Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: A Youtuber who’s recently come back from being cancelled livestreams an all-night excursion in a haunted house.
About: Pitched as “a found-footage horror movie for people who hate found-footage horror movies,” Deadstream made its debut at SXSW to lots of audience love. The movie was written and directed by husband-wife team Vanessa and Joseph Winter. Joseph also stars. The movie was purchased by the Shudder horror streaming service and came out this weekend.
Writers: Vanessa and Joseph WinterDetails: about 90 minutes long
I heard, “This generation’s Blair Witch” and saw a 90-plus percent Rotten Tomatoes score and I thought, “Hmm, this sounds like it could be good!”
I also thought the found footage genre died off too soon. In an attempt to pillage the genre, a lot of idiots who didn’t respect found footage made films that didn’t even attempt to be good. You need to love and respect the rules of a genre to make it work.
Their biggest screw-up was having zero reason for the character to keep recording. Which constantly broke the suspension of disbelief. Hearing all the high praise, I have high expectations that this will not be the case with Deadstream.
Our main character, Shawn, is one of those really annoying Youtubers. Think a nerdier version of Jake Paul. He does stunts like sneaking across the country’s border in a car trunk. Dumb nonsense that gets him millions of views. Which has emboldened him to become even more annoying.
Shawn recently got canceled for something we’re not fully privy to. All we know is that Shawn has just been reinstated by his streaming service, which allows him to come back with a bang. He’s going to livestream a trip into a remote haunted house in the woods.
Shawn has made some rules for himself. For starters, to ensure that things stay entertaining, he must check out any noise he hears or he will concede all monetization of the video. Next, he’s bringing a “Wheel of Stupid Things To Do,” (it has stuff on it like, “Seance,” and, “Play Ouija”) that he’ll occasionally spin.
He also rips out his car’s spark plugs and hurls them into the forest to prevent himself from chickening out. And once he’s inside the house, he uses a master lock to lock himself inside, then throws away the key. This man is committed to staying here!
After he sets all his cameras up, Shawn starts hearing things. When he goes to check out what’s going on, he runs into “Chrissy,” a super-fan who came here to hang with her favorite streamer. When his followers vote to let Chrissy stay, Shawn reluctantly does. But the more he gets to know Chrissy, the sketchier she seems to be. And, at a certain point, it becomes clear that he not only needs to get out of this house, but get as far away from Chrissy as possible.
The first thing that came up as I was watching this was… this is not original. I will bet that there have been several dozen low-budget horror movies made just like this over the past five years. Livestream in a haunted house. It’s the ultimate low-budget horror setup.
So why is it that Deadstream is getting celebrated while nobody’s ever heard of those other films?
The writing.
These two understand screenwriting. And I’m going to guess that everyone else who made one of these films just showed up at the haunted house and figured out the story on the fly.
It was clear while watching this that the writers extensively rewrote this until it was great.
Let me explain how I know this.
A movie like this is deceptively hard to write because while it can easily be a 20 minute movie, it’s nearly impossible to make it a 90 minute movie. There’s just not enough stuff you can do in one location with 1-2 characters for 90 minutes. You really have to structure the script out to fill up the length.
After meeting Shawn with a brilliant introduction that shows us a lot of his previous videos, Shawn arrives at the haunted house. Now I want you to think for a second, if you were writing this movie, you’re in, about, minute 8 of the movie. You still need at least 15 more minutes to get to the end of Act 1. So what do you do? How do you structure that out?
Think about it right now. Cause I want you to compare what you would’ve done to what these guys did.
Okay, so here’s what they did. Sean has to set up all his cameras in the house. There are six main rooms. He’s got his backpack full off gear. And he has to go into each room to set up the camera, which will be connected to his iPad, so he has video monitoring of every room.
As he takes us into each room, he gives us a little history lesson. For example, he’ll say, “This bedroom is the room where the most deaths happened in this house due to a, b, and c.” In other words, it’s all very structured. We have a goal (set up all the cameras) and they’re slyly slipping in exposition (which is the good kind of exposition, by the way, since it’s interesting) that takes us all the way up to the end of the first act.
Not long after, we meet Chrissy. Chrissy then becomes Shawn’s partner in crime (spoilers follow) for a while. The second character adds a different feel from the first act, which is important in movies like this, which get boring quickly due to monotony.
Then the midpoint twist happens. Chrissy attacks Shawn and Shawn kills her in self-defense. Now Shawn has physically killed a person. You may be asking, “And the livestream people are just okay with this?” That’s part of the fun here. The livestreamers are commenting things like, “Fake!” And “Your Special FX are awesome!” There’s this plausible deniability hanging over the livestream the whole time.
From there, Shawn gets out of the house, but, as we remember, he destroyed his car engine. So how is he going to get away? After that, he hides in his car from a few ghosts. And, in the end, he realizes (getting a little help from his followers) that if he’s going to get out of here, he has to go back in and destroy the soul of this house. And that becomes our final act.
The structure is impeccable. It really is. And it demonstrates just how important screenwriting is and why so many indie films – especially indie horror films – are so bad. The directors put barely any effort into the script and you just get a bunch of random nonsense.
Also, they did a nice job with the character development. Shawn isn’t just some guy doing a livestream. He’s a guy who did something terrible that got him canceled and he’s trying to revive his channel. The writers slow-play the reveal of what he did, which creates some mystery. And then when we finally learn what he did, we get some genuine character development, as this becomes about more than just surviving. It’s about growing and learning from your past mistakes.
They even do a great job tying Shawn’s profession to Mildred’s (Mildred is the house ghost who posed as Chrissy). Mildred was a poet desperate to get published. So Shawn realizes, at a certain point, that she was trying to gain an audience (followers) just like him. And this insight into her ultimate goal is what helps him finally destroy her.
And yes! They set up rules that made it make sense why Sean kept filming the whole time. At no point did you say, “Okay, he wouldn’t be filming here.” They even built in reasons for him to do stupid stuff, like go check out scary noises, because he knew it would make the livestream more entertaining so he made a financial promise to his followers to do so. That was clever.
I don’t really have many criticisms, except for the main character’s acting when Chrissy was around. When Shawn is talking to the camera, he’s great. He’s perfect at being “Annoying Youtube Personality.” But when the actor has to do genuine acting with Chrissy’s character, it just felt like acting. The naturalism was gone.
The thing I love about horror is that you can make really good movies for very little money. These two proved that. Definitely check this out if you have Shudder!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “’I think the whole time we were just terrified that we were making a movie with a camera on one guy’s face.” This quote from the writer-directors struck me because I think with every script you write, you become obsessed with that one component about your script that makes you think it’s not going to work. Jordan Peele famously talked about this issue with Get Out. He couldn’t reconcile the fact that he was trying to make something genuinely frightening and poignant but also make it kind of funny. He was convinced that that tonal balance couldn’t work. It’s important that we, as writers, understand that this is a natural part of the process. You need to be okay with that thing about your story you’re convinced doesn’t work because if you let it get the best of you, you’re going to give up.
