Timing is everything. The Last Broadcast was made and released a year before The Blair Witch Project, was made on digital film (one of, if not the first!) for about $900 and was even seen by the makers of The Blair Witch Project while they were still working on their film. It was even set to be screened at the same Sundance as The Blair Witch Project, until it was pulled at the last minute (it featured there the following year). And yet of these two films, only one of them ended up a worldwide phenomenon and kickstarting a whole new sub-genre of horror, while the other ended up in relative obscurity. Such is life.
The Last Broadcast presents itself as more of a mockumentary than as a found-footage film - although to add confusion it is in part a mockumentary about found footage. The filmmaker, David Leigh, is making a film investigating the mysterious "Pine Barrens Murders", where four people went in search of the Jersey Devil but only one of them returned. The survivor, James Suerd, is the only suspect and is tried and convicted of the three murders, and so Leigh's film is equal parts trying to prove Suerd's innocence and conducting his own investigation into the murders.
The Last Broadcast feels very much like a true crime documentary that you might catch on a crime documentary channel. It's straightforward, not particularly sensationalistic, and at times genuinely creepy. I think that part of this is down to the filmmaker/narrator, David Leigh - there's just something about the tone of his voice that makes me feel deeply uncomfortable while watching.
The slow build of the film also gives us a gradual ramping up of the tension and uneasiness surrounding everything. What starts out as a simple documentary film about a bizarre triple murder becomes an investigation where either the killer is still out there... or is in fact the infamous Jersey Devil itself. The supernatural is at first just a background detail (the victims hosted a cable access show called "Fact or Fiction?" and were searching for the Jersey Devil as part of an episode) but as things continue it comes more and more to the forefront, until you really cannot be sure if there isn't a supernatural cause to all of this after all. I'm not (too) ashamed to admit that, by about three-quarters of the way through the film the first time I watched it, I was watching from behind a door, remote control in hand, ready to hit the Pause button and run screaming if anything I saw proved too much for me (it was 15 years ago, I was a different - mainly thinner - person then).
And then there's the ending. Even 15 years later, I'm not too sure what to make of it, and opinion is divided everywhere. On the one hand it comes out of nowhere - or so you think, as looking back through the film there are tiny clues leading up to this point and so makes some twisted amount of sense - and is a genuine shock (it was a tense 30 seconds behind that door before I could breathe again and start the film back up). On the other hand, it is also very jarring, both in its suddenness and its abrupt shift in perspective. By the end of the film you're left thinking, "Well, what happens now?" and while that may have been the filmmakers' intent, it can also be frustrating to be left with the... shall we say "open-ended" ending that the film ends on.
Technologically-speaking, The Last Broadcast hasn't aged too well in places either. Back in 1998 it was indeed one of the first films to be shot and streamed entirely in digital, and its use of things such as the cable access channels, internet and IRC in its plot were all pretty new and ahead of the curve back then. But technology moves fast, and what was new and cutting edge then looks distinctively dated now. This isn't entirely a bad thing though - a documentary film made about events some years ago is of course going to have dated elements, and it helps set the scene all the better for the Pine Barrens Murders and the search for the Jersey Devil.
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