Alien Abduction

Alien Abduction

The trend of found footage films doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, and a lot of it is samey at this point, but director Matty Beckerman has delivered a genuinely eerie and energetic found footage thriller with “Alien Abduction,” the story of a family of campers stalked through the woods of Black Mountain, North Carolina by hostile extraterrestrial beings.

As its real-life hook, the film uses the phenomenon of the “Brown Mountain Lights,” which have given rise to an air of speculation and conspiracy theories straight out of the Paranormal Playbook. “Everybody up here knows something weird’s going on,” says Sean (Jeff Bowser), a backwoods guy in “Alien Abduction” who lives in an unheated shack in the Brown Mountain woods. Lights are seen moving in strange geometric patterns above the mountains. There are multiple unexplained disappearances every year. It is believed that the lights are somehow connected to these vanishings.

“Alien Abduction” opens like a documentary, showing interviews with physicists and paranormal researchers who all say that they cannot explain what causes the Brown Mountain Lights, and more work should be done on figuring it out. The footage of the film is said to have been “leaked” from the U.S. Air Force, whose creation of Project Blue Book in 1952 helped seed all this paranoia about Brown Mountain. Project Blue Book was established to study UFO data and determine whether or not UFOs (if they existed) posed any threat to national security.

The problem with many found-footage films is how much disbelief you must suspend when asked to accept that people would keep filming through terrifying moments where they should clearly put down the camera and run for their lives! In “Alien Abduction,” Riley Morris (Riley Polanski), an 11-year-old autistic boy, has got hold of his dad Peter’s camera because he films everything to help him engage with the world. This is a pretty neat device, but it’s also reductive, and it works.

The Morris family parents Peter (Peter Holden) and Katie (Katherine Sigismund), and kids Corey (Corey Eid), Jillian (Jillian Clare) and autistic Riley are off on a camping trip together. The mood in the car is jovial; everybody’s excited for some fresh air and quality bonding time. On their first night camping out, the three kids look up and see weird lights moving in the sky at night. The lights move in tandem in a triangular formation, then jut off at right angles. Those are no stars.

Things get downright creepy the next day, and soon enough the terrified family take shelter in Sean’s cabin. At first Sean seems like he might have strolled right out of “Deliverance,” resentful of all these city folk who come up here to his mountain … but he becomes an important figure to them all, even something of a hero. There’s a small character arc for Corey where he grudgingly admits respect for Sean that pays off emotionally. “Alien Abduction” even takes time for a lovely quiet shot of Sean and Corey sitting on the front porch of the shack waiting, staring out into the green forest, rifles cocked and ready.

The windows are filled with white high beams that flash down through the floorboards, shine through the cracks in the walls. It’s old-fashioned terror, and less is definitely more. There’s a long shot of a country road covered in dead crows that is hair-raising in its eerie and awful simplicity. Beckerman has spliced static into the footage loud, jagged, a couple of quick and dirty “effects” included. If you’re going to go the found-footage route, you might as well try to find a new way to approach the material. And Beckerman has.

Watch Alien Abduction For Free On Gomovies.