The Last Broadcast (aka If You Go Down In The Woods Today...)

The archetypal write-up on The Last Broadcast, the 1998 pseudo-documentary from Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler, will tell you that this is an intriguing and well-crafted piece of horror cinema right up until the closing few minutes, at which point the entire thing suddenly and irrevocably goes to shit, with a galling twist ending that Avalos and Weiler seem to have plucked right out of their asses. I'll advise you upfront that this is not my own stance. I'm of the opinion that The Last Broadcast is an oft-misunderstood film, and I'm going to try my hand at defending it, controversial twist ending and all. Think I have my work cut out? Game on.

The Last Broadcast concerns a group of tech-savvy Gen-Xers who go missing in the woods while on a mission to document some local paranormal phenomenon, and the recovered footage from their cameras that might hold the key to deciphering what became of them. You can probably already tell where I'm going with this, and yes, to make another tired point, the film bears several striking (albeit largely superficial) similarities to The Blair Witch Project, the found footage feature that debuted the following year and left a much more significant dent in zeitgeist. The Last Broadcast might have made it to the party first, but it is forever fated to live in the shadow of The Blair Witch. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's low-budget horror was the unlikeliest of success stories in the summer of '99, gaining traction through a creative marketing campaign that made innovative use of the internet at a time when the web was shedding its erstwhile reputation as a plaything for idle college nerds. It was quickly followed by the likeliest of backlashes - amid the initial wave of hype, audiences were supposedly swept up in speculation as to whether the footage in question might actually be genuine, and when it became apparent that it wasn't (no shit, Sherlock), some considered it most unsporting of Myrick, Sánchez and their crew. The film's promotional tools, including an official website with numerous faux police reports and interviews regarding the pivotal missing persons case, were widely denounced as at best, hollow gimmickry and at worst, false advertising, as opposed to playful extensions of the picture's internal narrative. One of the most interesting parallels between The Blair Witch Project and The Last Broadcast is that, despite their disparate box office fortunes, they seem to have a common problem in convincing a sizeable portion of their viewers to buy into their visions to the finish. With both films, unimpressed viewers tend to cite the endings as the reasons for their respective failings, arguing that after so much build-up and intrigue there simply isn't sufficient pay-off. The Blair Witch Project, infamously, never reveals what malignant forces have been screwing with the three young film-makers at its centre, and viewers who came to the picture in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the titular witch were severely disappointed. The Last Broadcast, by contrast, actually does reveal the nature and identity of its own monster within the last few minutes. It just wasn't the kind of monster that a lot of audiences were hoping for, which is to say the Jersey Devil (otherwise known as the Leeds Devil). The Devil didn't do it. And that's made a lot of people mad.

To an extent, The Blair Witch Project was a victim of its own unprecedented success. It paid the price for being a frugal indie that drew in a sizeable portion of the multiplex crowds. Crowds who, accustomed to Hollywood budgets and modes of storytelling, weren't necessarily disposed to buy into the narrative and stylistic choices made. A film like The Blair Witch Project is, frankly, an acquired taste, the kind that might have done better to have built up an appreciative following as a cult oddity on rental VHS (I know it was 1999, but I ardently believe that VHS, and not DVD, is the best format for this type of thing); its mistake was in getting too much exposure too soon. The Last Broadcast obviously doesn't have that excuse - what makes its ending so divisive, I'd imagine, is that it arguably tries to be a little too clever for its own good. Compared to the closing sequence of Blair Witch, it's an ending that serves to much more actively and aggressively pull the rug out from under the viewer, making the preceding 75 minutes feel like the extensive build-up to a joke that's very much at its audience's expense (April 1st proves a significant date within the narrative, which ought to tell you something). A lot of people, having become invested in the story's intriguing mystery, don't like that it culminates in such a smart alecky punchline. It is absolutely not an ending to suit all tastes, and I cannot begrudge anyone who wishes that the film had gone with something a little less tricksy. The specific charge that I do take issue with is the accusation that Avalos and Weiler pulled this ending in from basically nowhere. I find that accusation a bit odd, frankly, because The Last Broadcast is not an amazingly subtle film in terms of its themes and preoccupations. It frequently and explicitly states what it is about, and there is quite a lot of foreshadowing leading up to its final revelation.

