This no-budget DIY “found footage” movie is the true story of Chris Chambers (a not-real person played by Joseph Mazzaferro), and is composed of one hour of (not)actual footage of (not)Chris Chambers acquiring and opening his very own Dybbuk Box from the dark web.
A little background, a Dybbuk is a thing from Hebrew folklore, a disembodied spirit with an axe to grind so it possesses a human host (not a box bought on the internet) that it uses to act with on the material plane. Usually a female host that the male spirit enters into on her wedding night via her lady parts. A Dybbuk Box is a thing from internet folklore, stretching back to the halcyon days of 2003, when one Kevin Mannis bought a portable wine cabinet at a yard sale. He did some carving on the box, wrote up a backstory, then sold it on eBay as a haunted box. Kevin’s story (as well as his first name) is actually pretty cool, feel free to read up on it.
Now fast-forward to 2019, and this short movie loosely based on the concept of a Dybbuk Box being sold on the internet. I expect it to be complete silliness, but let’s just give it a go. Might be fun. It’s an hour. I’ve got an hour. The first 15 minutes of that hour is just about him buying and receiving this stinky stinky box and using some plastic Ghost Adventures toys on it which look suspiciously like a radio with a wiffle ball glued to it and a Speed Stick deodorant… which tracks, considering them box be so stanky!
Yes I’m fully aware of the multiple possibilities to use a particular “box” metaphor that have happened but I’m not going there. This is a classy website… about simulated murder and violence and gore and stuff like that. Very classy gore. You creeps.
After a good bit of time wasted playing with his ghosty toys, and a sorta-comical false-start he opens the box, and there’s some garbage in it. He goes away and comes back and the garbage has moved a little. Demons, I say!!
This is pretty indicative of most of the practical effects, simple no budget stuff, you could make this movie yourself, hopefully a little better… like maybe don’t inexplicably linger on the curtains and wait 30 seconds for your prop guy to make them open “all on their own.”
The acting… not awful. The writing is fairly meh, but the acting itself comes off seeming natural. Not forced, not corny. With a movie like this I’d almost call that a “win.” This might be as good as it gets… and it ceases to be believably-delivered when it goes from “monologue” to “dialog.” When making a glorified “creepy pasta” maybe don’t give your non-actress girlfriend a minor role in it.
The majority of the movie is not terribly imaginative, and it seems like they could have done so much more with it – so much of the Paranormal Activity camera stuff they relied upon for spooky content was terribly watered-down (and occasionally plagiarized), they could have worked this trope so much more effectively with just a little more imagination. It’s only an hour, but it really could have been a 20-minute YouTube video. It probably should have been a YouTube video. I’m not 100% certain this wasn’t first a YouTube video. 20 minutes of mediocre movie, 40 minutes of filler.
So much home-made horror is just plain terrible, it’s like a small-town heavy metal band… there’s no shortage of either, and only around 20% of ’em are worth your effort, the rest being bland and generic. So I’d have to grade this on a curve, were I to be the grading sort. Like 2.3 out of 5? It’s not zero. If you go in expecting anything other than your cousin Harold’s student film from state college you’re going to be pissed. Go in with low expectations and you might not hate it.
OR, you could spend those 60 minutes scrolling horror shorts online, there IS in fact some good home-made horror out there. Good horror doesn’t require stars and 100 million production dollars, but it does require a really good set of ideas and some working knowledge of how to execute them. “Dybbuk Box: The Blahblahbleck of Blablah” had a mediocre idea and enough money to rent an AirBnB to shoot it in.
Then go follow some Reddit conversations and online homemade review sites – it takes even LESS talent to put together one of those (bows graciously) and read all the dum-dums doubting whether or not the footage was real. They mention “How come I can’t find his ‘socials’?” or “Why didn’t he cut himself on that glass?” “I can’t say why but I get the feeling this was phony.” I want to point and laugh at these goons, ask “Wait, so you actually had a question that this may or may not be real?? Are you 12?” but then the horror fan in me is wishing I could be that kid who still believes in horror movie Santa Claus. I’ll bet it’s fun, watching “found footage” movies thinking they might be real. I’ll bet that’s amazing, ignorance truly can be bliss.
…but I’ll pass.