Dissemination

Lake Mungo (Joel Anderson, 2008)

Lake Mungo is one of several mockumentary horror films to come out in the past decade, a trend set by The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) but perhaps especially popularized by the recent two Paranormal Activity films (Oren Peli, 2007, Tod Williams, 2010). Unlike the previously mentioned films, Lake Mungo looks like an actual documentary, not simply found footage but rather a collection of interviews complete with questions from an interviewer. The following is rather filled with spoilers, so read on at your own risk.

The film does depend on found footage, especially in terms of the surveillance footage kept by the family or family videos from before. Essentially, the film proclaims to be a documentary about a family of four, where the daughter dies. Especially the mother refuses to accept the death of her daughter when strange pictures surface showing the daughter Alice after her death. The son Mathew even catches Alice on video. An exhumation reveals the corpse to be Alice, so evidently she is dead.
Here, the first interesting twist occurs because we are told that in fact these photos and videos were doctored by the son Mathew to console his mother. Intent on discovering what happened, the mother June reviews the footage intently and discovers that in the video where Mathew posed as Alice, their neighbor is hiding almost off-camera. Clearly, Alice’s last name is not Palmer for no reason, as there are clear references to Twin Peaks here, with Alice having flirted with illicit sex with the older neighbor.

Yet more seems to be going on, as Alice was in contact with a psychic because she had seen herself die. For this reason, she was unhappy and buried her dearest belongings on a school camp, including her cell phone. When these belongings are dug up, a video on Alice’s phone reveals a figure walking towards, a figure the father recognizes as the corpse of Alice.

In an astounding final scene, we see an old videotape of Alice alongside the final session her mother June had with the psychic. The scene is crosscut between Alice and June and we hear them tell the same story from different points of view, ending with a cut to June and the rest of the family moving out of their family home, which is the dream Alice related to the psychic. As the credits roll, we see the same photos with the fake Alice but a zoom to a different part of the photo, where another ghostly presence of Alice is evident.

What is so special about Lake Mungo, then, is that it dares trust its own story for long enough to not reveal anything before the final scene and so keeps the viewer in the dark about the actual status of the supernatural in the film. There are no flashy effects or shocks, only a creeping, unsettling mood which is resolved in a very unspectacular but chillingly effective way.

Secondly, it is also a film which employs a form of unreliable narration yet only embedded within the frame of the documentary, for Mathew’s tinkering with the photographic image makes us realize that we cannot take any image for granted as they might all be manipulated or fake.

This, then, is a film about the anxiety of the photographic image. The close relationship between photography and death is not new but has existed for as long as the medium of photography. Lake Mungo itself stages the opening credits with ghost photography and so generates a symmetrical closing, where the film is revealed to itself have been part ghost photography.

Like many of these other recent ghost films, the very status of the photographic medium is in question and it is no coincidence that the film itself employs a range of different image media, such as regular film (the documentary filmed on celluloid), TV images, cell phone images and video images (all filmed on digital video). The Ring cycle might be the best known example of these image anxiety films but also the whole Pulse cycle, White Noise, Shutter and even Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (Joe Berlinger, 2000).

These films all engage in what I have called the hauntology of the photographic image, exuding a severe anxiety about the reality status of the image in the age of biocybernetic reproduction (W.J.T. Mitchell’s term). What do we do when we can no longer tell original and copy apart, when it no longer even makes sense to speak of such a difference?

Lake Mungo is interesting in this scenario because it deliberately stages the entire discussion within that of a documentary film, a genre which inevitably relies on the authority and authenticity of its images. In a way, authenticity is bracketed by Lake Mungo refusing to decide on the authenticity of the image; by moving the second ghost into the end credits, we do not know to whom we should attribute these images. The implied narrators of the documentary filmmakers or some narrator existing outside the documentary frame? It is precisely this tension which gives the film its powerful effects.