Historia de lo Oculto

Watched at BeAfraidHorrorFestival and BAM!!!! it blowed my mind! One of the best movie of the year. if they had a bigger budget they would have done a masterpiece as The lighthouse. MUST TO WATCH if you love good cinema. <3

Atmospheric, mysterious, somber, oblique, apocalyptic. Goes needlessly off the rails a bit when hallucinogens are introduced in that always-disappointing way which has the filmmaker apparently thinking that gas lighting the viewer into wondering what is real and what is a hallucination is somehow entertaining or clever. It's similar to movies in which something creepy or startling happens but, oh gee, it was just a dream. These tactics are ineffective cliches and almost always bring a movie down a notch or two in my book. Despite these shortcomings this is a pretty cool movie with an impactful inclusion. It does come down to literally the last 30 seconds, in which we see that a stylistic element that had been introduced earlier in the film as seemingly a mere stylistic element is actually part of the story.

Side note: I have to wonder whether the name of one of the antagonists being Belasco is a nod to The Legend of Hell House, the Richard Matheson novel, and if a reference to Beaumont Street is a nod to Charles Beaumont, who wrote some of the best Twilight Zone episodes. This movie does have a very Twilight Zoney feel to it so maybe it's not a coincidence.

Saw this at the Imagine filmfestival 2021, usually in Amsterdam but now 100% online. Could not make heads or tails of it. I sat it out but had to force myself while attempting to follow what happened. For us Europeans there is not enough material to make a connection. An introduction of the parties involved, and especially the role of the journalists trying to phone-in with extra material, would be in order. I soon got lost what exactly the issues were. I kept watching in eager anticipation of a finale, hopefully revealing all secrets and intrigues, but it did not happen.

During the Q&A after the screening I thought I heard that the complete history around the TV-show was made up, and not related to reality. Freely translated: a vehicle to keep the story in motion. That was the moment I stopped the Q&A, lost my leniency to follow it, and switched to writing this commentary. I may have missed something important when the protagonists were introduced, however.

The black&white is another annoyance. It may intended only to suggest we are back in the 80-ies (color-TV existed more than 15 years before that time). It did not work for me and it is redundant anyway (whoever wants The Ten Commandments and/or Ben Hur shot in black&white to remind the viewer that this happened in the past??).

...and we liked that a lot!

Great acting, you really feel like you're watching an old TV broadcast, and the people outside that do transmit an old way of acting on movies of that era.

Good atmosphere, wasn't expecting it to look so old but relatable at the same time.

Of course, the end is a bit frustrating, but it is part of the movie, so it is somehow expected to end that way.

Hope to watch more of this director soon.

History of the Occult is not a documentary or a mockumentary. This is a movie. It's not filled with possessed little girls climbing on the ceiling or evil ghosts. It's not supernatural, paranormal, or even scary... And I'm thankful. This movie is all about building suspense through a simple premise- a news station is going to expose a satanic conspiracy among the political powers of Argentina.

The movie is cryptic and deliberately vague. If you need movies spelled out for you than this isn't a movie you'll enjoy. The ending is not neatly wrapped up, you'll have to think about it afterwards to make sense of it, and that's what makes it good.