­er and Clackin’s mur­ders, only to die in his cell under ques­tion­able circumstances.

Now film­mak­er David Leigh (David Beard) is mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary on the inci­dent, try­ing to uncov­er answers to the ques­tions, ​“why would a man com­mit such mur­ders… what real­ly hap­pened that night, and is Jim Suerd tru­ly respon­si­ble?” By the end of Weil­er and Ava­l­os’ sophis­ti­cat­ed hor­ror mock­u­men­tary The Last Broad­cast, the last two of those ques­tions will have been answered in an unequiv­o­cal – if unex­pect­ed – way, while the first will remain a mystery.

“The fol­low­ing peo­ple are not actors,” reads text near the begin­ning of The Last Broad­cast. It is a state­ment that comes with lay­ers. On the one hand, it is vari­ant on the ​‘based on a true sto­ry’ claim made at the begin­ning of many hor­ror films: an authen­ti­cat­ing asser­tion of veridi­cal­i­ty, even if in fact it already forms a part of the film’s fiction.

On the oth­er hand, it is a true state­ment, if per­haps not quite in the way that view­ers might imag­ine. Most of the cast mem­bers here are gen­uine non-pro­fes­sion­als, appear­ing in this film for their first and only on-screen role. Accord­ing­ly, much as Avkast and Wheeler’s gonzo show is called Fact or Fic­tion, and inves­ti­gates the para­nor­mal, both Ava­l­os and Weiler’s own fea­ture and Leigh’s doc­u­men­tary with­in it set the view­er sort­ing fact from fic­tion, and real­i­ty from its framed, medi­at­ed and manip­u­lat­ed presentation.

This quest for truth unfolds not just with­in the film’s dif­fract­ed nar­ra­tive, as an event is exam­ined and reex­am­ined through not always reli­able evi­dence and new­ly emerg­ing video­tapes, but also at a for­mal lev­el, as The Last Broad­cast insists upon its own sta­tus as a doc­u­men­tary, and adopts all the tropes (talk­ing head inter­views, police tapes, to-cam­era com­men­tary, archival footage, news­pa­per head­lines, etc) of that genre, while in fact being a work of fic­tion. Even a cur­so­ry look at the cast list will reveal that the per­form­ers here are not play­ing them­selves, but near name­sakes, in a tan­ta­lis­ing approx­i­ma­tion of actuality.

Leigh’s dogged pur­suit of this for­got­ten case, and his deter­mi­na­tion to reveal the truth behind it, will turn out to be an ancient, Oedi­pal impulse, updat­ed to a tech­no­log­i­cal world. The Last Broad­cast takes place not just at the ever-shift­ing bound­ary between fact and fic­tion, but also at a strange inter­sec­tion between the pri­mor­dial and the postmodern.

Ava­l­os and Weiler’s film and Daniel Myrick and Eduar­do Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project both fea­tured a doomed expe­di­tion, all cap­tured on portable cam­eras, into the deep, dark woods, and both helped kick­start a ​‘found footage’ hor­ror move­ment that would explode in the mid 2000s. Yet despite their over­lap­ping pro­duc­tions (The Blair Witch Project was released a year after The Last Broad­cast, but con­ceived before it), these two films were made in com­plete inde­pen­dence and iso­la­tion from each oth­er, and their sim­i­lar­i­ties are not the result of theft or influ­ence, but rather a coin­ci­den­tal response to some­thing buzzing in the air­waves of the Zeitgeist.

Both these hor­ror mock­u­men­taries emerged at a time when nascent tech­nolo­gies were com­ing into their own. The Blair Witch Project was famous­ly one of the first films to pro­mote itself with a high­ly suc­cess­ful online viral cam­paign. Mean­while, not only does The Last Broad­cast pur­port to show Fact or Fiction’s field record­ings from the world’s first live simul­cast of a pro­gramme both online and on cable, but The Last Broad­cast itself was the first ever fea­ture shot and edit­ed entire­ly on con­sumer-lev­el dig­i­tal equipment.

“These were mur­ders of a high-tech age,” as Leigh says in his voiceover, fea­tur­ing ​“chil­dren of a dig­i­tal age” who use the lat­est tech at their dis­pos­al to get the truth out there, and who are addict­ed to the inti­ma­cy and anonymi­ty of Inter­net Relay Chat. All these tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions offer an oppor­tu­ni­ty to tell ancient sto­ries in new ways.

The sec­ond half of Ava­l­os and Weiler’s film (and Leigh’s doc­u­men­tary) hinges on the last miss­ing video shot by Wheel­er and Clackin before their deaths – video which had, like Akvast, van­ished, but which has mys­te­ri­ous­ly been deliv­ered in a box on Leigh’s doorstep, in dam­aged strips. Leigh hires ​“mag­net­ic media recov­ery expert” Michelle Monarch (Michele Pulas­ki) to go through the painstak­ing process of retriev­ing what­ev­er secrets this found footage might hold, per­haps cast­ing new light on a very cold case, or even iden­ti­fy­ing a killer.

Indeed, The Last Broad­cast is a work of inves­ti­ga­tion and recon­struc­tion: it involves the reen­act­ment of a trek into the pri­mal woods, the recov­ery of bod­ies and DNA and the reassem­blage of grave­ly frag­ment­ed video – all pieced togeth­er to offer a mosa­ic pic­ture of a crime that hides in plain sight, or pos­si­bly a dis­trac­tion from what is being kept just out of frame. ​“It is as though the Jer­sey dev­il is a mon­ster reborn in a dig­i­tal age, reborn on the inter­net,” Leigh will say. ​“A demon cap­tured on IRC logs, man­gled video, whis­pers in the dark.” Here indeed, the Jer­sey dev­il is in the dig­i­tal details – and when this mon­ster final­ly shows its face, it does so in a way that demon­strates how eas­i­ly manip­u­la­ble these new media are.

The big sur­prise reveal in The Last Broad­cast is the only part of the film shot extradieget­i­cal­ly, with cam­eras being oper­at­ed by no char­ac­ter from with­in the nar­ra­tive. While this might lend the dénoue­ment a sem­blance of objec­tiv­i­ty, it is also notable that it express­ly takes place on the 1 April, 1997 – April Fool’s Day. Here every­thing is overt­ly shot, edit­ed and medi­at­ed; the illusionist’s trick and the prank rule; and per­haps noth­ing, aside from the mate­ri­al­i­ty of the mys­te­ri­ous woods them­selves, is real.

The Last Broad­cast is released on Blu-ray from 6 Decem­ber via 101 Films.