special quasi-seasonal crossover post
Amish Witches: The True Story Of Holmes County (2016) - so i found out about this one recently and instantly wanted to watch it for two reasons
- it’s a lifetime channel movie but it’s also (kinda) a found footage one, and as someone recently falling ever further down the rabbit hole of cheap found footage horror films i was very intrigued by the idea of this mutant conflation of house styles
- i was delighted by the specific mix of found footage content and the recurring tv movie interest in amishsploitation. like there are scenes in this movie where the amish girls get the visiting documentarians to wire up their barn (and bedrooms!) with little cctv cams, and then most of the last third of the movie is watching them creep around in bonnets while overlay text says CAMERA B - WEAVING ROOM. english, we have need of your paranormal activity movies. i think the worst thing about found footage is the handwavey way the format sometimes tries to justify itself as having something or other to do with How We Live Now, so i do enjoy the distortions that has to go through in the drive to absorb new forms of generic content. like, say what you will about the amish but i gotta presume “everyone is videotaping each other all the time” is less of a topical issue with them in general.
unfortunately this one is not um good by any other metric… the most fun i had with it was watching some sketchy pirate copy where the guy who recorded it was obviously watching something else in the background and micing it by accident, so every so often there’d be weird unrelated ghost dialogue or bursts of reality tv music. either that or the version i watched was haunted by a real life amish witch who loved trap house. the other interesting thing about this is the sense that they didn’t really know what found footage was or meant. most of the shots are pretty identical to a regular lifetime movie in framing and construction, except with a little bit more shakycam and constantly going in and out of focus. it does get kind of funny when there’s camera closeups and reaction shots in the same conversation and you gotta assume the diegetic cameraman is standing six inches in front of these women filming them while they talk. there’s also a good bit where the cameraman has to hide from a bishop, but still gets the reaction shots somehow. the bishop is played by one of bob odenkirk’s fake beards from mr show.
other details i enjoyed: the leader of the documentary crew is dressed like the girl from that game The Medium the whole time. in a rare variant of phone face, the main amish boy absolutely looks like someone who owns a ps5. i did like some of the parts with the various amish girls sniping at each other, and the one cousin noone’s seen in years who shows up abruptly and starts causing drama. there’s always one.
as a horror movie it is bad, all the scares are “loud noise” or in one climactic sequence “hand reaches out from behind a door”. it does do the thing i always find interesting in horor movies abt witches in that there’s some vague gesturing at ideas of patriarchial violence and the unfair scapegoating of herbal remedies etcetera but the eventual conclusion always has to be that witches themselves are real and evil and will getcha.
writer/producers shannon and eric evangelista’s other work includes amish mafia, return to amish, breaking amish, breaking amish: brave new world, amish haunting, the real amish witches, and breaking amish: LA.