Followed: Influência Maligna

I love horror films and I'm always looking for the next best story, creepy, disturbing, or scare factor. However, 2020 has been absolute garbage for horror since the anticipated films like The Conjuring 3 and A Quiet Place II, and several other solid ones have been pushed to 2021. But, to my surprise I came across this film and read reviews beforehand but ignoring the negative ones as I commonly do.

I enjoy found footage based horror films if they're done right (and without excessive camera shakes). This film was surprising for me. It's creepy and disturbing in some situations mixed in with the reality of Los Angeles.

I would say for a found footage based film, it was well done for what it is. I've seen some pretty crappy found footage films but the creepy/scare factor was lacking and camera stability was terrible. The story behind the elevator game was disturbing, sort of like a modern day version of "bloody Mary", except in an elevator while floor-hopping. This is worth the watch without having too much expectation; just enough to feed your curiosity.

About a ghost hunting vlogger offered a $250,000 sponsorship in exchange for a 3-night broadcast from a notoriously haunted hotel. Based on an actual hotel and events that transpired there. Ok, the cover (I got) has a devil, and a bound and gagged woman on the cover, neither of which appear in the movie. Oh, all sorts of strange things happen in this hotel, the crew loses its marbles, and ZERO of it is explained. It even has an ending that makes absolutely no sense. Acting gets REAL sketchy when they are tasked with being emotional. These filmmakers directly steal scenes and audio cues from Paranormal Activity. I really liked the idea of the "elevator game," and I am a sucker for both the paranormal and found footage. All that said, 4 stars for me.

I watch a lot of found footage films so admittedly I like them. This is one of the better ones, but definitely is full of the standard messes riddled with the genre. The acting is good, the scares are there, and the plot is intriguing due to the real history of the hotel. If you like the genre you will enjoy it. My main problems were the plot holes and the overtly contrived plot, but that's to be expected.

Dont agree with The bad reviews! Its accualy really good and I got chills more than twice.. enjoyed it alot! More like this please :)

This movie scored points with me on the basis of mainly what I was looking for: Did I get some good scares out of it? My answer was definitely yes, there were some well thought out places in the movie that were genuinely scare-worthy.

One thing this movie had that others that are "found footage", or whatever you want to call them, that also appealed to me, unlike many other movies of this genre, was that the investigators actually reviewed things caught on camera, whereas several other movies (Paranormal movies come to mind), the people setting up cameras to catch strange occurrences don't bother to review the footage of what happens while they're sleeping, which, oddly enough, is when most activity happens in these types of movies.

This is not really a spoiler, but will make you scratch your head. The ending seems to have just been thrown together and ruined for me what I considered a very decent movie.