FrightFest review – Heraldry Paranormal
This found footage film has a familiar theme – a group of paranormal investigators embark on an online career and run into something more dangerous than they expect – but takes a disarming approach, stressing character comedy as much as scares. It would work well as a sit-com pilot.
Narrator Blair Hicks (Parker Paige) is isolated from the HP team because she’s in America and they work in Leeds, Yorkshire, but she is in a long-range relationship with ball-of-energy Finlay McCoy (Jimmy Roberts), whom she’s never met IRL. Finlay has a need to believe and a short fuse which gets lit whenever he comes across fakery or is let down by others. He’s roped in his half-brother Seamus (writer-director Ashley Nashville) as video operator, because these days it’s inconceivable that anyone would set out to find, bust, break or whisper ghosts without getting it all on camera and plastering it on the net for likes and subscribes. Also in the team is engagingly gawky Emerson (Tara Buranakul), who is high-strung and demonstrative and kind of likes neighbour Ray (Lance J. Parker), a big personality Finlay still resents for spoiling a TV series he was watching and hangs about on the fringes obviously desperate to be invited to join in.
The gang’s first big investigation is the Gaukroger murder site, which turns out to be a hoax perpetrated by Terry (James Bayes), who rents out the crime scene as an Air BnB for ghost hunters and makes sure they hear spooky voices. Exposing this sham wins HP few fans and whips up an online storm of criticism, especially since more established medium/paranormalist Rosie Watts (Kate Hargrave) had made her reputation endorsing the Gaukroger haunting … so her fans start pranking the HP crowd, who respond with a hilariously awkward diss rap track about the whole thing. What keeps the film in focus is Finlay’s believable anger that others, in his crew and out, don’t take this as seriously as he does, and his tendency to self-sabotage by venting online. Then, HP are called in on two troubling cases – a woman (Gerry Johnson) bothered by some sort of poltergeist, who they are unable to help, and a lesbian couple (Lauren Grendon, Sekki Tabasuares) seriously assailed in a house in Pontefract gifted to them by a homophobic relative who might have known what would happen. The couple have also consulted Rosie, who shows up with a rival camera guy (Aaron O’Brien), and the two factions settle into an uneasy alliance to help out the clients, though the malicious entity in their home – if it is an entity rather than a malign hider in the house – acts up viciously, with possessions, assaults, a trip into an uncharted and labyrinthine area of the house (a British Backrooms wouldn’t be eerily empty – but full of cardboard boxes of old tat, broken lamps, rusty bicycles and other clutter someone once thought might come in handy then forgot about) with witch signs and one or two well-staged chills (one shot of an unwary investigator on a landing not seeing the glaring possessee coming upstairs is a keeper).
The FF format allows for rough edges, bits of improv repetition, gags which don’t entirely land and story threads which straggle, but Heraldry Paranormal is only deceptively random – it collects all its dangling plots and ties them up neatly. Without entirely dispelling the terror, it shifts to focus on hoping that the characters stick to their guns and overcome their own issues to forge happier outcomes.