SXSW Film Review: Exists

From the get go, Exists doesn’t play with the premise that this footage was found, it’s told from a first person perspective, but that choice is a tool Sanchez chose in lieu of traditional filming techniques. Credits and title cards roll from the start telling you that you’re watching a horror movie that just happens to be from a found-footage perspective.

We begin with a group of friends who are venturing out to a cabin in the woods (because that’s always a good idea). The cabin is owned by the uncle of the two brothers whose idea it was to begin with that they come out here. On a dark and dusty road, miles away from civilization, they hit something in the road. When they check what it is and don’t see anything except a weird figure that ran away screaming, they go about their day. The film takes place in Bastrop, Texas, which some of you may recall was the unfortunate victim of disastrous wildfires that desecrated much of the forest land in the area. This cabin was no exception, the road to the cabin is blocked, and the cabin itself looks like it had been abandoned for years. All seems well until the creature that they might have hit finds them, and begins to terrorize them.

If you can’t tell by now, and if you’ve looked at the marketing materials for the film, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that what you are watching is a Bigfoot film. In fact, the opening title goes out of its way to tell you that there have been no documented accounts of Bigfoot attacks. As silly as that premise is, this film just works on every level. The biggest problem most found footage films is that they suffer from a miserably long first act in which nothing happens, and the action starts pretty quickly in Exists. The cast is a bunch of young actors who don’t have extensive resumes, but they share a chemistry that had to have come from forming a bond in what was surely miserable filming circumstances. The filmmakers shared that among the problems this production shared were snakes, scorpions, and caterpillars. Caterpillars that bite!

So the big question in a found footage film about Bigfoot/Sasquatch has to be, how is the monster? The monster is fantastic. The man in the suit is Brian Steele, and though you’ve never seen his face, you have almost assuredly seen something he’s been a creature in. He has appeared in films like the Hellboy and Underworld films, Predators, and he’s even been in Bigfoot in the Harry and the Henersons television series. He’s got the skill set to be a terrifying monster and terrifying he is.