As found footage has firmly established itself as a genre, its foothold on the public imagination (and on that of filmmakers) bears scrutiny.
The excellent documentary The Found Footage Phenomena (2021) and books such as Found Footage Horror Films by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and POV Horror by Duncan Hubber have helped contextualize its appeal and power. But efforts like What Happened to Dorothy Bell? do more to carve out a place for found footage in film history than critics and academics ever could.
I like to think that critics are the most haunted of observers. Like the protagonists in Grave Encounters (2011). we wander endlessly through the halls of cosmic dread and outright terror these narratives create space for. So powerful are they that even an absolutely bare bones use of the medium, such as Skinamarink (2023), demands to be assessed.
In fact, the simpler these stories are, the more powerful they are, an opinion buttressed by, say, The Blair Witch Project (1999), which is essentially asking one question, “What might happen to me if I get lost in the woods?” The answer to that question explores not only the raw terror and despair inherent in its situation but the creeping dread of the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales and ancient campfire stories.
But What Happened to Dorothy Bell? is more complex than that, doing what many narrative horror films do these days in exploring grief, trauma and family inheritance, while relying on the tropes that have always made found footage at its best so effective.
The film tells the story of Ozzie, a young woman whose violent childhood encounter with her grandmother was, until recently, suppressed in her memory. Her family's decision to tell her about her tragic past opens up a psychological can of worms, baiting her into an obsessive search for the why of her situation. Why would her grandmother do this? What does it mean?
Simultaneously, her immediate family must navigate the history of mental illness, which may or may not be repeating itself in Ozzie. The discovery of a mysterious book may hold answers. But it’s questionable whether those answers will send anyone down the road of healing.
The film expertly employs the simplest of visual tricks one associates with found footage to create an atmosphere of paranoia and dread. Sudden sounds and corner-of-the-eye movements direct the point of view. Protagonists speak their fears directly into camera. The fourth wall becomes a permeable membrane leaking personal history, and future threat.
The real power of the film, though, lies in the central performance of Asya Meadows as Ozzie, who floats through the film with a blank-eyed, burnt-out affect, beautifully balanced against her determination to follow her and her grandmother's history wherever it leads. The result is a disturbing ambiguity in which concerns about the supernatural and the psychological become inseparable and resolution seems anything but sure.
The script and screenplay also operate at a level of nuance. What Happened to Dorothy Bell? emerges as more than a horror film. It is horror rooted in the individual and familial attempt to claim meaning and break out of inherited cycles.
It doesn’t use Ozzie's trauma as just an excuse to create thrills and chills, as much as it provides a road map wherein certain feelings and realities will be experienced. Ozzie is undergoing a profound deconstruction of personhood and we are witnesses to it. Whether we are witnesses to a process that is demonic or simply psychological and emotional, is left to us to decide as the film and Meadows' performance generates considerable empathy.
It can also be noted that like other recent horror films, such as Relic (2020), The Dark and The Wicked (2020), and especially The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), this film engages the horrors that can often accompany aging: the past catching up with the present with a vengeance, old sins of commission and omission demanding the pound of flesh and soul. Generational culpability takes on a larger than life resonance and dares us to examine our own forgotten history.
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