The titular last broadcast belongs to paranormal-themed public access show Fact or Fiction, hosted by Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler (Avalos and Weiler themselves), two aspiring young media personalities whose lives were tragically cut short while attempting to treat their viewership to something different. Acting on the suggestion of an anonymous message sent by IRL, they teamed up with Jim Suerd (James Seward) a self-proclaimed psychic and Rein Clackin (Rein Clabbers), a self-proclaimed paranormal sound technician, and ventured into the Pine Barrens on December 15th 1995 to film a live broadcast on the Jersey Devil. Somehow or other, things went horrendously wrong on the night in question. At least two of the party, Wheeler and Clackin, became the victims of a bloody massacre, and while Avkast's body was never found, enough of his blood was discovered at the scene for the authorities to presume him dead. Suerd, the only participant to make it back to civilisation alive, was immediately singled out as the prime suspect (the only suspect, in fact) and subsequently convicted of the murders of Wheeler and Clackin. But this is not where the story ends - or so insists one man, film-maker David Leigh (David Beard). Leigh professes to have approached the case as convinced of Suerd's guilt as everyone else and from the position of wanting to comprehend what drove the man to commit such violent acts. His findings have since pointed him toward a very different conclusion - that Suerd was actually the victim of a blinkered police investigation, a trial by media and a nefarious political agenda designed to demonstrate to the public, during an election year, that the authorities could yield a definitive response to an inexplicable crime. The intention was never to understand what really happened but to create and market a narrative that was superficially plausible enough to suffice as the truth.

What The Last Broadcast is assuredly not about is the Jersey Devil. Honestly, I would argue that it barely even qualifies as a red herring. There is, I think, a pretty big clue all throughout the picture indicating that its interests don't really lie with the legendary creature reputed to roam the Pinelands of South Jersey, and that is that it never takes the time to explain what the Jersey Devil is, or to delve into any of the lore surrounding the being. The most famous image of the Jersey Devil, the Philadelphia Bulletin drawing from 1909, is briefly shown, but no additional context is given. This implies one of two things - either the viewer was expected to come to the picture already knowing all of this information, or that it was never important in the first place. The name "Jersey Devil" sounds sufficiently ominous in itself, and that's all that's needed for a narrative in which the creature never becomes anything other than a symbol for the dark and allegedly unknowable. What The Last Broadcast is, underneath all of its found footage horror trappings, is an old-fashioned whodunnit with a cast of human suspects. Leigh interviews a variety of people with personal ties to the victims and the accused, a number of whom have managed to profit from their connections. Notable are Sam Woods (Sam Wells), a washed-up television director enlisted to help with the live broadcast, who reports that the surrounding publicity has since led to the reignition of his career, and Tom Branski (Tom Brunt), the video engineer for Fact or Fiction, who seems appalled by the law's treatment of Suerd but also cheerfully admits that the job offers now coming his way "may have helped me out of here". There's also the matter of the no corpus delicti regarding Avkast, which was enough of a sticking point to get that specific charge against Suerd dropped. What became of Avkast remains open to discussion, and Branski confides that he always had "bad vibes" about the man.

During Leigh's investigation, two startling new developments occur that threaten to impact perception of the case. Firstly, Suerd dies in prison "under mysterious circumstances", which for many seems to close the book on the matter, dulling remaining interest in re-addressing the formal conclusions now that an appeal's not going to happen. Secondly, a box containing additional camera footage from the night in the Pine Barrens is left on Leigh's doorstep by an anonymous donor. Although the footage has been badly damaged, Leigh enlists the services of a video technician, Shelly Monarch (Michele Pulaski), who goes about doggedly repairing the tape, confident that she can fill in the gaps in the narrative and that the facts will eventually out. Of the figures interviewed by Leigh, Monarch stands out as by far the most sincerely committed to uncovering what really happened, spelling out the horrifying implication that everyone else, regardless of their position on Suerd's culpability, seems mostly indifferent to - if Suerd was wrongly convicted, then it means that the real killer is still at large. She's also appealingly down to earth in her approach, refusing to get drawn into the vague insinuations that there were supernatural forces at work. When the possibility is put to her that the men might have been killed by something monstrous, she responds, "Yeah, I think this person's a monster."

