Like one of those Victorian novels that spends a chunk of time laying out its bona fides, Man Finds Tape does a lot of scene-setting early on, establishing the who and the what and the where. This all really happened, it insists. But this being the 21st century rather than the 19th, its claims to authenticity rest on different foundations. Victorians were happy to be fed a yarn about the narrator being told a tale by a stranger in a coaching inn on a dark stormy night, a tale that purportedly came straight from eye-witness accounts. Fast-forward to now and Man Finds Tape does it with a camera, a voiceover and a welter of social media. The truth, such as it is, is out there… on a server in Nevada.
Did the Victorians really buy this “authentication” or did they just see it as warm-up and part of the fun? I suspect the latter. Similarly in Man Finds Tape when we’re asked to believe a story about what amounts to some kind of paranormal possession in a small Texas town because YouTube and Reddit have been invoked, I doubt that a single soul is convinced by it – we’ve all seen The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and a few other “found footage” films and we are no longer taken in, if we ever were.
I’m dissembling, preambling the reader to death, because this film’s claim to authenticity, its setting out of its stall, is in fact a massive part of what it offers. The story as such is wafer thin. It’s the telling of it that’s so interesting, so ingenious, so well done.
Things get going, more or less, with blurry black and white CCTV footage of activity on a main street in a small town. Suddenly, all the people going about their business just stop and slump, asleep on the spot. This includes a man who was crossing the street and is now motionless with his head on his chest, while a white van clearly with a catatonic driver at the wheel heads towards him. Is the guy stock still in front of it going to get run over? We cut to a local TV evangelist (John Gholson), making his religious pitch from his sofa. And cut again to an influencer with an online show called Man Finds Tape. This show is all about the tape he found of himself as a kid asleep in bed. Who shot it and why is what his show was asking.
The show Man Finds Tape, it turns out, made Lucas Page (William Magnuson) something of a star. But that is ancient history – 2022. Lucas gave all that up after a combination of a nasty social media pile-on and a legal threat from someone he accused of being involved in the filming. Now, in the here and now, Lucas is taking a bit of a back seat. Instead his sister, Lynn (Kelsey Pribilski), suddenly back in Larkin after some time away, is setting out to make a documentary about the weird sudden-falling-asleep thing, which she wants Lucas to be part of.
So we have a documentary involving a guy who himself once made a documentary about documentary footage shot when he was a child. Add in the fact that Lucas and Lynn’s parents – both mysteriously dead – owned a video company that shot videos in the days of tape. They also had a sideline putting up security CCTV in town. All these cameras, recordings and layers, the effect is of mirrors reflecting mirrors almost into infinity.
It’s brilliant. A remarkable piece of conceptualising by writer/directors Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall, whose feature debut this is.
With a handful of characters – Lynn and Lucas, the Reverend Endicott Carr, plus Wendy Parker (Nell Kessler) and a bearded stranger with a doctor’s bag referred to only as The Stranger (Brian Villalobos) – Gandersman and Hall put together a demonic horror of the old school doing its best to hide what it’s about. Dracula is in here somewhere, snuggling up to Damian of The Omen and Regan of The Exorcist, to produce a story of infection/possession retooled for the social media era – all this surveillance, of lives led always “on”, what’s it doing to people?
Energetic, creepy, technically remarkable and with something to say, the only really bad thing you can say about Man Finds Tape is that it’s not particularly scary – unsettling, maybe. Scary, no. Good thing, probably. That would make it too much to bear.
Man Finds Tape – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
