Streaming Availability: YouTube
"The fourth kind, there's nothing more frightening than the fourth. You see, that one is when they abduct you."
The Fourth Kind is one of the most experimental movies we've covered this month. This is part of the late-2000s found footage horror boom following Paranormal Activity; found footage itself a new wild production method. Things like The Blair Witch Project could explain the camera in the diegesis of the film, giving this bold pose that what you were seeing was "real". 'Did those kids really die in those woods?' It all fits well into UFOs, considering how our experience of these things are usually cruddy footage shot by a shaking POV. The found footage subgenre is daring you to believe the same way spooky documentaries or X-Files episodes dare you to. The Fourth Kind goes all the weirder with it by pulling in traditional film scenes with professional actors mixed with a mockumentary of supposedly "real" footage. It is trying to make the found footage aspect seem more convincing by leaning on the artificiality of filmmaking. In one version there is a supermodel actresses performing melodrama. Meanwhile the "reality" has a sickly woman with blemishes and less favorable lighting.
Few movies open with their star introducing themselves and explaining the role they're playing. The Fourth Kind intrigued me right here, this is why I chose to cover this.. Milla Jovovich comes on to tell us she is playing Dr. Abbey Tyler in a "dramatic reenactment". .Meanwhile, there is archive footage and audio we'll see, often side by side with the "fake" stuff. The "real" Dr. Tyler is played by Charlotte Milchard. Either Abbey is a psychiatrist working in Nome, Alaska, helping patients tormented by alien abductions.
The duel level of reality is strange even within the metanarrative of The Fourth Kind. History Channel documentaries would sometimes add color between the various academic talking heads with little reenactment scenes where extras might play some Confederates in costume, maybe at best you'd get a few lines by a guy playing Napoleon. You never have a full Hollywood movie living side by side with what is supposedly a real document of the material. Why would you do this if you're the in-universe documentarian (played by the director, Olatunde Osunsanmi)? It is interesting as a commentary on the blend of fact and fiction that is core to the found footage genre, but it has no further strategy I can understand.
I kept waiting for The Fourth Kind to really get funky and start messing with this bizarre mechanism it has built. It is establishing layers upon layers of artificiality, I wanted that structure to collapse. Get Jovovich and Milchard to interact in the same scene to mess with our heads. Have the fake movie also get tormented by aliens, suddenly our actress is experiencing what her inspiration has been through, like Wes Craven's New Nightmare with Martians. But that never happens. I cannot explain the motivations of the in-universe Osunsanmi when he decides what parts Jovovich will recreate and what parts he'll leave 'real'. We don't have our big star performing the final climax scene. Sometimes the two kinds of footage are shown literally side by side, split screen, sometimes not. I really wanted that border to break down, the 'safety' of what we're told is real and what we're told is pretend to become blurry and messy. It never does. It never is more than a gimmick, which was sadly the key problem of this whole brief found footage craze. This style persists, but the P.T. Barnum showmanship trickery aspect died out.
Worse, I'm not terribly impressed with even our universe's Osunsanmi as a director. The Jovovich portions use a lot of handheld photography. Why would you do that when the footage is consciously un-real? Handheld photography is supposed to create intimacy, as if you're living and breathing in the scene with the actors. But this is all fake and The Fourth Kind wants us to know it! I would gone much harder with the formalism. Put Milla Jovovich on very obvious sets, with blatant CG aliens. Maybe even put her on a stage doing overly-dramatic reads. We could have four or five levels of adaptation happening here at once blurring everything.
What I'm saying is that Wes Anderson needed to make The Fourth Kind. And in fact, did he not? Last year, he made Asteroid City, I picked it as my favorite movie of 2023.
As an abduction movie, The Fourth Kind is decently scary. I don't think the gimmickery contributes much to the horror, and the movie seems to know it. That's why Jovovich disappears in the big scary climax. The Fourth Kind understands the assignment of an alien movie better than say, Fire in the Sky. It has to play with the audience's reality enough that they just start believing in the story. I don't think the budget was very high so we never get footage of the aliens in either plane of reality. Instead there nice frightening scenes of characters seemingly under possession. Milchard's Abbey Tyler has great screams. I do not begrudge you if you lose sleep to The Fourth Kind.
I even think its concepts of aliens are interesting. There's this recurring archetype in every patients' dreams, this white owl that appears at night when they cannot sleep. This is lifted directly from Whitley Strieber who theorized that 'the owls are not what they seem', to quote Twin Peaks; that these nocturnal visions are fake memories replacing a Gray alien. And owls do look spooky sometimes, there's a viral video of two baby owls in a crawlspace that look terrifyingly like space aliens. It is an effective bit of economical imagery, the zoomed-in shots of owl eyes fill in for big effects shots well.
More interesting is the mythology. I have to wonder: Is The Fourth Kind even about aliens? At a certain point we discover the creatures tormenting Nome speak Ancient Sumerian, a la Pazuzu from The Exorcist. Everybody keeps waking up at 3:00 AM, the witching hour like in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. We get vague references to Ancient Astronaut theories (which are still all horseshit but I won't relitigate all that). There's multiple hypnotic regression scenes where uncovering the memories takes on a demonic quality. Characters float in their beds and speak in tongues. Abbey Tyler will break her neck trying to speak with the voice of the creature. During that portion, with the standard dropped camera and spooky effects of static on the digital camera, the alien announces that "I am God". Abbey explains it merely believes itself to be God, reminding this writer of Yaldabaoth, the gnostic demiurge.
We get a flying saucer on camera though. Demons do not use flying saucers. So who knows?
Less great is the use of Nome as a setting. The Fourth Kind exploits this region's history of missing persons and high fatalities. It is one thing to make a fully fictional movie saying aliens are attacking Alaska, but when The Fourth Kind has these pretenses of reality, it feels more than a bit tasteless. There's real pain here, do not pretend that your shitty horror movie offers answers or closure.
The real flaw of these found footage movies is that ultimately they need to end with you dazzled by the magic trick. Once they've conned you, that's it. There is no definitive statement on what is going on with the demonology or aliens. Tyler's daughter disappears and is never found. We discover very late into the movie that her husband, who we were tricked into believing was murdered (possibly by aliens) actually committed suicide. Documentarian-level Osunsanmi, why would you fake-out your audience that way? Nobody making a documentary would do that. The Fourth Kind is ultimately all a tease. There's no juicy conclusion, nothing is really done with the metafiction. There just is no there there.
Next time! The remake of AVP without Predators, Prometheus! (Oh and Alien: Covenant too.)
Thanks for the review, interesting stuff
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