Everyone Underestimated This Found Footage Horror Movie — Until Its Ending

The Big Picture

• The Gallows
  subverts typical horror movie conventions by giving depth to its characters, leading to shocking plot twists.
• The film pairs routine horror elements with haunting scenes of violence, showcasing the intense suffering of its teenage characters.
• The Gallows
  surprises viewers with a finale that reveals the seemingly innocent character as a cunning mastermind behind the terrifying events.

Found footage is an ingenious medium, a horror subgenre that twists the audience’s perceptions to root them in the horror onscreen. There are still many innovative projects in this subgenre, like the ongoing V/H/S anthology series or the original mind-bending Paranormal Activity. But for every indie success, there are plenty of mainstream attempts that fail to do anything innovative — which is what people assumed about 2015’s The Gallows, directed by Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff. A superficial view of the film reveals a rather basic plot: a group of teens find themselves in their school in the middle of the night, being stalked by an evil force (conveniently captured by a camcorder that one teen can’t seem to put down). It’s accurate to recognize so much of this premise as your average horror fodder, but it’s how the movie subverts these basic ideas that reveal the true terror of the film. It uses the audience’s expectations of these tired concepts against them, luring them into believing they know exactly what to expect before shocking them with a level of suffering and dread they never could have anticipated.

‘The Gallows’ Has a Basic Beginning

Like any found footage horror movie, The Gallows’ story is told by a character who just can’t seem to put their camera down. In this plot, that’s the high school jock Ryan (Ryan Shoos), a cocky football player who begins the movie documenting the daily life of him and his friend, Reese (Reese Mishler). Reese is a markedly kinder character than the brash Ryan and is currently playing the lead in their school’s play, The Gallows, a melodrama with a finale hanging stunt that, 20 years previously, took another student’s life when it malfunctioned. He’s doing all of this to try and impress fellow thespian Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown), his crush, and a huge theater fan who is noticeably different from this genre’s typical love interests. Throughout the first act, Reese is extremely nervous, wanting to be around Pfeifer but petrified to showcase his shoddy acting to the entire student body, so Ryan has an idea: they sneak into the school that night and tear up the set, hopefully ruining any chances of the play being put on.

The film reveals a surprising depth to this common setup, with Reese especially subverting the “popular jock” archetype with his surprisingly adorable affection for Pfeifer. It shows a subtle vulnerability to him, granting an empathy that makes the entire film much more compelling. The movie does the same with Ryan; he fits much easier within the jerk persona teen horrors usually feature by doing things like bullying nerds and mocking theater to make his friends laugh, but the film shows that he feels conflicted when he does these things. It doesn’t justify his actions, but the internal conflict he has debating between hurting someone’s feelings or gaining validation from those around him is a real turmoil teenagers face today. These quiet developments characterizeboth boys as foolish, but also innocent, and remind watchers that beyond being horror stereotypes they’re kids at the end of the day — which makes it jaw-droppingly horrifying when the film begins subjecting them to intense acts of suffering.

Horror is Easy When The Characters Are Simple

Ryan and Reese move forward with their plan and recruit Ryan’s girlfriend, Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford), to destroy the set. They’re stopped by the surprise appearance of Pfeiffer, who claims she saw Reese’s car parked outside and wanted to see what they were doing. The four then realize that something has locked them inside the school. The film begins to follow the plotting of similar ghost stories, the quartet discovering that the spirit of the boy who died two decades before, Charlie Grimille (Ariel Castro), has decided to avenge himself by unleashing terror onto a new generation of teens. It’s all rather run-of-the-mill for a scary movie — until Ryan shockingly gets his leg get gruesomely broken by the ghost. The film spends a dreadful amount of time on the young man’s screams of pain and fear as the specter confronts him. It’s a painful, gut-wrenching scene as viewers watch Ryan, his previous bluster gone, whimper and drag himself across the blood-soaked ground, pleading for his life. It’s a reminder that while misguided, these characters are still just teenage high school students, making the suffering Charlie subjects them to so much worse.

These scenes are reminiscent of gorier found-footage movies like The Poughkeepsie Tapes, a film that spends as much time on its victims’ anguish as it does their actual deaths. The Gallows is subversive already for how it pairs its routine elements with these haunting scenes of violence, with Cassidy’s subsequent death being as horrifying as Ryan’s, but where it indeed twists all expectations is its finale. Reese and Pfeiffer’s bond has been growing amidst all of this mayhem, with Pfeiffer creating a kinder, more heartfelt version of a final girl than viewers may be used to, and Reese realizing his love for her and understanding that he may have to give up his life for hers. It’s in this heartbreaking moment that Pfeiffer begins to…monologue. Reese starts to panic, watching the girl he’s giving his life for uncaringly recite the script of their play, his drawn-out death by hanging only growing more terrifying as viewers begin to understand the truth: Pfeiffer has been in on it the entire time. Revealed to be Charlie’s mournful daughter, this seemingly innocent genial teenage girl is shown to be a cunning mastermind, playing on the emotions of everyone around her to not only lure them further into her deceased father’s traps but also ensure that each of their deaths is as painful and devastating as possible.

There’s More to ‘The Gallows’ Than Meets the Eye

The Gallows is a film with a thoroughly creative approach, but it’s not without its faults. Even with its attempts to create a more layered plot, the film tends to fall into more repetitive scares and the plot elements of your typical found footage films. Still, the movie finds every opportunity to subvert expectations by giving what could have been your basic stereotypes some depth and showing the hidden evil behind seemingly innocent characters. It concentrates on providing every person onscreen with some complexity, making watchers question whether these are the one-note archetypes they’d been expecting or perhaps something more before putting them through copious amounts of pain and suffering. It’s a callous twist on the genre that plays on the audience’s perceptions, giving them the basic horror plot they’d been expecting in the most disturbing way possible.

The Gallows is Available to Stream on Amazon Prime in the U.S.

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