Review: Deadstream
Seeing is Power
By Clara Pellegrini
“I need to take a look at this”. The phrase is uttered by the streamer Shawn Ruddy to the two GoPro cameras which, separately but simultaneously, are filming his own face and the fixed plan of his point of view, as he places a new camera in front of the haunted house where he will spend the night. Deadstream, by Vanessa and Joseph Winter (US, UK, 2022, Midnight Movies), a screenlife movie of trash horror which delves into the metalinguistic exaggeration of the tropes of horror cinema – especially foundfootage and its variations – explores and extrapolates in the same key the markers of an internet culture of “content production”, a model whose prime focus is the personal footage and gains imbued in the image of the individual (concrete and symbolic) in front of and behind the camera.
The incursion into the supernatural is a strategy of undertaking radical engagement, desire of redeeming a reputation, and the thread on which this choice is based is the idea of a supposed absolute control over everything you see. It is precisely in the loss of this mastery that the film opens for the real diversion: the key of exaggeration and self-consciousness/reference to the habits on which we depend, make Deadstream an amalgam of proximities which create a liberating non-place – neither exactly terror nor comedy, but both at once, in modulated degrees of pregnancy.
The disengagement with the logic of definition of genres, relevant mark of the trash category, allows the feature to weave threads of interest and pleasure in the doubly grotesque and bloody practical effects, in the jump scares which hover in the air with a not always fulfilled promise, in the clumsy collisions between the human and the demonic. The suspension of this fidelity opens space for the exacerbation of the exaggerated and the absurd, the moving forces of the exercise. The sharp crack brings the lunacy to the point at which the order reverses: it is the ghost who is filming, the GoPro on the phantom’s head and afterwards the moment which devolves both the privileged point of view as well as the blows sustained by the protagonist when he succumbs to the inescapable force of the supernatural. If vision is the area of dispute in the film, Deadstream encounters its greatest force in the inversion of the power hierarchy: the opening for the ambiguity of the genre boundaries.