Found: Closing write-up

It is amazing how certain films inspire my ease to write. Found (2012), a little, micro-budget horror show set small but having something big to say had me like a faucet just running out words. Here is my closing write-up below.

Any film that starts with a little boy talking about his brother keeping a human head in a bag, talking about how there is a different one in there every few days, typically of a black woman, you have to know that this is certain to feature some ghoulish goings-on.

Found left its imprint on me in a way I found profound. I have a brother. We grew up watching horror throughout our entire teenage years. We shared conversations about movies and characters. It was a method of bonding between us. My younger brother, though, is troubled to this day over bullying he suffered as a kid. I also endured bullying due to my size, and the number of assholes that seemed to magnet their cruelty my direction. Unlike me, who found a way to not allow what was done by them to rot my soul, my brother hasn’t been able to do the same. Bullying is something quite topical, and I believe horror is the perfect genre to tackle it. How we dealt with some shitty circumstances not our fault was escapism. The video store was like a temple housing treasures, and films were the gold. While we were both active kids, my brother and I still found plenty of time to escape into the movies, horror especially. Found touched on that with me. I could identify with a moment where the older brother, in a moment outside the monster that he typically is, encourages the younger brother to check out Nightbreed if he loved Hellraiser, allowing him to “scan his horror collection and pick some movies out to watch with a friend”. “Why does there have to be two Steves?” asks the tortured kid regarding a brother that could be cool if he wasn’t a serial killer.

“Marty, you missed the boobs!”

“You want to see something really scary?”

Ultimately, I think Found is a film about brothers. Marty wishes his brother, Steve, wasn’t a nutjob. He ponders if the film, Headless, was influential to Steve. Steve is protective towards Marty when he wonders if bully Marcus would continue to beat him up even if he fought back. Marty’s only friend, a toxic cipher who reconsiders being associated with the kid due to his being made fun of by other classmates, is soon introduced to “the head”, and this changes everything. There’s no going back.

What was truthfully unnerving to me was the horror poor Marty is carrying around, and how his parents couldn’t possibly fathom the knowledge of it. The parents completely amiss when it comes to not only the fact that Steve, their oldest, is a monster, but that Marty is understanding of what he is while they haven’t the foggiest notion. They aren’t necessarily rotten parents, as much as, just not aware of what is going on.

Not only that, but Marty is conscientious of a nagging fear he’d wind up just like his brother.  But the influence is vivid. Marty’s dilemma is responding to those bullying him (verbal is just as bad as physical). He’s told by adults not to respond with violence (as he does when one kid provokes him during a “church meeting”), yet in Marty’s mind if he doesn’t it will never end. This is a significant and realistic topic worth discussion, and the film addresses it with the added twist that the bullied kid has a brother that murders African Americans because he considers them an infestation! Marty’s beating up the kid, later telling him to go to hell when the two mothers get them together in the hopes of apologizing, and his unwillingness to listen to a concerned preacher eventually ignites the rage of his father. And Marty’s father shows his nasty side. The father slapping Marty, cursing him, and just acting an ass while his mother looks on (a weakling without a spine and unwilling to interfere), with the situation escalating as Steve winds up punching pops to the cement floor of the garage, as all of this results in the final sequence of events that leads to a family obliterated.

The film shows us that the end result wasn’t a surprise, but expected. The family was fractured far before we were introduced to them. Pops has a foul mouth and not much of a soft touch. The kids are pretty much left to their own devices, and we rarely see the parents except at the dinner table. The father takes Marty to a movie, and his mom takes him to a tent church service, but there’s a lot of absence during the film. Perhaps that is a statement. Maybe the parents should have been more available. You don’t see a lot of Steve. He is shown in “increments”. You get the picture, though. He threatens and insists towards Marty. Marty knowing his secret does him a disservice. The violent response to the kid insulting him was the injection that fed everything awful that happens to the family. A beast unleashed, Steve purposes his homicidal rage at the parents for “hurting Marty”. They supposedly hate him, but, if anything, they just make mistakes that a lot of us parents make. Communication faulty, reacting irrationally (the father just proves he can be an assclown when angered), and confronted with their own mishaps as parents, the whole event that sends Steve over the edge, spurning him into the eventual plan of action due to his psychotic realization that Marty is doomed. It is all quite shocking: this is Steve’s catharsis. He “frees” himself and Marty from them. This delusion ends in blood and body parts.