Leigh, for his part, arrives the conclusion that the victims were killed by "something more horrendous than possible to imagine", although if you pay attention to his words, you'll notice that he rather glibly avoids committing to any concrete notion of who or what butchered Wheeler, Clackin and, possibly, Avkast. The Jersey Devil is factored in purely as a (ham-fisted?) metaphor: "Perhaps the demon we call the Jersey Devil did kill them in the Pine Barrens, but if so, the Jersey Devil is the electronic image, the sound, the communication to the masses, somehow twisted into a surrealist electronic world." The real villain of the piece, so far as Leigh is concerned, is the media, and the technology which, far from documenting the truth, made it possible for those with a vested interest to reconstruct their own self-serving interpretations of what went on. Amid his high-minded assertions that his project "has become more than just a search for the truth behind the Fact or Fiction murders - it has become an indictment of truth and how it is viewed through the lens of the media," there is a thread of irony, in that Leigh seems no more interested than most of his interviewees in understanding what did kill these people. This is something he ultimately downplays, satisfied with his conclusion that "the media upon which these events were recorded, the media that should have been able to provide a truth more pure than ever before, has somehow become the story." So long as there was a compelling story to be harvested, then Wheeler and Avkast themselves were hardly immune to this indifference to the truth; their show was titled Fact or Fiction, as opposed to Fact or Fiction?, implying an apathy toward distinguishing.

Unlike The Blair Witch Project (where, once those kids had taken us into that ominous woodland, we never found our way out again), The Last Broadcast deals with the return to civilisation, revealing it to be every bit as inhospitable and laden with peril. The film is about a wilderness of our own making, a new frontier forged by a reliance on technology to dictate how we should perceive and relate to the world around us; technology that should, in theory, create greater intimacy with reality, yet somehow makes the truth more elusive. One character for whom this seems particularly pertinent is Clair Deforest (Mark Rublee), a video editor hired by the prosecution to assemble an odious piece of character assassination from the camera footage recovered by the authorities; any recordings of Suerd that could be construed as negative were added in, just to make it easier to sell to the jury the image of Suerd as a killer. The name "Deforest" is an obvious gag, alluding to the character's supposed role in clearing the wilderness while only obscuring the truth further. Perhaps more telling still is the morbidly humorous moniker bestowed on him by the press, the "Killer Cutter", sounding as it does like the kind of nickname given to a serial killer, and suggesting as it does a kind of implicit violence to his own actions. He hasn't merely obscured the truth, but butchered it entirely. Adding to the tension is that Rublee plays him as a nervous overgrown school boy, with awkward, smirking mannerisms that seem reminiscent of Norman Bates (speaking of Norman, the killer's apparent ambidexterity comes up as a plot point). The real revelation is that Deforest was not even totally convinced of Suerd's guilt. He admits upfront that while the evidence against him seemed reasonably damning, he was troubled by the absence of Avkast's body and never able to rule out the possibility that he might have been the culprit. All the same, he absolves himself of responsibility in a possible wrongful conviction by redirecting Leigh's accusations back at him. "With a documentary film...ultimately, it's what the film-maker perceives as the truth. I mean, don't you think...that's what you're trying to do, right?", he asks, with a final smirk that seems deliberately taunting. He is, notably, the only character to actively question Leigh's role in the equation; in implying a kind of kinship between their merciless gutting of reality, however standoffishly, he cuts closer to the truth than he could possibly realise.

On one level, The Last Broadcast is a commentary on the same kind of television-saturated world that Oliver Stone was critiquing in Natural Born Killers (1994), in an age in which the OJ Simpson trial had become a media event (there's an oblique but unsubtle reference to the Simpson case here, when Leigh speculates that the jury was "anxious not to ignore DNA evidence, as had happened in other trials"). But its suspicions are also directed at that other small screen that was now becoming a pervasive part of our everyday lives - the home computer, and the rise of the internet it was bringing with it. The internet, which promised to open up a brand new avenue of global connection and communication, was yet another place in which to lose yourself, an untamed wilderness with legions of Jersey Devils lurking behind every corner. Leigh himself makes such an allusion when he notes that, "It is as though the Jersey Devil is a monster reborn in a digital age, reborn on the internet." The anonymity of the internet user, and the prospective peril of not knowing who you are really conversing with online, becomes a monster in of itself, as signified by the eerily robotic voice used to convert into speech the viewer messages sent to Fact or Fiction via Internet Relay Chat. Branski admits that he had bad vibes about that thing too. He also questions why the police never attempted to identify the anonymous individual who made the suggestion that they do a show on the Jersey Devil, essentially kicking this story into motion. The implication is that it was easier not to; Jay McDowell (Jay MacDonald), the Fact or Fiction web designer, explains that there was ultimately no trail. The monster was able to strike and then slink away, without leaving footprints (as Leigh claims the killer also managed to do at the scene of the crime).

