content warning: animal euthanasia (simulated), death by suicide, flashing images, bestiality, violence against children, violence against women, snuff film

Robert here. A few things to know with these content warnings. The actual film opens with a dog being euthanized at a veterinary office. The setting for most of the film is a forest marked with a sign encouraging people to seek help if they have suicidal ideation. One character is stopped from dying by suicide. Flashing images are cut into the film as part of the found/altered footage narrative. The flashing eventually leads to clips of an unrelated snuff film edited into the actual film we’re meant to be watching. Please make an informed choice about your ability to watch the film safely. --Robert J Gannon

I’m a big fan of the found footage conceit in horror. The horror genre is largely a safe exploration of the darker side of life, confronting our greatest fears in a relatively safe way. The found footage angle aims to blur that line even further. It adds authenticity to what you’re going to watch even though you know true events that disturbing would never be released unedited to a wide audience.

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made takes it a step further. The first 10 minutes and closing credits of Antrum are short documentaries about the history of a lost horror film called Antrum. Film historians and critics describe the legacy of a tiny, independent, barely-released horror film. Apparently, anyone who sees the film will die shortly after watching it. Entire festival screenings burned to the ground, and festival organizers planning on rejecting the film died before the rejection could be made official.

There’s more. The rarely screened film with the deadly reputation has been severely altered over the years. There’s no way of knowing what the original cut is as no original prints remain. What we have is a heavily altered piece containing flashing subliminal images and additional unrelated footage. At least we assume this was all added later. There’s no way of knowing as no one who watched the first known screening survived the experience.

With that context, we’re given a 30 second warning to vacate the theatre. Staying to watch the film absolves the producers of any responsibility for what might happen to. This is a throwback to an old marketing technique I even recall being tacked onto Universal Monster Movies during my childhood. An authority figure would warn the audience that what they are about to see might be too terrifying for most audiences. The intention is to set an expectation for a terrifying story. It’s the equivalent of a hypeman for horror. Tell the audience that they will be scared by what they are about to see and they will be ready to be scared.

Only then do we see Antrum. A brother and sister travel to the woods to dig a hole to hell. Their dog was just put down and the younger brother wants to rescue the beloved pet from the underworld. If they dig a hole and perform the right rituals, they can rescue the dog from its cursed fate. Layer by layer, we join them on their journey to free their dog from the fifth circle of hell, guarded by Cerebus himself.

The level of research in Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is remarkable. Writers/directors David Amito and Michael Laicini are flexing on the horror genre with one of the most successful metatexts I’ve ever encountered. Before watching it, I clocked it as a mix of the cursed tape of The Ring and John Carpenter’s Masters of Horror episode Cigarette Burns. The documentary is chugging along, talking about the novelty of a cursed film, and I’m sharpening my knives for the takedown. Come correct with your documentary in a horror film details or don’t come at all. Then one of the interview subjects point blank calls out those references and explains why Antrum is different. This barely scratches the surface of what Amito and Laicini tackle in the film.

Antrum pulls from a long history of lost horror films and other entertainment. Do you know how many television shows were erased forever because no one anticipated the lasting power of the new medium? We have none of the original footage of the first televised broadcasts, only filmed copies of screens. Even when shows like I Love Lucy and Twilight Zone began producing their episodes on film to preserve for rebroadcast, countless other shows stuck to old techniques that did not allow for multiple broadcasts. Film reels were highly combustible, and many films (shorts and features, narrative and documentary) were lost forever in fires or other damaging circumstances. Even as technology evolved to tape, there were studios choosing to erase tapes to save cost rather than preserve the history of television and cinema.

Even more modern films were damaged beyond repair between test screenings, festival releases, and wide releases. Antrum has many nods to the most notorious of these: The Wicker Man. The film was originally 99 minutes long. All of the distributors wanted it under 90 minutes so they could use it for double features at drive-ins. Roger Corman had the only full length copy shipped outside of Britain and the footage was so damaged that it could never be fully restored when he realized what he had. There are so many different cuts and edits for different markets ranging anywhere from 87 to 96 minutes long. The Wicker Man was not alone in this practice, but it is the most acclaimed B-movie of the time and the one with the most effort put into restoring. It’s a Sisyphean task that can never be completed, and continued restoration, alteration, editing, and addenda risk transforming the work into something altogether different.

All of this is important to analyzing Antrum. It seems bizarre to say it, but the point of Antrum is not to make a stellar stand alone horror film; the point of Antrum is a critical exercise in the history of censorship and intellectual property right theft in independent horror cinema. It’s the constant alteration of other people’s work to make it sell to a wider audience amplified to its most evil level. Hollywood is just trying to make a buck with some films intended for a wide audience. They change what they need to in order to pass the ratings board, get the film in theaters, and get audiences to see it. Whoever we are to imagine did the same thing to Antrum altered the film to invoke evil forces and cause harm to anyone who watches. That’s satire on the level of Videodrome achieved in the framing conceit of a modern horror film.

Frankly, I think the Antrum film in the film is pretty terrible. I also think that’s by design. It’s all intended to be hot button issues that cause censorship to happen in independent horror films. This is a horror story where children are intentionally put in harms way. Multiple animals are injured, die, or are tormented even after death throughout the film. One set of villains in the story are mysterious men speaking in some indistinct foreign language and living like wild animals. Satanic images flood the screen without the additional edits to the “original” footage. There’s a bestiality scene for crying out loud. This is supposed to be every infamous B-movie rolled into one (what, no time for cannibalism or a good old fashioned satanic nunnery?), justifying the outside edits in the context of the drive-in and grindhouse market of the 70s and 80s and betraying that industry tradition with actively harmful edits.

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is wild. I’ve seen a lot of horror films about other films, real and imagined, before. I’ve even seen horror films meant to be documentaries about other horror films featuring actual cruel, evil, and/or cursed footage. I’ve never seen one so effortlessly jump between the different modes in a way that’s intentionally going to limit its reach to experienced horror fans who are in on the gag and new horror fans who don’t yet know the truth behind the found footage/based on a true story marketing angle.

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

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