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Sundance 2012: Real-life scares at screening of ‘V/H/S’

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A late-night screening of the found-footage horror film ‘V/H/S’ at Sundance yielded disturbing news: Shortly into the screening, one person had left the theater and fainted in the lobby while another had exited with nausea.

Producer Roxanne Benjamin, posting on Twitter, said that EMTs were called to the scene, that the event was not staged and ‘it was scary and not fun, and everyone is grateful the guy and his girlfriend are OK. And they wanted to go back in the theatre!’ Benjamin would later post that the cause of the couple’s problems were ‘altitude sickness, exhaustion, dehydration and alcohol” and not directly related to the film.

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Either way, the movie is not for the faint of heart. Benjamin and fellow producer Brad Miska brought together six directors -- Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glen McQuaid, Joe Swanberg and a collective known as Radio Silence -- to create six short horror films based on the notion of “found footage.”

The frame story follows a trio of hoodlums who come across a cache of videotapes after they break into a house; each of the shorts portrays what the burglars supposedly see on the tapes. The shorts each have a unique style and offer the requisite twists and gore.

Wingard shot the hoodlum story, while Bruckner tells the tale of three young men who get more than they bargain for when they film a night of carousing. West created a home movie of a couple whose road trip goes off course. Though all the filmmakers worked independently of one another, there are recurring themes and images involving such subjects as voyeurism.

During the Q&A after the screening, with all the directors present, Bruckner summed up many of the shorts in the anthology when he said his inspiration was to make a viewer ‘feel guilty, maybe, about the things that you thought about doing with a camera, maybe things you’ve done with a camera, things you plan on doing with a camera and punish you severely for it.”

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-- Mark Olsen in Park City, Utah
twitter.com/indiefocus

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