I Love All The Ghosts

Review of The St. Francisville Experiment (2000) by reeldevil: 👎 0.5/5

At one point, a character says:

“I feel more scared than I felt all night. Can you hear this?”

She then points the handheld camera at her chest, where we can perfectly hear her heartbeat — which is somehow both completely normal and inexplicably loud enough to be picked up by a cheap rental camera.

This is the moment I asked myself: Is this really the horror movie 10-year-old me was obsessed with?

The St. Francisville Experiment is a post–Blair Witch Project found-footage horror film in which a group of strangers get together to ghost hunt a plantation with a horrifying backstory.

“Somebody help me! Please! You can’t keep me down here! There’s spiders down here!”

Now, I want you to think of the worst found-footage horror movie you’ve ever seen. I can almost guarantee that The St. Francisville Experiment is worse.

“You’re not Charles — you’re the one who threw the chair.”

It boasts some of the worst, most painful local-commercial-tier acting imaginable. The movie is essentially four dudes with extremely thin acting résumés winging a horror story, each seemingly operating with a completely different version of the plot in their head. At times, you can practically hear them arguing about what the movie is supposed to be.

There are only two redeeming qualities: It genuinely captures the vibe of early-2000s ghost hunting (I was part of one or two of those). Some of the dialogue reaches Troll 2 levels of unintentional comedy.

The final jump scare is… fine, I guess. But trudging through 80 minutes of some of the most painful acting ever put to tape simply isn’t worth it.

Also, it brings of some very not cool slavery theme into the lore. Which is not bad on its own if handled well. Here, it's just grossly exploitative.