Recently, a Taiwanese film on Netflix has been making a noise on the internet world for its realistic impact. Incantation was released in Taiwan last March 2022 but is now available internationally on Netflix. It was directed by Kevin Ko and written by Ko and Chang Che-wei, the film uses a found-footage, documentary approach to chronicle its disturbing story.
The story of the film was inspired by a 2005 incident in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in which a family claimed that they had been possessed by folk demons and which resulted in the eldest daughter’s death. In the film, Ronan (Tsai Hsuan-yen) has finally recovered enough from the events six years before to take custody of her daughter Dodo (Huang Sin-ting), who has been living in a foster home.
However, Dodo is soon affected by strange “baddies” and becomes dangerously ill. Flashbacks to six years before reveal that Ronan was once part of a ghostbusters YouTube channel alongside her boyfriend Dom (Sean Lin) and his cousin Yuan (Wen Ching-yu).
They went to a remote village to see a Chen clan ritual, worshiping a god called Buddha-Mother. As the film unfolds, the audience learns more about the curse that they triggered with their trip there and how it is still affecting Ronan and those around her.
MOCKUMENTARY APPROACH
A mockumentary is a staging technique by which the audience is led to believe that a created work of fiction is actually a documentary. Mockumentary is a term coined from “mock” and “documentary” and holds the meaning of something which mimics or imitates (or, in some cases, parodies). Mockumentary staging techniques present a fictional work as a non-fictional documentary. One factor that led today’s film industry to favor the mockumentary style is that filming itself has become readily accessible to ordinary people.
In the film Incantation, it utilizes its mockumentary format to draw the audience in and make them feel involved. At one point, Ronan even asks the viewers to say a blessing with her. The project is framed as a plea for help for Ronan’s daughter, and Dodo is cute enough to tug on the audience’s heartstrings.
MOCKUMENTARY IN FILMS
Today’s horror movies often make use of mockumentary techniques, documentary-like imagery, rather than following conventional, storyline-based filming techniques. It started with the 1999 mockumentary, The Blair Witch Project, which is a mix of media tie-ins, including the use of the Internet as an advertising tool. This movie is presented under the premise that it is recorded footage of an incident, implying that the sequences of the storyline were recorded through POV shots.
Also, in the movie, The Fourth Kind—an actress appears at the story’s opening saying “I am actress Milla Jovovich and I will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler. This film is a dramatization of events that occurred October 2000 in Alaska. To better explain the events of this story, the actual archived footage was included. This footage was acquired from psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler, who has personally documented over 65 hours of video and audio materials.”
This presents the film’s premise that the composition of this film is a mix of dramatization and archived footage of a psychologist.
CONCLUSION
Incantation is full of frightening images and some body horror but is more unsettling than scary because of its disjointed editing and pacing. The film is overly long and becomes somewhat boring in the middle and the out-of-chronology format is confusing, making it difficult to keep track of what’s happening at times.
Mockumentaries generally attempt to challenge the notion of reality rather than falsely claim ownership of it. The question of what is real and what is not is at stake. And because mockumentaries pose that query, it should theoretically be easier for audience to transplant their resulting skepticism of reality onto other films shot with documentary film narratives and visual aesthetics.
But with these, millions of television viewers seem entranced not only with “reality TV” shows, but to the type of shows, like mockumentaries, believe them to be wholly real and authentic.
