TW: Rape, murder, sexual assault, all sorts of nasty stuff

Megan Is Missing is a 2011 found footage psychological horror film written, directed, edited, and co-produced by Michael Goi. It's recently been popularized by TikTok's discovery of it and its sensitive material. This movie isn't an experience for everyone, but I want to talk about it because I honestly think it's a masterpiece. It depicts and describes awful things. If you think that you can stomach that, then I might suggest you go watch it; it's free on Youtube.

Let's start with the bad: technically speaking, this is a very poor film. Cinematography is negligible, the acting and writing look/sound like what boomers think 8th graders look/sound like, it was filmed in a week on an amaetur budget with purely debut actors. The director claims that the message is some bullshit about not giving out information online, but honestly that gets so muddled in the sheer horror of the film that it's pointless to try to get any purpose out of it than just that: pure horror. I'm not really sure if I like the idea of the rape of a child being depicted in any form of art for any reason.

I'd also like to mention one scene in particular: the scene in which Megan describes giving a blowjob to a camp counselor when she was 10 years old. Apparently the director got this story from a relative and describes it word for word in the film. The denouncement of that goes without saying. With that said, the scene and some others early on in the film goes a long way to humanize our protagonists and act as a sort of anchor for the pure horror that comes later in the film.

Now I want to talk about what makes this movie good: it is not a traditional horror movie because it doesn't really evoke unease or make you scared. Instead, I'd call it a true horror film, something akin to A Serbian Film; it evokes true horror in its audience. It replicates the feeling you get when you see something for the first time that your brain doesn't really have a place for; something people who grew up on the internet should be intimately familiar with: animal torture on LiveLeak, ISIS beheadings, really fucked up porn. Now, it's a movie, so it's not real like those things. But, it seems about as close as you can get to the real thing without actually being the real thing. Your head definitely knows the difference, but your gut doesn't.

The final 20 minutes of this film are just an endurance test. It's awful, uninterrupted barbarism. I'd describe it as pure hateful darkness. As a neutral film that sets out a clear goal, to truly horrify the viewer, it is nothing short of a triumph. It's wildly subversive transgressive fiction at its finest. I think it's a masterpiece in that regard; and I wish it had never been made.

I'd love to get some other opinions on this.