A Town Becomes Host to Cosmic Evil in the Wildly Creative Man Finds Tape
For all the repetition and cliche-treading that is more or less inherent to found footage as a horror subgenre, it remains an arena in which truly inventive filmmakers can find an angle to exploit new corners of our relationship with media, and with the screens that surround us on all sides. Back in 2020, a film like Host arrived at just the right moment, taking up the torch of Unfriended as it fused supernatural horror with a screenlife presentation style in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The likes of Lake Mungo and of course The Blair Witch Project laid foundation for the combination of more common found footage horror filmmaking and the faux documentary, co-opting a filmmaking style used to give their frights more terrifyingly real gravitas. Man Finds Tape, meanwhile, the feature debut of Austin-based filmmakers Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall, makes use of a wide variety of these tools and tricks, standing out less for the introduction of some new thread of gimmickry than it does for just how skillfully it employs its many units of cinematic language. This is a startlingly creative and skillfully assembled little movie–one that eventually overreaches to some degree, but as a viewer you wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. The ambition of its filmmakers to reach well beyond their meager resources is as inspiring as the film is creepily unsettling.
Man Finds Tape is a lot of things at once, but at its core it’s being presented as a fully edited documentary made by Lynn Page (Kelsey Pribilski) about the mysterious and ultimately cosmic phenomena occurring in her small, rural hometown of Larkin, Texas. The town’s woes are first revealed not by Lynn but by her younger brother Lucas (William Magnuson), a fellow videographer and YouTube content producer who becomes an internet sensation with a creepypasta-adjacent series literally called Man Finds Tape, in reference to a creepy tape he discovers in their family home that was seemingly taken of his sleeping form when he was a child by some outside intruder. As Lucas investigates the rot at the heart of Larkin, the town-wide phenomena he discovers draws his sister back in, reuniting the pair after she had left town following the mysterious deaths of their (also videographer) parents. The narrative is wrapped up in these familial layers and calls upon footage taken by multiple generations, sowing seeds of unease for the siblings as they come to suspect local televangelist Rev. Endicott Carr (John Gholson) as central to a plot that eventually spirals far beyond what we expect.
The film’s premise lands close to the center of a creepypasta bullseye, in the sense that it’s one of those scenarios where an elaborate hoax from the person who “discovered” the story is almost certainly the most likely and logical explanation, but our innate desire to believe–because we love a good story as a species–trumps suspicion, because we collectively prefer to avoid mundane explanations. The town of Larkin, meanwhile, calls to mind Stephen King-esque burgs such as Derry, Maine, particularly in the way that it seems to omit a field of oblivion that blinds its residents to the horrors unfolding there. Without getting too heavy handed, Man Finds Tape depicts a recognizable form of self-delusion through the inability of Larkin’s residents to perceive their exploitation or abuse, even when they’re directly watching videos of it. A cadre of realistic character actors brings to life the small-town sense of both ennui and entropy, the resistance to change that ultimately allows abuses to continue unfettered because no one is willing to acknowledge how bad things have gotten, lest they take some responsibility for their own complicity.
Where the film really stands out, though, is in how skillfully it blends together so many different streams of presentation. There are screenlife segments in the form of video calls, interspersed with traditional documentary B-roll and talking head interview footage, studded with excerpts from Lucas’ own Man Finds Tape video series, handheld investigative footage, and a wealth of security camera footage from around town–cameras installed by Lynn and Lucas’ own parents, which deepens the thematic family element while also allowing for a refreshingly eclectic style. The creepy, droning, lo-fi found footage horror-style videos of Lucas as a child look like the kind of thing that Scott Derrickson would drool over, which makes the producer credit for Sinister and The Black Phone writer C. Robert Cargill make perfect sense. Also among the producers: writer-directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, whose own style of mind-bending, subtly cosmic horror has also trickled down into Man Finds Tape. You can understand exactly what each of the other horror filmmakers involved would have appreciated about the project.
This is an appreciably onion-like film, a deepening slow-burn mystery with many layers to get through in its first hour, reliant almost entirely on creepiness and a willingness to explore the mystery with the same amount of information that our viewpoint filmmakers possess at the time they’re captured on screen. That said, it eventually does reach a switch-flipping moment when its slow burn transforms into a blaze, and a film that had been largely bloodless suddenly reveals itself as significantly more gross and grisly than one would have expected. If Man Finds Tape is ever in danger of losing its audience, this is where it would happen, as it makes this transformation with a certain jagged abruptness and then barrels ahead into “wait, what?” territory as a flood of answers begins to arrive to the question of what has been going on in Larkin. Suffice to say, it doesn’t all land, and it can feel like the film is grasping about in its attempt to generate a grand finale of a payoff, limited by uneven VFX and a sudden loss of the more mysterious vibes that had sustained it.
Still, the prevailing impression at the end of Man Finds Tape is simply one of admiration: It’s a wildly creative concept that ping-pongs explosively between its different shooting styles and formats, in a way that is not confusing or alienating but engrossing for much of its runtime. Its solid performances are on display whether it’s a small-town BBQ pitmaster talking directly to the camera about the horrors he’s had supernaturally wiped from his memory, or footage evocative of splattery true crime docuseries (this year’s Strange Harvest comes to mind, but Man Finds Tape surpasses it), or its eventual metaphysical, Lovecraftian-tinged freakouts. Gandersman and Hall cast a wide net, but they never feel overmatched by the unusual ambition of their project. It’s a pleasant surprise; a sleeper entry into the found footage horror canon from two debuting filmmakers who clearly have bright futures ahead of them. A title like Man Finds Tape doesn’t exactly require all that much to satisfy its implied promise, but thankfully for horror fans, this one blows past its simple prompt to become something far weirder and ultimately more memorable.
Directors: Paul Gandersman, Peter S. Hall
Writers: Paul Gandersman, Peter S. Hall
Stars: Kelsey Pribilski, William Magnuson, John Gholson, Nell Kessler, Brian Villalobos, Graham Skipper
Release date: Dec. 5, 2025 (Select theaters, VOD)
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.
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