‘Alan At Night’ Skewers YouTube Pranksters in More Ways Than One [Chattanooga Film Festival 2025]
Plenty of horror movies have already been made about the “Everything Is Content” times in which we live. Even The Blair Witch Project, more than a quarter century ago, got mileage out of Heather Donahue’s compulsion to document everything, even her most mundane suffering, right up until things went dark. It’s easy to see why it’s fertile ground for horror creators, because refusing to avert your eyes means looking into an abyss, whether you like it or not, and eventually that abyss starts to look back.
Alan at Night, writer/director Jesse Swenson’s feature directorial debut, is the latest addition to this ever-expanding subgenre of largely found footage horror. The story of two merry internet pranksters who document the strange behavior of one of their roommates, is at once a dark comedy, a relatable descent into awkwardness, and a frightening look at what grows on the other side of a door you can’t stop recording, no matter how many times you swear you’re going to turn the cameras off.
Jay (Joseph Basquill) and his friend Camillo (Jorge Felipe Guevara) are your classic internet comedy duo. They started getting clicks by doing outlandish things and filming them. Now they’re attempting to build a minor online empire through their videos, their podcasts, and their general vibe as Two Bros Having Fun. So when Jay sublets the second bedroom in his apartment for one month to a shy herpetologist named Alan (Chris Ash), the duo sees an opportunity for some new content, and work to coax Alan out of his shell.
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The focus on Alan begins with some of his more mundanely annoying habits, such as his apparent ability to snore like a massive beast, practically shaking the whole apartment. Then it progresses to other classic roommate dilemmas, like missing food and sniping at each other in the hallway. But the more Jay and Camillo focus on Alan, the more convinced they are that he’s hiding something unnatural.
There are clear real-world parallels to the kind of behavior Jay and Camillo exhibit in Alan at Night, which takes the form of a sort of YouTube documentary the duo have made about the entire month-long Alan saga, but one of the film’s great credits is Swenson’s refusal to fall back on simple binaries of the scenario. Are Jay and Camillo wrong to keep documenting Alan’s behavior without his permission, as Jay’s girlfriend Sam (Hadley Durkee) so often insists? Should they fall back and simply talk to Alan, as they try to do in a very funny, oddly sweet podcast sequence in which they get him drunk?
Probably, but the film’s slowly swelling sense of dread and strangeness within the apartment means that we also relate to Jay’s need to capture every part of Alan’s behavior, because how else will someone believe him? What will be left if it all goes wrong?
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These are heavy questions, and they’re combined with meditations on the intersection of the natural world (where Alan spends his time as a lover of reptiles and amphibians) and the digital (where Jay and Camillo make their home), the nature of reality when so much of it is viewed through someone else’s phone camera, and more. When it needs to be, Alan at Night is thoroughly unsettling, giving us the quiet of an apartment at night broken by strange sounds, and the horror of watching someone on a night vision camera do something absolutely disgusting when they think no one sees them.
It’s also, alongside and even during the scary sequences, a remarkably human movie. Jay and Camillo could be soulless content grifters, but in the hands of Basquill and Guevara they become guys who are genuinely trying to do the right thing at least some of the time, still wrestling with the responsibility they have as guys with a platform versus what their audience expects of them, adding a hint of dark capitalism to the equation. Then there’s Ash, who’s wonderfully subdued as Alan, snapping like a frog catching a fly only when he needs to.
Alan at Night deserves to join films like Deadstream as part of the next wave of rewatchable, thoroughly entertaining found-footage horror comedies. It’s just light enough to make it feel like a hangout movie, but just heavy enough to leave a trail of freaky images in your brain after the credits roll. I’m glad I caught it at Chattanooga, and I hope more people find it as the year and the festival circuit roll on.
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Alan At Night
Summary
Alan at Night deserves to join films like Deadstream as part of the next wave of thoroughly entertaining found-footage horror comedies.
Categorized: Reviews
