By Drew Dietsch
| Published
I love getting to recommend movies to people. Not in some clickbait, soulless, formula-manipulating way like so much of the Internet when it comes to highlighting movies. It’s great when you can discover a movie and feel a legitimate passion about sharing it with others. I keep this spirit alive on my weekly movie club podcast, GenreVision, but I also like to bring it here when appropriate.
My most recent recommendation like this was Punishment Park, a film from 1971. This time, I thought I’d give the spotlight to a much more recent movie but one that deserves just as much rediscovery as Punishment Park. And this time, it’s from my favorite genre of them all: horror.
This is Savageland.
The Story Of Savageland
Savageland is a 2017 faux documentary about an Arizona border town whose entire population is wiped out over the course of a single night. Only one survivor is found, a photographer named Francisco Salazar, and he is immediately considered the perpetrator of the town’s mass murder. Strangely, Francisco lost a roll of photographs he took during the night. When the film is discovered, the photos paint a very different picture: a town besieged by rabid human monsters on a rampage.
The film presents itself in true documentary style, structured around Salazar’s photographs and a number of talking head interviews from different perspectives. You get opposing figures like local police who are convinced of Salazar’s guilt and more sympathetic viewpoints like a fellow photographer. By the end, you start to see that what happened in that tiny little town of undocumented Mexican workers is not an isolated incident.
Why I Love Savageland
It takes a lot for me to get thoroughly excited about a found footage movie. The format often brushes up against me unless it can make a strong enough case for such a specific stylistic choice. However, I’m a sucker for faux documentaries that commit to the bit. Savageland does exactly that to a degree that deserves recognition.
But even more than that, I love that Savageland takes the concept of found footage and injects it directly into the narrative. The documentary focuses on the literal found footage Salazar shot over the course of the night. It’s a clever acknowledgement of the concept that crafts a story where we can see how society would react to actual found footage.
Unsurprisingly, Savageland presents a political and social inhumanity that will be far too familiar to anyone with the capacity for empathy. Anyone with half a brain will see exactly what Savageland is saying with its platform. It’s the kind of horror that’s become all too real today.
I’m always hoping smaller movies of sincere quality will get the audience they deserve through time. However, it’s up to anyone with a platform of any size to do their best to champion these movies and the messages they are trying to convey. Otherwise, they will be doomed to obscurity. No algorithm is going to give a movie like Savageland the appreciation it deserves. It’s up to us actual humans to shine the light on it.
It’s not too hard to find a way to watch Savageland. It’s out there on a couple free streaming services and You can definitely find it on a Tube site of some notoriety. Give it a watch if you need to see how horror is the best genre for understanding the horrors of today.
