Welcome to Knockout Horror. We have covered some ultra low budget horror movies on this site. Some of them, like Something Walks in the Woods for example, are pretty damn awful. Others, e.g. Life of Belle, are actually quite good but I don’t know if any of them are quite as low budget and quite as DIY as the movie we are reviewing today – New Folder from 2024. You can check this movie out for free on L.R. Smith’s YouTube Channel.
As Bare Bones as They Come
This is, perhaps, the most fitting example of “have a go” directing that you will see all year. This is one dude, L.R. Smith, grabbing a camera (apparently a Samsung HMX-F80 which you can currently purchase on eBay for about £50) and making a movie about a stalker harassing an unsuspecting woman and streaming the events to, what I can only imagine, are an audience of snuff film fans.
It’s as simple of an idea as they come. Thoroughly unoriginal and thoroughly lacking in innovation. Still, I find a strange type of enjoyment in these movies. There is a certain kind of charm to them. I mean, where else can you find ideas like this other than in found footage horror?
Someone literally saying to their wife “Hey, I am going to make a movie. I’m not going to write a script, I am not going to purchase decent equipment, I am not even going to hire any actors…. By the way, I am going to brutally murder you at the end of the film.. K thanks!”. And actually doing it, slapping it up on YouTube and asking for people’s opinions. You would only find this thing in horror and only via the medium of found footage.
People… Were Less Than Impressed
As you can probably imagine, the YouTube comments were less than complimentary. Mr Smith kept his chin held high, however, and liked every comment. Clearly grateful for people taking the time to actually check the movie out. Being perfectly honest, there are a few things that New Folder gets right and a few things that deserve some praise.
Keeping in mind that this is more of a hobby film than anything. L.R Smith has done a pretty good job of nailing that unsettling style of voyeurism that actually took place in real life crime cases such as that of the Lauren Giddings murder. You don’t need fancy equipment for this type of thing. You just need someone with a desire to spy on people and a 50x optical zoom on their camera.
People complained about the cameraman’s heavy breathing but we are supposed to think he is a weirdo. What better way than to have him sucking air every half second of the movie. Well, maybe that is a bit of a reach but it works given the context. The bigger problem is that it is all just rather boring.
Just Quite Dull
The majority of the movie is presented as a series of clips played by the perpetrator to a life stream audience. Things don’t start off positively. For some reason, Mr Smith deemed it necessary to make the viewer sit through the process of copying the videos to the aforementioned New Folder.
This was legitimately painful to watch. It went on long enough for my fiancée to decide that she wanted to start a baking day each week where she makes cakes and biscuits, as well as hedgehog friendly snacks for the local spiky denizens of our back garden. If your opening shot of files being copied into a folder is long enough for someone to pick up a new hobby.. You might want to rethink it.
The rest of the movie simply features a bunch of clips of not much happening. The perpetrator finds his victim, films her through the window, stalks the house etc etc. It’s entirely what you would expect and probably would have worked far better as a short film. It’s hard not to think of some of the V/H/S anthology movie segments when watching. The format would have been far more suited to something much shorter and straight to the point. Still, with that being said, I didn’t hate it. It is gritty and realistic enough to work. It will creep a few people out, I am sure, and that’s an achievement in itself.
Should You Watch New Folder?
Honestly, whether you should watch New Folder or not totally depends on your tolerance level for found footage and bare bones DIY horror movies. This is as basic as they come. It is very slow, not much happens and the camera work will probably get on your nerves a bit. Despite this, it feels gritty and fairly realistic, partly due to said camerawork, and some may find it unsettling. It would have worked so much better as a 15 minute short. Trim the fat, get to the point and leave people feeling like they didn’t get lost in the preamble.