Found footage horror and urban legends are kin. Both rely on the idea that there’s veracity to a clearly ridiculous spooky tale, simply by virtue of the simplicity of the retelling. In found footage, it’s the roughness of unedited footage, whereas urban legends don’t need a sparkling narrative because they’re from a friend of a friend of a cousin.
What makes low-budget horror What Happened to Dorothy Bell? so coolly fascinating is that it melds the two, and adds a more sinister binding. Ozzie Gray (Asya Meadows) doesn’t simply know about the urban legend of the Witch Librarian of the Edwards Public Library – everyone in Spellbound, Ill., probably does – but she’s connected to it. The witch librarian was her grandmother (Arlene Arnone Bibbs), the sweet old lady that used to tell her bedroom stories and commit horrible, inexplicable crimes, her grandma who finally hung herself in the library and is said to haunt its shelves and stanchions ever since.
There’s an overwhelming sense of bleakness and disconnection that hangs like a funeral pall over What Happened to Dorothy Bell?, which received its world premiere at Fantastic Fest. Writer/director Danny Villanueva Jr. makes it clear from the opening scene – a VHS flashback – that whatever was wrong with Dorothy, it wasn’t just senile dementia. More driven by an urge to get some kind of emotional closure than solve some supernatural enigma, Meadows quietly cracks open Ozzie’s unresolved anguish and lets a greater evil seep in.
Character study beats out simple scales here. However, it’s the style of What Happened to Dorothy Bell? that really distinguishes it. For the past quarter century, most found footage movies have tried to emulate the vérité kineticism of The Blair Witch Project. But it’s rarer to see a movie like What Happened to Dorothy Bell? that subscribes to the cooler, more removed, creeping dread of The Poughkeepsie Tapes. That 2007 landmark of underground horror felt like walking through a crime scene, and there’s a similar sordid, tragic feel to Villaneuva’s debut feature. If he’d had gone for the running, screaming approach of most post-Blair Witch flicks, it wouldn’t allow for the moments of introspection that build into slow-burn horror. After all, Ozzie isn’t simply trying to uncover some supernatural secret but work through familial trauma that she seems ill-equipped to navigate. Like her grandmother, she’s tiny and frail, soft-spoken and introspective: almost a ghost herself, especially when near her giant father (Michael Hargrove), who is permanently hunched and constrained by his feelings of guilt. Meadows plays Ozzie like mist, at her most comfortable behind the barrier of her computer screen in session with her shrink (Lisa Wilcox). When she makes the inevitable stumbling steps into the darkness, it’s obvious that it’s because she does not have the emotional tools to know to stay in the light.
Found footage has often been inaccurately described as a way to make a small budget go a long way, but that may well be the case here. With a tiny cast and a couple of locations (most memorably the gorgeous Gilbert M. Simmons Memorial Library in Kenosha, Wisc., whose marble walls make the perfect setting for a spooky film), Villaneuva only drops in a couple of jump scares to play into horror tropes. They may be the weakest elements – a couple will get garner gasps from the audience, while one or two are weakened by rough CGI – but even they do not detract from this mournful descent into hell.
What Happened to Dorothy Bell?
USA, 2024, 80 min.
World Premiere
Wednesday 25, 5:20pm
Follow all the Chronicle’s 2024 Fantastic Fest coverage.
This article appears in September 20 • 2024.
