‘Lake Mungo’ Is The Unnerving Found Footage Masterpiece You Need This Halloween

Horror cinema, and horror fiction in general, is often at its most viscerally effective when it exists at the intersection of horrific and mundane. Halloween is a movie about babysitters just trying to go about their night. You’re Next and The Invitation both begin as awkward dinner parties. Carrie starts as a story of bullying. When the nightmares creep toward us from a familiar place, a place that looks not unlike where we live or work or study, we’re more likely to lean forward, and to keep the lights on until the movie is over.

The found footage and mockumentary subgenres of horror have, of course, pushed this juxtaposition to new levels by introducing the idea that the human characters aren’t just participants in the story, but participants in making the story. There’s an extra layer of engagement there that just reaches out and grabs certain viewers instantly, particularly in an age when we all have a video camera in our pockets.

In the right hands, that sense of participation, of caring about people who are taking an active role in the horrors playing out onscreen, can reach deeper still into new levels of metaphor, meaning, and gut-wrenching terror, until at last it feels like we’re watching something so perfectly unnerving that we could swear it was real.

Lake Mungo, one of the most unnerving and underseen horror films of the 21st century, performs this trick to fantastic, nerve-shredding effect, and if you still haven’t seen this modern classic from Australia, this Halloween season should be your moment to rectify that.

Writer/director Joel Anderson’s 2005 film about a family’s grief and coping mechanisms in the wake of the death of their daughter takes a hybrid mockumentary/found footage approach that begins in the form of a well-shot, thoughtful documentary like one you might find on your local public broadcast station. A camera crew follows the strange saga of the Palmer family who, after the drowning death of their daughter Alice, begin experiencing strange phenomena around the house. Is it their grief playing tricks on them? Is it wishful thinking? Are they losing their minds? To try and find out, the surviving Palmer child Mathew begins a series of photography experiments around the house, from static photos of the backyard to cameras placed in hallways at night. When images of Alice start turning up in the footage, the Palmer family starts to believe their daughter might not be as dead as they thought.

This is, on the surface, a rather conventional ghost story narrative from the start, and while Lake Mungo ultimately morphs into something else entirely, the apparent predictability of the opening story beats doesn’t actually matter. Anderson approaches his chosen gimmick with such a clear commitment to stylistic naturalism, from the ordinary coziness of the Palmer house to static shots of streetlamps and treelines around their town, that we are almost instantly fully immersed in the created reality of the Palmers’ lives. The extraordinary performances of the cast – led by Rosie Traynor and David Pledger as Alice’s parents and Martin Sharpe as Mathew – put this sensation absolutely over the top into a territory where we almost feel we know the Palmers personally. Their beautiful naturalistic work in portraying a family that’s just trying to get through each day as sanely as possible is both heartbreaking and truly haunting, and makes us imagine how we each might feel when confronted with a camera crew asking us about the great heartbreak of our lives.

Then there are the haunting images themselves, which both look “real” in the same way that a ghost image you might have seen during a quick Google search looks real and seem to point to something deeper, something even Alice’s family hasn’t fully allowed themselves to imagine. To chart the course of this apparent haunting here would be doing the film a disservice, but there’s more going on in Lake Mungo than a family simply capturing their dead daughter on film in the months following her death, and the way Anderson and company build out that narrative is both truly chilling and emotionally wrenching. As the layers build, and the Palmer family descends deeper into their web of grief and secrets and strange images they can’t fully explain, Lake Mungo becomes less about the ghosts of the dead and more about the ghosts of the living, the things we all carry with us in the wake of losses, and the ways in which those little hauntings in our lives make us question the nature of our world. Are things really that bad, or are we simply projecting our grief onto them to make them more bleak? Are ghosts a real presence in our lives, or do we invent them, and if we had a way to know for sure, would we actually want to?

By the end of the film, we’re left both thoroughly entertained and unsettled, pondering the holes left in our lives by the people who have gone before us, and combing through the many forms of ghosts that linger in our lives. It’s the kind of film that leaves you sleepless in that way that only the most honest, raw horror films can, and the fact that it could have happened next door to you only serves to add an extra layer of visceral power.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire whose work has appeared at Syfy Wire, Mental Floss, Looper, Playboy, and Uproxx, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas, and he’s always counting the days until Christmas. Find him on Twitter: @awalrusdarkly.

Watch Lake Mungo on Amazon Prime Video