With the endless proliferation of true crime cinema, this does feel like a good moment for documentary-style horror to shine. The true crime medium has evolved a bit over the years, eschewing objectivity in favor of suspicious narration; what better place for horror to flourish, then, than in the headspace of a documentary subject whose own obsessions threaten the entire project? That’s the premise behind Hunting Matthew Nichols, a new documentary-style horror film from co-writer and director Markian Tarasiuk.
It’s been more than two decades since the disappearance of Matthew Nichols (James Ross). So, armed with a film crew and years of therapy, younger sister Tara Nichols (Miranda MacDougall, horror’s latest iteration of Jennifer Carpenter, complimentary) returns to Vancouver Island to create a documentary detailing the final days of her brother’s life. Tara and her director Markian (Tarasiuk) have a detailed plan in place: thanks to the recent release of police evidence to the Nichols family, Tara has new insights into the case and has scheduled interviews with many of the people featured in the original investigation.
At first, much of what they learn matches the public records. But as Tara digs deeper, she unearths new evidence that suggests Matthew and his buddy Jordan (Issiah Bullbear) had become obsessed with the local legend of a frontiersman who devoured his family. What begins as an exercise in closure soon becomes an obsession, as Tara retraces Matthew’s footsteps and gathers the talismans and archival documents he fixated on in his research. Before Tara and Markian can finish their own documentary, they learn for themselves if there was any truth to the rumors of Matthew’s satanic woodland rituals.
Whether it’s best described as found footage or documentary-style horror, the format of Hunting Matthew Nichols is the entire hook of the film. It’s good, then, that Tarasiuk has such firm control over his material. We are introduced to Matthew’s love of amateur filmmaking, and his obsession with the success of The Blair Witch Project. Even before the suggestion of demonic practices, Tarasiuk’s film draws us into the story of two wannabe filmmakers whose desire to make the next great DIY horror film could have led to a tragic accident. Picking up the pieces of that story all these years later provides the emotional undercurrent of the film, and it also gives us a real reason for Tara’s own obsession with her brother’s disappearance. The act of making a movie is meant to bring her closer to him.
(In fact, the faux documentary segments of the film tend to run stronger than the horror sequences. Given that so much of the film's horror is reserved for its final 15 minutes, this works nicely in the movie's favor.)
The highlight of Hunting Matthew Nichols is an animated sequence positioning Vancouver Island's urban legends against the backdrop of North American folklore. Halfway through the film, Tara interviews a local anthropologist, who offers a primer on the connections between global communities and cryptids. As he outlines the folklore behind infamous cannibal Roy Mackenzie, the film switches to animation, bringing the legend of Vancouver Island to life through weathered black-and-white frames. It’s both another clever nod to the true crime format – which often replaces reenactments with animation to build an emotional connection with the audience – and a standalone piece of visual storytelling, one that helps prop up the less-concrete mythology of the film’s final act.
Still, the form has its limits. As with many of its predecessors, Hunting Matthew Nichols does chafe a bit against the medium as the structure goes from conventional documentary to found footage horror. The more supernatural the footage becomes – as talking heads give way to late-night seances and otherworldly creatures – the more the onscreen editorial choices call attention to themselves, and not necessarily for the better. Every work of found footage requires us to simultaneously imagine and ignore the presence of an in-world editor, and Hunting Matthew Nichols, in hewing so closely to the standards of modern documentaries, knowingly trades immersion for form in its final minutes.
Then again, if every found footage horror film needed to transcend the medium to be successful, we’d be left with only a handful of worthwhile titles. What Hunting Matthew Nichols sets out to do – adapt the visual language of Netflix documentaries to slightly modernize the found footage format - is mostly successful, and Tarasiuk and cowriter Sean Harris Oliver even manage to find narrative relevance in a character’s trauma (something too often overlooked by contemporary horror filmmakers). It’s a gamble for any studio to put a film like this up for wide release, but if Hunting Matthew Nichols can expand the genre’s appeal to true crime devotees – well, squint, and you can see the untapped audiences producers can only dream of.
For the rest of us devoted horror fans, Hunting Matthew Nichols remains a high floor, low ceiling exercise in genre. There are worse things to be than a film that wears its admiration for The Blair Witch Project on its sleeve. Toss together compelling folk horror, an engaging true crime structure, and the gloomy beauty of Vancouver Island, and Tarasiuk’s film serves a more polished alternative to the countless direct-to-streaming found footage cash grabs. [3/5]
