YellowBrickRoad (2010, directed by Jesse Holland and Andy Milton) is another horror movie in which a group of researchers follows the footsteps of some mysterious disappearance. In this film, it's a New Hampshire town that up and walked into the great north woods in 1939. Basically, the premise is an excuse to maroon a group of diverse personalities in a kind of microcosm and watch them tear each other to pieces. These kinds of films are often POV found footage films. This one, mercifully, is not.
This is a slow-burn kind of movie. It has a deliberate pace and it withholds its secrets. There's some violence, but the violence isn't the aim here. The aim here is to disorient, to discombobulate, to knock the planks of reason out from under the feet of its characters (and, by proxy, the audience). It's a more polished descendent of The Blair Witch Project and it uses most of that film's toolbox: wrong geographies, sounds in the woods (in this film, an incessant distant music), stupid decisions on the part of characters with diminished capacity for reason. There aren't any monsters in this film, or, rather, the monsters are always on screen. They are the people who wander into the woods. The woods themselves are a kind of crucible that brings out the worst in them. Until the end, that is.
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