One of the biggest problems of being a fan of the found footage and faux documentary subgenres of horror is that sometimes it feels like you’ve seen all the good ones. However, this can inspire you to seek out the hidden gems, those films that may have slipped under the radar in the horror community. Savageland, directed by Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, and David Whelan, isn’t a film that made major waves at the time of its release in 2015, but it has developed a word-of-mouth following due to the masterful building of its uneasy and disquieting story. Yet what makes it memorable is its stark approach to real issues alongside the more familiar horror setup.
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Savageland is presented in the same vein as Making a Murderer or other true crime documentaries and follows a massacre in the small town of Sangre De Cristo on the Arizona-Mexico border. All town residents are dead except for Francisco Salazar (Noe Montes), who is almost immediately judged as the perpetrator. The sheriff of the neighboring town is convinced of Salazar’s guilt – as are locals who condemn him based on him being a loner and an illegal immigrant – while journalists and others cast doubt on that possibility. When a series of photographs taken by Salazar on the night of the massacre comes to light, it paints a far more horrifying picture of events.
When a horror movie finishes, the lone survivor stumbles into a new day, having lived through the various horrors of the night. But what comes next? Savageland paints a picture of a worst-case scenario where the survivor becomes the main suspect. Horror is full of lone survivors, but if Salazar was replaced with a more conventional ‘final girl,’ would he still be accused in the same way? It’s doubtful.
The sheer conviction that people have of Salazar’s guilt is barefaced in its racist vitriol. Every little thing about Salazar – such as his status as an illegal immigrant, his Mexican heritage, and his hobby of photographing dead things – is used against him. His photographs damn him twofold as he also has taken pictures of the young (white) daughter of the town’s preacher – even though we see nothing to suggest this is anything sinister or born out of anything more than Salazar’s friendship with the family.
The authorities talk about him like a maniac and a monster, but when we finally see him, he is utterly broken. He can barely speak, is clearly damaged by extreme trauma, and looks unlikely to be capable of hurting anyone, much less killing over 50 people. Even at a glance, it makes no sense for Salazar to have killed the entire town with nobody attempting to fight back against him or successfully subduing him through sheer numbers. That doesn’t matter to the authorities, especially the sheriff, as his re-election immensely benefits from Salazar’s conviction.
Then people start mentioning bite marks, and Salazar says the people attacking him were dead. That’s when it hits you: Savageland is a zombie movie.
Zombies have gone hand-in-hand with social commentary since the days of George Romero. While Romero always claimed that his casting of Duane Jones in Night of the Living Dead was down to Jones’ acting ability over a desire to be political, Jones’s role in that film – and the ending where his character is shot by a mob and thrown on a pyre to burn next to various ghouls – made a statement on civil rights in America and set the groundwork for zombies as a reflection of society. While it is certainly possible to enjoy Romero’s zombie films, or indeed any zombie film, divorced from broader issues, it’s something that’s always there in the best examples of the subgenre.
In Savageland, though, the social aspect is very much at the forefront. While it was made before his election, this is very much the zombie movie of Donald Trump’s America. Many of the townspeople – especially right-wing radio host Gus Greer – give voice to the kind of racism that became so prevalent in those years. Journalist Lawrence Ross, playing a version of himself, is the polar opposite of that spectrum, determined to prove that what has happened is some kind of racially motivated execution of an immigrant border town. You do get the impression, at least initially, that the authorities were willing to write off the incident as gang or drug-cartel-related before the opportunity to blame Salazar came along and before it was known that there were white people among the victims – the preacher and his family and a local hunter.
When the photographs, courtesy of Ross and a trucker who very mysteriously dies soon after passing the negatives on, come to light, it almost gives a brief sense of hope to the viewer that this will exonerate Salazar and expose the truth. A large chunk of the movie’s second half is a timeline of the night’s events using the photos to map out what happened. There is something about still images that can be even more effective than traditional found footage in this situation, as using photos gives us an impression of the events but with plenty of room for the audience to fill in the blanks for themselves.
What we imagine is horrifying. The photos themselves are black and white and slightly blurred in places, giving a sense of movement and frantic urgency to what’s happening and giving the attackers a very inhuman and menacing appearance. It also brings to mind the very ending of Night of the Living Dead and the still images of Ben’s body being collected by the mob and put on the pyre. Yet despite the photographs giving a clear path of Salazar’s actions that night – even proving that he wasn’t near some of the murders – the photos are almost universally dismissed as a hoax. One of the only people who realize the truth of the photographs and, more importantly, understands their implication is photographer Len Matherson, played by a wonderfully understated Len Wein (who is neither a photographer nor an actor but a comic book writer and one of the creators of Wolverine).
Do the authorities know the truth about it being zombies and are covering it up? It’s a popular theory, and there is certainly evidence for it when you consider things like the mysterious sudden death of the trucker who found the film reel with the photos on it. As for the authorities and the media, the truth doesn’t really matter – only the narratives that they have decided on do – and it’s ultimately the victims and their families who suffer most.
The ending of Savageland has proved divisive for some. Salazar’s body post-execution has disappeared, and some footage recovered from a campsite suggests that after everything he has survived, Salazar is now just another part of the hoard. While some may find this a bit too conventional compared to the rest of the film, this ending just emphasizes that the community’s problems will persist – and likely even escalate – and that those in power are unlikely or unwilling to help. And no, the real problems in life are unlikely to be zombies but rather those everyday injustices and social problems that leave innocents dead and authorities uncaring. Savageland may deal with a horrific and unthinkable situation, but it’s the very real world we live in that provides the backdrop to it, and that’s far scarier than any dead body coming back to life.