Found-footage horror has long been a proving ground for first-time filmmakers, a genre that can feel immediate and intimate when it works, or hollow and unconvincing when it doesn’t. Man Finds Tape, the feature debut from Texas-born directors Peter S. Hall and Paul Gandersman, falls squarely into the former, wearing its faux-documentary skin with unflinching conviction, blending procedural realism with the uncanny, unsettling rhythms of a small-town shocker. Rather than simply imitating the form, it inhabits it fully, creating the lived-in authenticity essential for this style of horror to succeed.
Lucas Page (William Magnuson), a YouTuber courting notoriety off a stack of supposed childhood tapes, becomes the unlikely centre of a snowballing mystery when he sends his estranged sister Lynn (Kelsey Pribilski) a piece of footage that shouldn’t exist: a murder in broad daylight, captured on a small-town surveillance camera. Lynn returns to Larkin, Texas, to find a community stitched together by old secrets and a deeper, more enduring dread than either sibling could have anticipated.
Hall and Gandersman keep their approach deliberately restrained, resisting the temptation to escalate for its own sake. Instead, they foreground the textures of everyday life — the overlaps of family history, the rhythms of small-town speech, and the subtle movements of a hand-held camera, which shakes naturally rather than for effect, without ever becoming disorienting. It’s this restraint that keeps the spell intact: nothing breaks the illusion that we’re watching real people navigate something they were never meant to witness.
The cast is central to the film’s credibility. Found-footage horror collapses when performances feel staged, but each actor here is grounded and fully inhabits their role. Magnuson and Pribilski anchor the narrative with a dynamic that feels organic rather than contrived, while Brian Villalobos maintains an enigmatic presence that keeps the audience on tenterhooks. Nell Kessler navigates the tricky task of maintaining the film’s lived-in realism while adapting her performance for the faux-documentary talking-head segments, each appearance seamless. John Gholson’s Reverend Endicott Carr dominates his scenes with menace and charisma, tempered by a grounded authenticity that makes him genuinely unnerving. His improvised opening scene, wisely chosen to start the film, immediately establishes an eerie, disarming tone that draws the audience in.
As the story unfolds, the film explores a very contemporary anxiety: the power and toxicity of social media, the circulation of viral content, and the way collective scepticism can both obscure and distort reality. Hall and Gandersman never overstate the thread, letting it run beneath the siblings’ investigation and the town’s hidden histories. The film’s true horror comes from plausibility — the sense that this could actually be happening, and that digital evidence can expose as much as it deceives.
Coupled with the performances that never step outside the world they inhabit, the directors maintain a camera perspective that never reminds you you’re watching a movie — a commitment reinforced by their repeated refusal to use their DoP’s drones, keeping the viewpoint grounded and immediate. By the time the fantastical elements emerge, the film’s foundation is so credible that each revelation lands with undeniable weight.
Equally striking is Hall and Gandersman’s willingness to fully unveil these fantastical elements, a risk often avoided in found-footage or faux-documentary films for fear of breaking authenticity. Here, the effects teams pull out all the stops, delivering substantial spectacle without undermining the film’s lived-in realism — a rare and impressive achievement in such a challenging sub-genre.
Man Finds Tape demonstrates a sophisticated grasp of its form, combining disciplined craft with a rare ability to generate genuine terror from plausibility. Hall and Gandersman avoid cheap shocks, instead building fear through meticulous attention to authenticity and atmosphere, marking it as one of the most assured and unsettling horror debuts in recent years.
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Magnet Releasing releases Man Finds Tape in select theaters and on digital platforms on December 5, 2025.
