FAQ

Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), producer of "Grave Encounters", a reality TV show about ghost-hunting, and his team—occult specialist Sasha Parker (Ashleigh Gryzko), equipment tech Matt White (Juan Riedinger), photographer T.C. Gibson (Merwin Mondesir), and psychic medium Houston Gray (Mackenzie Gray)—have themselves locked inside the abandoned and supposedly haunted Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, intending to spend the night to search for and photograph any creaking doors, cold spots, and full spectral apparitions they can stir up on their static cams, EMF meters, and Geiger counters. What they do encounter is infinitely more frightening.

Grave Encounters was written and directed by the Vicious Brothers, Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz. The movie is shot in faux documentary style, supposedly by people who subsequently disappeared, leaving behind only their camera equipment and whatever footage they shot. It's this "found footage" that forms the basis of the film. The release of a sequel, Grave Encounters 2 (2012), followed in 2012.

Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital is located in Maryland. However, the real filming location was at Riverview Mental Hospital, Coquitlam, British Columbia.

Two explanations have been offered. Some viewers have suggested that the perpetual darkness and the lack of exits was all in their minds, sort of a shared mental hysteria. However, that doesn't explain why the cameras also showed these effects. Other viewers think they were "transported" to a different plane of reality. The cameras didn't pick up anything amiss because what was happening was real where they were.

At the beginning of the movie, executive producer Jerry Hartfield (Benjamin Wilkinson) explains that the film was assembled from some 76 hours of raw footage, meaning that the researchers were in the hospital for just over three days, which jibes with what their watches tell them.

That's a hard one to call. Matt falls to his death when he jumps down an elevator shaft, and Houston is killed when he is attacked and thrown down a hallway by an invisible force. Lance is shown alive at the end of the film. What happened to T.C. and Sasha is unknown. They simply disappeared.

As Sasha and Lance rest against the wall in one of the tunnels, a fog drifts over them. When Lance opens his eyes, Sasha is gone, and he is totally alone. He begins to freak out. He speaks into his analog audiorecorder and hears eerie laughter all around him. A rat walks past him, and Lance beats it to death with a pole and feasts on its flesh, laughing maniacally. After a short sleep, he wanders about in the dark until he sees a door. Entering the room, which appears to be a laboratory of some sort, he sees photos of what must have been previous patients being operated upon. In another room, he encounters an altar bearing candles, a human skull, and Satanic books amongst the other books for medical treatment of mental disease. In yet another room, he comes upon Doctor Friedkin (Arthur Corber) and two nurses performing a lobotomy. The picture goes dark, but Lance can be heard screaming, "No! I'm not crazy!" In the final scene, Lance can be seen again, this time with blood coming out of his eye. He says, "He said I'm all better now. I can finally go home. For Grave Encounters, I'm Lance Preston signing off."

Hatfield doesn't explain how he came by the footage. Matt explains that all the cameras, besides recording onto their own drives, send their footage to a remote hard drive in the main lobby, which transmits wirelessly to Matt's computer. It can only be assumed that Kenny the caretaker (Bob Rathie) found the cameras or the computes when he unlocked the doors to let out the researchers.