The Wicksboro Incident (2003)

The Wicksboro Incident

Spoiler Warning: This entry contains spoilers about the conclusion and other important plot points of The Wicksboro Incident.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5. 

The Wicksboro Incident is a very bold film in a cornucopia of ways. First, it is quite uncommon to see a found footage film with such a stark and obvious musical score. It's an exceedingly peculiar decision for a film which otherwise would rank among the most realistic found footage movies of all-time -- there is nothing overtly paranormal ever featured in it, what-so-ever. Rather, the film's initial premise of an unseen alien takeover is subtly corroborated when the group becomes ceaselessly pursued by the law. What Wicksboro Incident is, more than anything, is a chase movie. But the paranormal shades make for some interesting nuances.

The film begins with a documentary segment, featuring the typical UFO-believer ideology about unexplained sightings and government conspiracy. Heavily featured is an inventor named Lloyd explaining how in the 1950s he collaborated with the government on a device that detects auras. After working late into the early morning in the fallout shelter that was his workspace, Loyd emerged to find that the entire population of Wicksboro where he worked, had been vaporized into thin air. After 50 years in hiding, he has decided to come out with his story and film a documentary.

Some people comment on believing that it is a genuine documentary for the first 20 or so minutes. Indeed, realism is one category where this movie definitely deserves praise. The audience is led to believe that they are following an eccentric, crazy old man's goose chase until they find his bunker-laboratory in the desert of Texas, and the group of three becomes hunted by the police, the government, and perhaps forces unknown.

The ensuing chase, which makes up the meat of the film, could pass for an action plot. That is, if not for the shaky-cam, shoestring dynamics. This is where the film makes its other great departure from tradition. Many found footage films make use of dark shots and random angles, but none to this extent. Much of the film focuses on random car lights, the flicker of a lighter, and complete, total darkness. This isn't Hollywood-style darkness where there's not supposed to be light but you can see perfectly. This is you staring at a completely blank screen. It's a bold, bold move. But it works ingeniously to tingle the mind's eye, and inspire homegrown fears of mostly your own devise. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sometimes clutching my arm in fear of what might happen next, even though very little ever did.

With so little on screen, the inclusion of an unabashed soundtrack may be a benefit rather than a detractor, despite harming the realism. We as film fans are trained to fear impending doom based on certain nuances of the accompanying music, and so when we here these sounds and yet see little more than pitch black on the screen, it's left up to our psyche what kind of horrors must be lingering off-screen. While cynics might call this bad filmmaking, it was an intentional tactic from the filmmakers (as explained in the audio commentary), and for fans of found footage, it should work wonders (as it did on me).

As the film draws to a close, it includes the genre's near-requisite "deathbed confession" (which is what I call a penultimate scene in a found footage movie where the camera-holder turns the camera on themselves and gives their last words, typically summing up the situation), but in this case it doesn't include a goodbye, as the cameraman appears confident he will be saved. Evidently he is not, though, as the final bit of movie shows newspaper clippings detailing the obituaries of our three freelance filmmakers. Clearly they have been killed to hide the conspiracy, an alien takeover that is both real and too frightening to think about, according to the now deceased camera-man.

I give it a flawless 5 out of 5 in subtlety, the quintessential fear-inducer of any decent found footage film. It also deserves at least a 4 out of 5 in originality, for its bold choices and uncommon story. It has to lose points, though, for lacking an on-camera paranormal element. Near the end I kept waiting for that moment of true fear to leap out of the frequent pitch blackness; a craft in the sky, a grey arm reaching out to silence the cameraman's life... It's not that I want aliens to prance into bright daylight and do a jig, but I look to The Blair Witch Project for the standard on how to avoid anything specifically impossible, while still providing scary events of questionable origin. Wicksboro has none of that per se', but plenty to play on your imagination until you think you may have seen something.

Skeptically, you might wonder why an alien race has taken over 50 years to overtake the mankind, when evidently they had the technology to vaporize an entire town's population without so much as disturbing the half eaten breakfasts left behind. But the main purpose is that the preposterous premise is both creepy, and wild enough to seem like bullhockey until we find the bunker in the desert; and that's exactly how it's supposed to pan out. Besides, for all we know the vaporization weapon is extremely expensive and can't be used on such a large scale. To nitpick the paranormal is foolhardy when potential limitations are endless for non-existent technology.

Overall Wicksboro Incident is fantastically creepy, and a great work. It's simple, it's pure. It doesn't rank on par with Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity, but it ranks above many of its contemporaries in the found footage genre. I wouldn't recommend watching it with the lights on, though, I imagine it'd greatly diminish the effect of the minimalistic dark-screen camera action.