For all screenwriters moan about how mobile phones and social media have made certain traditional thriller plots obsolete, the internet has also opened up new possibilities for suspense cinema. For example, future books about horror subgenres will have to include a section on “AirBnB horror”, as recent films like Barbarian, Men and The Rental have used the holiday accomodation site to get their protagonists in an unfamiliar place. It’s a subgenre that begs the question, “is it still a home-invasion movie if the unwanted guests actually own the house?”
It’s a question that’s also raised by Travis Greene’s 8 Found Dead, which has been released on DVD and digital by High Fliers Films. At first the film doesn’t look like it’ll have much on its mind, and it opens with a scene where Jenny (Jenny Tran), drives through the desert, trying and failing to get a phone signal to talk to her mother. After a long journey she gets to her house, and after a long series of ass shots she goes out to her garden to sunbathe – which is where she’s attacked by an unseen axe-wielding murderer. The stage is set for some unapologetic slasher trash, but at this point the movie takes a hard swerve.
That swerve isn’t a problem at first as 8 Found Dead has the kind of structure that’s made to welcome sudden tonal shifts. With Jenny’s now-vacant house being converged upon by a string of couples, all of whom might be in their own movie. There’s a pair of middle-aged actors played by Rosanna Limeres and Tim Simek, an influencer and her reluctant boyfriend (Alisha Soper and William Gabriel Grier), their friends Carrie and Ricky (Aly Trasher and Eddy Acosta), and a pair of bickering cops (Patrick Joseph Rieger and Laura Buckles).
Limeres is particularly excellent, and becomes more polite and girlish as her character becomes more dangerous
Limeres and Simek’s characters are unknown to the rest of the cast, but they appear perfectly friendly which naturally adds to the tension, and the younger couples assume that they must be playing nice with them because they’re swingers – Simek in particular playing up the implicit sexual threat there. The problem isn’t with the performances (Limeres is particularly excellent, and becomes more polite and girlish as her character becomes more dangerous), but with the idea that you can do a slow-burn are-they-or-aren’t-they-killers plot when the opening scene of your movie has a bikini-clad girl being axed to death. It’s a further problem that 8 Found Dead‘s seven-day shoot, while an impressive achievement, means the film’s visually striking material is rationed for the opening and the ending, with the actual meat of the film indifferently shot.
The observant will have noticed nine characters listed in this review, which means 8 Found Dead must end with one of them still alive, and the question of who that is drives the plot. It could have pushed the story more if it wasn’t for the fact that, despite being introduced sequentially, not all of the characters are in the same timeframe. When Rieger and Buckles show up to the house they’re investigating a crime scene where some of the characters are corpses on the floor, and it’s here where 8 Found Dead shows its true genre identity. It’s not a slasher or a psychological thriller, but a belated entry into the kind of tricksy, time-scrambled, dialogue-heavy indies that proliferated after Pulp Fiction. Simek’s rants about modern movies sound particularly like they were ported in from a ’90s film, and overall it’s a more archaic prospect than the movie seemed to promise.
8 Found Dead is out now on Digital Platforms via High Fliers Films
It also played at Grimmfest 2023
