13 Nights of Shocktober: The Last Broadcast

by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and, October becomes the month long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 7: "Why don't you do a show on the Jersey Devil?" The Last Broadcast

The Last Broadcast is an interesting time capsule from the late 90’s. It presents itself as a documentary attempting to uncover the truth behind the events of an episode of a New Jersery cable access TV show called Fact or Fiction that led to the death of everyone involved except for one person. The two hosts of the show and a man claiming to be a psychic set out into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to try and film the Jersey Devil, a mysterious hooved wild creature of urban legend, at the suggestion of one of their viewers. Only the psychic comes out of the Pine Barrens alive and he is arrested and convicted for the murder of the other men; but this documentary is meant to prove that something else happened that night.

The key to this mystery is the tangle of videotape the Fact or Fiction crew shot the night they were murdered. We get to see most of the footage from the crew’s final night. They are led through the woods by the psychic and when they become lost tempers flare. While the narrator of the documentary interviews people involved with the case, the damaged tape is being rendered into viewable images. The narrator’s monotone voice gives the whole movie a feeling of unease. As the distorted images from the damaged videotape become clearer, tree branches, a hint of eyes, a face, a shape of some kind, they also become creepier.

The Last Broadcast was made in 1998 but is about events that took place in 1995 when the internet was new and unfamiliar. In an attempt to gain more viewers the hosts of Fact or Fiction began broadcasting on the internet and using a new program called Internet Relay Chat, what we would call voice chat today, to interact with their viewers. It is through the Internet Relay Chat that one viewer suggests they do a show on the Jersey Devil and because this was a time when the internet could provide anonymity, there is also a mystery about the viewer that made the suggestion.

The Last Broadcast is reportedly the first feature length film to be shot on digital equipment. It was distributed digitally to movie theaters. It also predates The Blair Witch Project which was also a low budget horror film about filmmakers lost in the woods that also presented itself as a documentary. These films paved the way for the subgenre of horror movies that would become known as “found footage” movies in the 2000’s. This may not be the strongest mystery movie but the details about the production and its contributions to the horror genre and independent filmmaking along with its portrait of the mid to late 1990’s make it worth watching.