Creature of the Pines (Panic Fest 2026)

From its origins in movies like Cannibal Holocaust, The MacPherson Tapes and The Blair Witch Project, found footage has evolved from a way to imply unreal events took place in the real world into a surprisingly expansive genre. It struggled in the early 2010s when it seemed every other horror movie had a character carrying a camera, but it prevailed to the point where all manner of stories now dip their toes into this pool. A tangential offspring of the found‑footage movie is the faux‑documentary, made famous by Kōji Shiraishi’s Noroi: The Curse and Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo. While not as common as standard found footage, they’re growing in number, and a new one recently played at Missouri’s Panic Fest – Chris Ruppert and Tyler Transue’s Creature of the Pines.

Ruppert and Transue’s faux‑documentary begins with the words “this is an uncompleted film”, before taking us into New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, a stretch of woodland that’s a communication dead zone where countless people have vanished for years. Composed of regional news reports, expert accounts, and police footage of a rare survivor, it functions like a conventional documentary – albeit one based on dramatised subject matter. The found‑footage element appears when scenes, snippets and recovered material are spliced into the documentary in a style I wish was more common, as it allows filmmakers to be experimental without testing audience patience the way many experimental narrative films do. The myth‑building in these faux-documentaries also tends to be more rounded thanks to the removal of a single narrative focus – the protagonist.

The weakest thread of Creature of the Pines is the local news broadcast, but calling it weak feels unfair as all news media that uses a green screen instead of a built set looks uncanny, so capturing that reality is simply authenticity. This green screen approach used to be common, and since these are historical broadcasts they hold up to scrutiny, but some will, of course, cry foul or lazily accuse it of being AI. Another layer of authenticity comes from the experts – the cryptid researchers (or cryptozoologists), who draw together the themes and behavioural tics of the creature, invoking the mythological entities that gave America icons like the Owl‑Man and the Jersey Devil. They aren’t manic or unhinged like the “Ancient Alien theorist” types, which grounds the film and makes Creature of the Pines feel more legitimate in its documentary aspirations.

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You could also argue the faux‑documentary structure forms a thematically uniform anthology as we see three separate eyewitness accounts of people entering the Pine Barrens. The first is a solo rambling YouTuber, the next is the group the survivor belonged to, and the last is the kayfabe documentarians making Creature of the Pines doing their due diligence – one of these being unlike the others, but we’ll get to that.

Through the found footage captured by police while searching for the missing people we see the methodology of the thing in the woods. The experts have their theories based on Native American folklore, which probably didn’t need to be so closely confirmed in the third visit, but they do establish a pattern of behaviour before it closes in, messes with tents, does small but intimidating things, and then bang – people go missing. Knocks in the woods near campsites, a totem of skulls marking hunting grounds (the CG isn’t great, but it hardly matters), and the creature shouting people’s names in familiar voices, which in the YouTuber’s case is her sister calling out to her despite being hundreds of miles away.

For the YouTuber this manifests through photos and repeated takes as she tries to get things right, but she isn’t recording consistently so the snapshots feel purposeful and haunting. The next group of three guys (one of whom escapes), record constantly as they’re cameramen and wedding filmmakers testing new kit. These sequences align more closely with traditional found footage, with improvisational dialogue, unbroken scares, dead space, and the mystery that comes from a camera not meticulously guiding the viewer’s eye. When done well (as it is here), very few traditionally lensed horror films come close to the fear a good found footage movie can generate, so at this point I was fully on board with the film, and picking up everything it was putting down, because Creature in the Pines was full of moment‑to‑moment horror that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

The third sequence lost me more than I’d care to admit because it reveals too much, goes too big, and although shot with the same cinematic language as the second group, shares far too much information about the creature and its nature. It was scary before because it was unknowable and horrific in its detached hunting style, but the final shot in particular dilutes much of the film’s power. How a movie leaves you is vitally important and I left disappointed, which is a shame as it belies how successful, spooky and structurally strong Creature of the Pines was until around the hour mark. It’s still worth watching for the faux‑documentary and found‑footage true believers, but its final stretch undercuts the careful structure that made it so effective.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – CREAURE OF THE PINES