Grave Encounters

3/10
Not scary at all. There were only some parts that would stay in your head but uncreative

such a bad movie

one of the best if not THE best found footage movies ever! the acting is amazing, the story is incredible. watching the characters start to slowly lose it has got to be my fav thing bec holy hell the acting man

there is little to no amount of money you could pay me that would allow me to step a single toe into that place

i was hyped up with the comments saying it was scary, but there were no interesting dialogues, no scary scenes, no good filming... NOTHING, and it makes me so disappointed.

While Grave Encounters definitely started off slowly—typical of the found footage genre—it gradually becomes more engaging as the story unfolds. While I didn’t have many major critiques, I do wish the film had gone deeper into the origins of the asylum and its patients. The setting is creepy and full of potential, but it feels like a missed opportunity not to explore the backstory more thoroughly. I recently learned there is a Grave Encounters 2, but I’m not sure if I’m going to check it out. I’m assuming it goes into the origins or the background of the asylum, but we’ll see. One thing that stood out was how the scares were heavily stacked in the last 30 minutes. The first half of the film drags a bit because of this imbalance. Pacing-wise, it could have benefited from distributing the tension more evenly throughout. As for the characters, none of them were especially memorable, but they also weren’t annoying, which I’ll take as a win in this genre. They felt like believable paranormal show hosts, which fit the premise, but I wasn’t particularly attached to any of them. I’ve heard people refer to Grave Encounters as one of the scariest found footage films ever, and honestly, I don’t get it. Not to discredit anyone’s experience, but there are definitely much scarier movies in the genre. For me, this one leaned more on eerie sound effects and predictable jump scares. I jumped at the first one—not because it was scary, but because it caught me off guard, pretty much up to this point nothing had happened. The most unsettling moment was definitely when we see a tongue is ripped out on the floor and then and we suddenly see him on the ceiling. That genuinely caught me off guard. Overall, Grave Encounters isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s an interesting watch. If you’re into found footage, I’d say it’s worth checking out.