Regional no-budget filmmaking will capture the heart and soul of a place before any big movie ever will. That’s regularly the case in the horror genre, too, which offers such deep roots for films that are specific, located, and invested in their environment. All horror needs is a rich atmosphere. Horror is a big bucket and it can be anything but when there is a sense of hanging dread enlivened by a sharp sense of place, a film without any budget can still produce the same, or more, effect than one with too much money.
Films made as amateur experiments are also a valid form of filmmaking. If the edit is experimental, and this one is certainly both preliminary and experimental, then another effect can be achieved. It can feel like a passion project of a small group of friends. When movies feel like they come from a community, they seem rendered out of more heart and passion than those made by a committee.
Such is the case with Skagit, an obtuse little horror film with so much in-edit trickery, an excessive amount of cheap and technical touches made in post, that it becomes a funny little oddity born out of a very specific place. Where it’s born from is Skagit County — although the film is not only shot there and is more liberal about which parts of Washington State it is being shot in and conveying.
What matters is that there is an independent heart and spirit behind it. It’s the same old story: a group of young, dumb, and horny kids go off the grid and wind up in a vacation home and become possessed by a spiritual sort of evil. When horror movies are shot in the Pacific Northwest, they already convey certain tendencies — we might say Twin Peaks (1990) holds a spiritual imprint over any horror movie shot in the green expanses of the state and that holds true here.
The whole affair is a silly one. There’s not much gravity lent to what happens. Some of the jokes are questionable and immature — one character repeatedly dons some Skagit Pilgrim Woman regalia and its a crude and dumb joke about how he presents sexually. Awkward and gross. Likewise, the movie is concerned with sexuality, as this spiritual force seems to be tied to the raging hormones of the house guests and as is said in horror circles, sex and unclothed bodies are the cheapest and most effective practical effects.
The movie loses its way eventually. When it gets more bogged down with its internal mystery and shies away from its very explicit regional celebration of area and evergreen vibrancy, it loses something as the plot unravels, revealing how thin the strings behind its machinations have been all along. It’s not a lost cause, however, as the regional specificity and endearment to the region of Skagit County in particular are rewarding selling points that make for a fun and lightly compelling horror movie that generates quantifiable laughs, both out of intention and out of the peculiar oddity of it all.
Skagit is no great movie but it is a perfectly fine regional variant on indie horror filmmaking, a group of friends having some fun with a camera and their first access to some editing tools. If that’s something you’re looking for, as it’s a specific and interesting thing in itself, there’s just enough reason to support this work, which only a select group will surely see of folks with local ties and interests. Support your local filmmaking community.