The Outwaters is, as of this writing, the latest found footage sensation. It was written by, directed by and starring Robbie Banfitch, with his brother Scott co-starring. Here is how I imagine the conversation went between them as they decided to make this film…
Robbie: “Waaaasuuuuup!”
Scott: “ Waaaaasuuuuuuup!”
“Dude, I have this bitchin’ idea!”
“Did you just say, ‘bitchin’?’”
“Yeah…some middle-aged guy who lost touch with popular culture a couple of decades back is trying to write dialog for us.”
“Ohhh…bogus. Shit, now I’m doing it.”
“Don’t worry. You know I write dialogue even worse than this guy, so you know we’re going to be rolling in the bling. We’re going to make a movie”
“Radical! But we don’t know shit about making movies. What are we going to do?”
“Haven’t you seen The Blair Witch Project? It’s been like 25 years since that shit and you know that old saying: you can fool all the people all the time.”
“YOLO!”
“We’ll go on vacation in the desert and just act like all kinds of crazy shit is happening.”
“Fuh-shizzle!”
“Yeah, we’ll just do shit like act like we can feel the ground vibrating, or hear weird sounds at night, or see some guy in silhouette holding an axe, or pulling extra layers of skin off our real skin, or possibly time traveling, or maybe seeing a demon or aliens or some shit.”
“Gnarly! But we don’t have any bread—I mean money, so we can’t do special effects or shit.”
“That’s OK. That’s why we’re going to what Blair Witch did, but show even less. We’ll just run around in the desert at night and everybody will think they’re seeing all kinds of shit because all anybody will see is what the flashlights show.”
“Where’s the beef! But won’t people want to know why we’re in the desert?”
“That’s the best part! I’ve been trying to get in the jean shorts of this hippie girl who sings, so she’ll be in the movie and the idea is we’ll be making a music video for her. She has a singing voice like any other woman who can kinda sing, a butterfly tattoo and everything!”
“Dy-no-mite! Is she going to show her tits?”
“Nah, but there’s another woman I know who is willing to do that. Maybe smear some fake blood all over them, ’cause you know that’s my thing.”
“Groovy, man! Hey, wait, wasn’t the idea of Blair Witch that somebody finds their tapes later? If this is found footage, who finds it?”
“Who cares? We’ll just make it look like cops found the memory cards for our cameras and they’re watching it. We’ll claim it is the raw footage, but insult the audience by having audio and music spanning over some of what would be different recordings”
“Heavens to murgatroyd! But won’t the audience notice?”
“That’s the best best part. Either they’ll be too stupid to notice or they’ll be too scared to point it out to others because we’ll have all these people who immediately defend anything they don’t understand!”
“That’s the cat’s meow! Do we have anything we can already use?”
“You know it! We got that stuff I shot at my Mom’s when I surprised her by coming home unexpectedly that one time. Then there’s that abstract shit I did in my CGI course before I dropped out of film school. And there’s all that artsy shit I made when I was trying out my new camera. Remember all that stuff I did just pointing the camera down a pipe with a light at the end? We’ll use that! We’ll use all of that! This is like a movie meatloaf and we’ll put nothing but bread in it. There’s no meat! We can’t lose!”
“That’s strictly from Dixie! That’s a ducky shincracker!”
“We’ll be togged to the bricks! We’ll hit on all sixes! It’s a saltash luck!”
“It’ll be a lally-cooler! We’ll be a shoddyocracy! We’ll be wake snakes!”
“It will be a Banbury story! We’ll be chirping merry!”
“A pox on both our houses!