Part of the reason that I feel compelled to defend The Last Broadcast is because it is a film that I find genuinely unsettling. We might not get the Jersey Devil, but to me there are monsters aplenty lurking within the picture's nooks and crannies. Its power is built not on thunderous jump-scares that have me jolting upright in my seat, but on little things that get under my skin and fester. The inhuman unpleasantness of the IRC voice. A freeze frame allegedly pinpointing the specific moment in which Wheeler becomes aware of the attacker lurching at him from the darkness, which becomes so much more chilling paired with Leigh's assessment on why, in his opinion, Avkast was not the killer ("I see no recognition in Locus's face...I see Locus, a man larger than Steven, turn tail and run, as does Rein"). A moment in Leigh's final monologue when, having travelled to the Pine Barrens himself, he suddenly pauses and turns, as if distracted by some unseen movement in the distance, before resuming. It is an immensely creepy piece of work. But it's also nothing if not a playful picture, with numerous jokes purposely designed to prod at the fourth wall and create a tongue-in-cheek intersection between fact and fiction. You might notice, for example, that a chunk of the characters have monikers that play like variations on the names of the actors portraying them. If that weren't enough, there's also a title card at the beginning of the film informing us that "The following people are not actors", an allusion to the fact that the cast was made up predominantly of non-professionals. An additional thread humor (and unease) pervades with Leigh's acerbic and possibly hypocritical commentary - the first time I saw The Last Broadcast, something that stood out and immediately amused me was how much disdain he evidentially had for the parties involved. His criticisms of the police investigation could be seen as stemming from a place of righteous indignation, but he comes across as just as scornful of the victims of the matter, putting down the production values of Fact or Fiction and the competence of its hosts at every given opportunity. Given the visibly frugal production of his own documentary, and his occasional dabbling in tacky visual effects, I felt Leigh wasn't one to talk.

Here's where I'm going to discuss the controversial twist ending, so if you'd like to avoid SPOILERS you are advised to bail out right now.

I suspect that what throws many viewers off about the ending of The Last Broadcast is two-fold - by the very nature of the narrative, the expectation is engendered for there to have been supernatural elements involved, for the Fact or Fiction team to have encountered something in the Pine Barrens that was less than human and defies all rational explanation. The revelation that the killer was Leigh himself, and human all along, not only negates that but sets a very different expectation in place - that there has to be a rational explanation for everything we've seen. Instead, there are multiple mysteries and loose ends that remain unaccounted for as the picture fades. The circumstances of Suerd's death. The whereabouts of Avkast's body. How on earth Leigh managed to pull off the brutal, single-handed slaying of three men while (in his own words) leaving no footprints and no evidence of a struggle. Some viewers hang uneasily in the middle, wondering if Leigh is actually the Jersey Devil lurking in plain sight, having gained the ability to assume human form.

For sure, the ending is not an airtight one. The major question for which I've never been able to produce a remotely satisfying answer has to do with how Suerd died. If the implication is that Leigh was responsible, then it's not at all clear how, and yet it seems too convenient a development for the narrative he is attempting to construct for him not to have had anything to do with it. But other issues that viewers will commonly insist go unaddressed actually do have implicit answers if you pay close attention to Leigh's commentary. For example, the issue of Leigh's motive. He does hint at one: "It is as though the real killer planned a media event so amazingly cunning that it could be thought of as scripted. A kill ready for primetime, so to speak." It's important to keep in mind that the real red herring of this scenario was never the Jersey Devil, but Avkast. Even before Deforest explicitly imparts his theory that Avkast might have been the killer, we're given reason to perceive him as a dubious character with ambitions of hitting the big leagues, enough to illicit suspicion that this "primetime-ready kill" might have been his twisted masterpiece. In reality, Leigh sacrificed the persons involved so that he could make his documentary about the case and establish himself as an investigative film-maker with something important to say. Noting his aforementioned disdain for Wheeler and Avkast, it seems logical to infer that Leigh targetted them because he resented their success and felt that he could do better. The discrepancy between the narrative he presents in his documentary and what is later presented as objective truth all boils down to the fact that he is the one manufacturing the narrative in front of us. Certain developments in his documentary, such as the lost footage being "mysteriously" dumped on his doorstep, were staged (ie: Leigh took the tape from the scene of the crime, and it was in his possession all along). He gives the tape to Monarch to repair so that he can document new narrative twists emerging, but is careful to monitor her progress, so that if she ever gets too close to discovering his role in events, he can swoop in and put a stop to it. As is evident from Leigh's final conclusion, getting to the truth was never what he was seeking to do - he wanted to tell a story, like everybody else.

