A year later, their footage was found. It's an ingenious device, one that efficiently and economically exploits our cultural immersion in reality TV and recalls our own amateurish and shaky home videos. It's at once familiar and disquietingly surprising. It's a far scarier place to be. Mysterious piles of rocks appear in their paths.
Strange voices seem to be calling from points unknown.
And signs of other unfriendly life become more obvious with the passing of each desperate day. The suffocating terror, and the gloomy poignancy, is in waiting to see what's going to keep them there forever. Both films explore the unnerving possibility that perhaps the worst thing supernatural powers can do is to sit back and play with our heads, to let our minds create a hell of their own. Sure, Heather can scream like a banshee, but she also shows the nuances of fear in subtler, more unsettling ways. The film leaves us, like the filmmakers, abandoned in the woods, with no one there to save us.