If You've Spent the Last 17 Years Chasing That 'Lake Mungo' High, This 2017 Found Footage Horror Will Give You a Fix

Few found footage movies are as impactful as Lake Mungo. This horrifying, heart-wrenching story is a perfect balance of fear and emotion, using its unique format to present not only a display of eerie apparitions but an investigation into one family’s unresolved grief. Many films have tried to recapture this plot’s gravitas, but none have come as close as Justin Barber’s Phoenix Forgotten. The film (which is free to stream on Tubi) follows a young woman returning to her hometown, sure that her brother’s old videotapes are the key to uncovering the truth behind his disappearance many years ago. The tapes she finds are filled with extraterrestrial mayhem and shady government plots, with our protagonist learning about the horrors her brother uncovered — but that’s not the scariest thing about this film. It’s the sadness of the family at its center that makes Phoenix Forgotten so unnerving, with its title acting as an ironic, devastating antithesis to the way a person’s death can linger and tear apart everyone they’ve left behind. There will never be another Lake Mungo, but if horror fans are looking for a found footage movie that similarly has as much heartbreak as it does fear, they need look no further than Phoenix Forgotten.

‘Phoenix Forgotten’ and ‘Lake Mungo’ Are Terrifying and Devastating

Phoenix Forgotten begins the way so many found footage movies do: with someone finding an old video camera. The story follows Sophie (Florence Hartigan), a young woman returning to her Arizona hometown intent on discovering what led to her brother’s sudden disappearance when she was a child. She’s sure that his old tapes hold the answer; on them, she discovers that her brother became convinced that the “Phoenix Lights” — a real phenomenon in which strange lights appeared over Arizona — were proof of alien life. Eager to prove his claim, he gathered up some friends and a few cameras, taking off on a trek through the Arizona mountains in search of whatever extraterrestrials had decided to visit our planet.

It’s Time to Watch ‘Lake Mungo,’ the Most Devastating Horror Movie Ever Made

You’ll want to call your loved ones immediately after watching this one.

This framing will immediately remind audiences of Lake Mungo, as both films focus on someone desperately using cameras to try and uncover what happened to their siblings. Along with this general plot, the aesthetics are shockingly similar; both movies pair mundane home shots with unsettling footage of the wilderness, with the trees of Lake Mungo and the scraggly landscape of Arizona both making viewers constantly scared that something unnerving will suddenly appear. Phoenix Forgotten certainly goes in a different direction, though, than the grounded anguish of its predecessor. Josh’s exploration sees his party encounter government experiments and more unsettling events that all seem to point to aliens being responsible for those strange lights in the sky. And as both Sophie and the audience watch, he finally uncovers the truth about the Phoenix Lights and what’s been hiding in the arid hills around their hometown… and the little sister finally learns the horrifying truth about why her brother never came home.

‘Phoenix Forgotten’ Shows That Loss Is the True Monster

While Josh’s footage is extremely unsettling, the hardest parts of Phoenix Forgotten are when Sophie shares her thoughts about what she is watching. The entire film is a systematic crushing of the young woman’s spirit; it becomes clear as the tapes grow more disturbing that Sophie had always hoped they’d hold the secret to bringing her brother home. The found footage aspect makes the scenes of her breaking down feel all the more viscerally real, with these and special interviews with her now-divorced parents offering a grueling portrayal of how grief can hurt someone more than any monster ever could. This is something thoroughly explored in Lake Mungo, with the film similarly using the horrors of its premise as a tool to dissect the familial depression at its core. Both excel at creating a multi-faceted kind of fear, merging resonant heartbreak with outright terror in a shocking plot that is often hard to watch. More than any creature or alien, Phoenix Forgotten and Lake Mungo confront viewers with true terror: losing someone you love

While Phoenix Forgotten does excel at imbuing its horror with emotion, the film stumbles at times; while its finale is jaw-dropping, the path to get there can often feel more monotonous than overtly scary. It certainly doesn’t have as much finesse as Lake Mungo, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t embody that film’s goal: showing that loss is the true horror of this world. Through Sophie’s mounting dread and the fractured lives of those around her, it paints an eerily understandable example of what losing those closest to you can do to people, especially when that loss is as unresolved as her brother’s unexplained disappearance. This concept is more petrifying than any kind of alien could ever be, and it’s what makes Phoenix Forgotten one of the most underrated found footage movies we have today.