Is it an overly elaborate scheme that would never get anywhere close to succeeding if some sordid hotshot tried it in real life? Oh heck yes. I'm certainly not going to credit The Last Broadcast with being realistic, of all things. But then I think to get too bogged down with the particulars of how Leigh managed to pull this off is to miss out on the broader symbolic significance of his character arc. It is, on the one level, a gigantic practical joke at the expense of the viewer (there is a title card indicating that the final reveal happens on April Fools Day, after all). The message that we've repeatedly heard throughout is that you cannot completely trust anybody who is attempting to sell you their version of reality, a point it exercises to the extreme by exposing our narrator as unreliable to a horrendous degree. On another level, Leigh is representative of both a media that prefers to create the narratives over simply recording them, and the emerging technological landscape giving a frightening anonymity to those with less than savoury intentions. The viewers who theorise that he might actually be the Jersey Devil are kind of right, but only in the same clunky metaphorical sense that Leigh himself attempts to put the Jersey Devil at the centre. He puts a troublesome face on everything that's warped and wrong about the electronic media dominating and shaping our world. And there are certainly hints aplenty as to his true nature. At one point, whether deliberately or not, Leigh veers dangerously close to spilling the beans: "I know Jim is not guilty. I know that the truth is still at large, potentially closer than anyone can realise." He speaks in an emotionless monotone that, on reflection, seems eerily reminiscent the robotic vocals used by the IRC (Beard's subtle but wholly uncanny performance is great; I would go so far as to call his one of the most authentically spooky presences in all horror cinema). Various sequences in which the camera is seen to follow its subjects as they go about their daily lives take on a chillingly voyeuristic quality, particularly his tracking of Monarch. In The Blair Witch Project, the camera offered false solidarity to the prey (in the film's most famous and frequently parodied scene, Heather weeps directly into the camera, as though it were the shoulder of a sympathetic friend), who came no closer to comprehending what was going on around them, despite having the ability to document all of it in full detail. In The Last Broadcast, it is the real ally of the predator looking to make themselves inconspicuous.

For all of its innovations, there are points where The Last Broadcast seems only too eager to indulge the hoariest and most objectionable cliches of the horror genre, most notably a fascination with spectacle involving the violent slaughter of women. The film manages to incorporate one protracted onscreen murder sequence, and some might find it troubling that the victim should happen to be its most prominent female character, Monarch the video technician. Her death is bloodless, but brutal (that it was chosen as a popular cover image for the film's home media release is something I'll admit does give me pause). From a thematic standpoint, Monarch's death makes sense - she dies because she is the only character who cares about uncovering the truth, which nobody else wants, not least Leigh himself.

Despite the miraculous proficiency of Leigh's scheme, the film closes by depicting him not as an evil genius bringing a deserved reckoning upon a media-addled world, but as a fundamentally chaotic and nonsensical figure who probably isn't going to attain the success he desires. Eventually, he runs into a limitation, in that his documentary must forgo an ending. He chooses to head out to the Pine Barrens, and to the site of the murders, in order to "re-enact" events, admitting that he does not know quite what he hopes to achieve. He wraps things up with a final monologue in which he makes another glib attempt at defining the Jersey Devil: "What is the Jersey Devil? It's a man wandering into the Pine Barrens never to be seen again. It's a mangled animal found on one of these access roads. Perhaps it's something that rests within our psyche, and we'll never truly understand." Within Leigh's documentary, the matter of Monarch and her quest to identify the killer simply fizzles; Leigh's insistence that "It's a mystery and it may permanently remain so" seems strangely at odds with her confidence that a definitive answer was in reach. As noted above, something in the distance seems to catch Leigh's eye, leaving him momentarily diverted; initially, we might take this to mean that Leigh is getting dangerously close to a Jersey Devil encounter of his own, and that something really is stirring amid those trees. At the very end, when we revisit the same scene from an objective third person perspective, aware that Leigh had actually travelled to the Pine Barrens to dispose of Monarch's body, it seems more likely that Leigh was glancing over his shoulder for potential witnesses. We see him attempting to film his closing monologue, but is unable to get past the opening without flubbing and having to start over: "This site is a close approximation to the one chosen by Steven and Locus as the site of their Fact or Fiction Jersey Devil broadcast..." The film ends with Leigh going around in an interminable circle, getting nowhere. He does always seem to have more of the electronic than the human about him, and I guess you could say this is him in malfunctioning mode. Eventually, he's drowned out by the sounds of chirping crickets, as dusk sets in, and finally we fade to black. Leigh simply disappears into the darkness, not with the triumph of a cunning murderer who's pulled the perfect crime and walked away scot-free, but with the disarray of a deeply muddled man who has no idea where he's ultimately going with any of this. He takes with him his carefully constructed version of the truth, and the actual truth itself - life moves on pretty fast in its search for the next lurid fixation, and it is indifferent to both in equal measures.