SAVAGELAND (2015) mines visceral fear and political fury out of horrors both fictional, and all too real
This stunning "found photos" mockumentary roots its supernatural terrors in the grim realities of life in America.
“The moment he stopped being a photographer, and decided to do a single human action to save somebody else, is the moment that changed everything for him. You give up being a photographer, and you become a human being, and you lose what has kept you alive and safe through the rest of the process.”
What would it look like, from a normal individual’s terrified, frantically photographed point of view, to witness the ground-zero beginnings of a supernaturally infectious apocalypse, long before it consumed the world, before it was ever admitted as a factual threat, and before the evil force had a definitive lore, or even a name?
Savageland all-too-convincingly reimagines both a familiar format (found footage now abstracted further into a small collection of found photographs), and an oft-told tale of horror fiction (a siege upon a small town from violently malevolent forces), finding a new seam of fear to mine from old material by presenting it through the guise of a true crime documentary exposing a terrible miscarriage of justice. One which just so happens to also be the grisly prologue to the kind of larger story we’re used to seeing be told much farther down the line, commonly from a more omniscient, spectacle-filled perspective.
Think of Savageland as an important historical document in waiting, to one day resurface many years after the fact, and be recognised for its unheeded prophetic value through the hindsight of some future journalist’s extensive research, yet which would only get mentioned on a single page, or even just a paragraph, in the prelude to a World War Z-style oral history.
But what is the mortal threat at the heart of Savageland? At first glance, I thought the answer was simple, with a readily available name for the evil phenomenon being obvious, yet unsaid for the purposes of keeping the story grounded. But the film plays things more ambiguously than you might initially think on a cursory examination. What is the ungodly plague that desecrates the border town of Sangre De Cristo? What are these uncanny, people-shaped monsters, petrifyingly captured in stark black-and-white snapshots, their inhuman faces grainily frozen in motion-blurred rictuses of hungry bloodlust, eyes aglow with animalistic depravity? Is this The Walking Dead? Is this •REC 2? Or is this 30 Days of Night (which would certainly befit the found photos being visually reminiscent of Ben Templesmith’s artwork from the original graphic novel)?
For Savageland, those are all possibilities left open to interpretation. The what and the why of those ghoulish things seen in the pivotal 36 photographs isn’t as important to the film’s concerns as the innocent people whose lives were taken on that one dark night, and the person who shot the unsettling pictures to begin with: Francisco Salazar - a solitary, introverted man with a natural born instinct for photography, an “illegal” immigrant from across the border, and the sole survivor of a town-destroying massacre, who in turn gets all of the blame pinned on him.
This is where the film gets under your skin in a left-field manner reliant not just on the horror of the found photos, but on the horror of witnessing a corrupt police force, infuriatingly unfair judicial system, and a distressingly, unapologetically racist cross section of American society collectively collaborate to scapegoat, discredit, and destroy someone who they think just looks like a killer, regardless of any evidence that could disprove their conclusions. A man they automatically assume is somehow inherently subhuman, incapable of decency or morality, and uncaring for the sanctity of life that these sanctimonious judges of character idly claim to abide by, even as their distastefully hateful words and bigoted attitudes betray that the ignorant preconceived notions they espouse, about the culture of his birthplace being a breeding ground for evil, are based on nothing more than the colour of his skin being different from theirs.
It’s here that Savageland becomes a howl of righteously furious political outrage, making the classic move of using the vehicle of its horror movie premise to drive home some bleakly pointed observations about the dark sides of society and humanity, just as powerfully as when George A. Romero ended the original Night of the Living Dead with our remaining African-American hero getting unceremoniously killed by callous police officers who just saw him as nothing more than another monster.
So deeply entrenched is the film in confronting America’s history of racism, colonisation, oppression, and genocide on just its own nation, that an interview segment with real-life journalist/author Lawrence Ross involves him listing off US history’s litany of racially motivated mass killings, including the notorious 1921 Tulsa massacre that we all (by which my broad generalisation means predominantly younger, whiter generations such as myself) probably wouldn’t know anything about to even call it “notorious” until the HBO Watchmen series came along in 2019, four years after this less-widely-seen independent horror film.
The fact that Savageland was made not only before Trump was elected President, but before he ever even announced he was running, is a testament to how the film continues to be stomach-churningly evergreen in its depressing relevancy to our times of fascistic anti-immigration sentiment, populist racist rhetoric, and law enforcement brutality.
It’s in these moments of the film, when the intolerance and incompetence and injustice wrought by the regular human monsters of the story feels too real, that I have to re-remind myself that these are actors playing characters in a work of fiction. This story isn’t real… but it easily could be… and in a way, it already is.
At its core, Savageland is about dehumanisation. The insidiously destructive impulse that people have to not just minimise the value of the lives of various denominations of humanity they somehow find fault with, but to actively convince themselves and others that those people aren’t really people at all, and don’t deserve to be treated as such. Throughout history, the same words get bandied about by the hateful to describe the hated - “animals”; “vermin”; “insects”; “swarms”; “beasts”; “monsters”. Bit by bit, as the individual and collective personhood gets stripped away en masse from a demographic deemed too distasteful to deserve to exist, it allows the supposedly more civilised, more real people to engage in words and deeds that should be plainly obvious are barbaric and cruel, were it not for them directing their verbal and physical abuse at those they’ve been conditioned to see as the true barbarians, as unconvincing, uncanny facsimiles of real people, who are without lives or cultures or hearts or souls to worry about destroying.
But by the time of the film’s third act revelation of what took place during the final few photographs, the startlingly haunting display of heartbreaking humanity that we see Francisco Salazar exhibited for others, during the undeniably worst moments of his ordeal that blood-soaked night, moved me close to tears, both for the tragedy in what we discover he saw, and for the soul-shattering magnitude of the trauma he endured by being there for someone else, a choice that will forever leave him a broken shell of a man, cursed to never be able to forget or live with what he saw and heard, yet still a choice he would never go back on.
Rarely ever do found footage (or in this case, found footage-adjacent) horror mockumentary-type movies leave me shaken to my bones by not just scaring me in some way, but profoundly wrecking me on an emotional level, their impact lingering long after the final frame. Lake Mungo is often the epitomising example of this viewing experience, of course. And for me, and whatever my opinion is worth, Savageland is on that same level of essential genre-defining excellence.
