At first glance, The Outwaters, writer/director Robbie Banfitch’s polarizing new film, seems like your typical found footage horror experience. The movie is presented as the only evidence of a creative trek to the desert among four friends. All that’s left of them after their harrowing journey in the Mojave are three memory cards full of videos that make up the movie and capture the group’s last days as everything (literally) goes to hell.
With this setup, you could reasonably expect to see the thumbprints of The Blair Witch Project, but Banfitch, who also stars in the film, found ways to incorporate Terrence Malick’s roaming style, too. “My character’s like a little wannabe Terrence Malick. So I was like, ‘This is a good excuse to make a found footage movie, like, pretty,’ for at least some of it,” he explains over a Zoom call. Banfitch also cites Jane Campion’s eye for detail and the video log from Event Horizon as inspirations.
This unlikely mix of cinematic sensibilities is one of the reasons The Outwaters has been gaining significant buzz since its premiere at the New Jersey Film Festival in February 2022. The film is getting a theatrical release this month and will be streaming via horror streamer Screambox after. From incorporating bloody elemental horror and a disorienting narrative to effectively using immersive sound design, The Outwaters takes the expectations of found footage and subverts them in unique ways.
Banfitch’s idea for the film started with the name. “Somehow I thought ‘outwaters’ would be a cool word. And then, like, what a great movie title,” he explains. The exploration of the word led the filmmaker to make the movie, and he took a similarly instinctive approach to the production itself. “Everything [was] generally organic,” he says, “exploring without really thinking, ‘What will this mean?'” Banfitch and company, made up of close friends and collaborators, shot the film without a full script. “We did wing it, in an intentional way. But there was very much very specific shots and [an] order of things.”
The intentionality behind the filmmaking comes through in the tactile nature of the film, both in its practical effects (creating a horrifying creature with blood, sand, and costumes, for instance) and in the experimental sound design. Banfitch was responsible for both. “The key for this [the sound design] was to really try to make it feel raw and like it is coming from being picked up on the camera, aside from certain moments where something else might be happening, but it was really just experimentation. The most experimental aspect of the movie is sound,” Banfitch says.
Although the film’s experimental nature won’t work for everyone, Banfitch stands by it. “It’s so interesting how this totally works for some people. And then some people just completely turn it off,” he says. “If I had … shortened it in parts, or tightened it up and made [it] a little neater I really don’t think it would work for some people. I think maybe like there would be some in-between thing. And that’s boring.”
The Outwaters opens in Austin on Friday.
This article appears in February 10 • 2023.