Review of The Fourth Kind (2009) by Ivy K — 08 Oct 2017

I'm both terrified and intrigued by aliens. recently I was reading an article about alien abductees and started clicking on all the links within it. One of them took me into a discussion about this movie, I think on Reddit. I had never heard of this movie before but everyone was talking about it with high praises both as an accurate representation of the alien abduction phenomenon and as being "omg so scary.".

-_- I was extremely intrigued about what I had missed, only to discover that whatever I was missing this movie was missing too. Alien movies that feature no aliens are not scary. Alien abduction movies that feature no visible abductions OR anyone talking about them coherently aren't scary OR interesting. Movies that present themselves to the willingly ignorant public as being based on real stories are only scary in how irresponsible they are and the fact that people believe them. I might not mind as much if this movie didn't pretend aliens disguise themselves as owls. Don't go killing owls because you think they might be aliens folks.

The other dangled interpretation, where you choose your own adventure on deciding if you're Mulder or Scully, where there are multiple psychotic people in this town, leading to murder-suicides and never found missing kids is slightly more bearable, and significantly more terrifying. If you didn't have to deal with the oh video cameras stop working when things happen ordeal. Funny how that worked but audio was still perfectly recordable. Cause science.

I'm quite certain that the people I saw discussing this movie's merits were the same damn people that were convinced The Blair Witch Project was 100% real and super super scary despite the migraine inducing two hour camera shakes that were immediately followed by full credits including cast and crew.