Extra, extra! Among the runners and riders of the EIFF’s Main Competition for this year sits Snapshot, the first feature from indie director Joseph Archer, writer Cathy Wippell and their studio, Silicon Gothic, which aims to lend a tangibility to the man-made problems by presenting contemporary issues as physical monsters.
It’s extremely fitting, then, that this eerie found-footage horror movie is set against the backdrop of Victorian London, with a plucky and boisterous group of female spiritualists looking to find answers to their morbid curiosities by investigating and (with any luck) catching Jack the Ripper, one of the era’s most sinister and shadowy spectres.
‘It was a man who did this. It was a man.’
I spoke to both Archer and Wippell (who also stars as Minnie, one of the most determined women in the group) on the lasting legacy of The Ripper, for better or for worse. ‘The Ripper narrative has historically been written and rewritten and rewritten by men’ muses Wippell. ‘And the same thing is happening now with the Manosphere – it’s never about the gendered violence towards the women, it’s all about the men at the heart of the narrative […] so it was just really nice that these women are the subject of the film and it’s not about a guy trying to investigate it.’
Interestingly, there is still one man in every scene of the film: Tamworth, played by Tom Stourton. He’s the group’s cameraman, whose tapes and wax cylinders have now been unearthed in the modern day to bring 19th-century London onto the big screen, though the images themselves are, stylishly, limited to a mere circle in the centre; a pinhole lens. Tamworth’s happy to put the focus on the women rather than hog the limelight, with Stourton getting the occasional line of airy dialogue, a fittingly spooky narrator who lends atmosphere to the film’s already creepy dark corridors and dank alleyways.
As found footage goes, it’s an interesting approach to swap out shaky camcorders or omniscient security footage and take things all the way back to the very first steps of the medium for a horror piece. There’s been discussion about how plausible such coverage would really be in that early, early era of filmmaking where cameras were unwieldy beasts, but if you were to venture down that avenue with every film you saw, you’d still be trying to wrap your head around the complexities of flux capacitors or the aerodynamics of strapping five-hundred balloons to a house and hoping it’ll get you and the local Boy Scout to South America.
Perhaps in a lesser film, it’d be harder to suspend disbelief, but I never once found it a distracting issue; just an intriguing proposition for a genre that has, this year alone, dealt with distressingly powerful wishes that would, in reality, probably not be sold in corner shops and inter-dimensional doorways that most likely aren’t sitting at the back of your local furniture shop, no matter how nebulous and labyrinthine those liminal spaces may be.
‘It’s the first of its kind’ says Archer, of that unique format, shot entirely through a circle, ‘you won’t see anything like it at this festival or any other festival’. That idea of creating shots where so little of the image is actually visible proved challenging, but there’s an element of misinformation running through Snapshot that ties in well with the idea of, quite literally, not being able to see the full picture.
‘1888, in some ways, was like the birth of kind of sensational misinformation by the media, with Jack the Ripper and things like that.’ continues the director. ‘That’s the way we like to put it. And also it’s the real birth of spiritualism and photography and women’s groups forming. And it’s like, how do we combine all these things together and set it in 1888 in this crazy year? So all these concepts came together.’
The melding of these elements and themes plays out well on-screen, especially given the dinginess of the film’s locations. With these Victorian settings, you can often find things look a little cheap – doubly so for films with comparatively less investment and backing than others in the Competition – but Snapshot manages to avoid those pitfalls. The team have chosen their sets well and there is a palpable sense of looking into an off-kilter and eerie otherworld; that Gothic era that we can all clearly envision in our heads. It could well have been shot down in our very own infamous Edinburgh vaults.
A memorable and transportive proposition among the lineup, Snapshot manages to invite its horror audience along for a descent down into the Victorian underworld with enough chills to carry its twisting story through. You can never quite tell what’s real and what’s fake, which may leave some confused, but that same ambiguity is a purposeful and confident choice on Archer and Wippell’s part. I left not quite knowing what I’d just seen, but after a dozen other films at the festival, this one really did seem like an unorthodox treat for fans of the found footage genre.
This film has an age rating of 15.
Snapshot is showing at EIFF 17th/18th August, with tickets available here. It has yet to secure further UK distribution.
