Due to COVID-19, theaters are still closed. Streaming services are the only means to view new content, other than drive-ins. The releases of bigger horror films, like Candyman and Antebellum, have been delayed. As a result, this has given the chance for indie films to find an audience. Recently, an article at AV Club caught my attention regarding the success of Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made. It snagged Amazon Prime’s top-trending title last month, during the height of isolation. Though initially hesitant to watch the flick, namely because it sounded gimmicky, I gave it a stream. On the one hand, the low-budget film (shot for $60,000), has a few aspects going for it, namely its 1970s aesthetic. That said, the plot and characters are too thin, and the result is a film that doesn’t add up to much of a cohesive plot or narrative arc.

Directed by David Amito and Michael Laicini, Antrum is initially about “the deadliest film ever made,” so cursed that a theater in Budapest burned down when it screen the film in 1988. Faux film reviewers and horror hounds are interviewed in the opening minutes, and it’s a clever use of the exhausted found footage subgenre. It builds hype for the movie within a movie, that is the story of Oralee (Nicole Tompkins) and Nathan (Rowan Smyth), siblings who embark on an adventure to dig a hole to the pits of hell to rescue their recently euthanized dog because Nathan has visions he’s been sent to the fiery place, for whatever reason. Oralee locates a spot, telling her brother it’s where Lucifer landed when he was kicked out of heaven. They grab shovels and start digging, and that’s about as much of a plot as the film offers.

From there, the story loses its narrative and descends into a film of bizarre, often disjointed images, some of them unsettling. There are strange noises in the woods. At one point, an image of Lucifer’s face lingers on the screen longer than the creepy flashes of Pazuzu’s face that haunt The Exorcist. There are even a few Nazis hanging around a massive demonic statue, but they serve no real purpose to the plot, other than a sense of danger.

If you set narrative gripes aside, the film deserves some props for the way it was shot, mimicking 1970s Satanic cult films. The grainy quality serves the film well, especially when juxtaposed with some of the images that flash on screen. It’s a clever aesthetic and perhaps the best aspect of Antrum.

There’s also something to be said for the attention the film has garnered. The AV Club article notes that when it payed at film festivals in 2018, it caught the attention of Eduardo Sanchez, co-director of The Blair Witch Project, the film that started the found footage hype back in 1999. Like Antrum, The Blair Witch Project used found footage to bend reality. It had one of the most clever marketing campaigns in all of horror history, creating missing person posters for its three lead actors and a website during the early days of the internet dedicated to their “disappearance.” Antrum uses fake interviews to hype what follows in the rest of the film.

Antrum won’t have the legacy and influence of The Blair Witch Project. No other found footage film will, but it does do something unique and interesting with the tired found footage genre. It’s slow-hype and word of mouth, including teens on TikTok debating if Antrum is actually a cursed film, is commendable, especially for a film shot on a budget of $60,000 by a studio (Uncork’d Entertainment) known for knock-offs and b movies. COVID has given some indie movies a bigger audience. Give Antrum a stream. Ignore its narrative in-cohesion and enjoy its 70s Satanic art house aesthetic.