Review: ‘Hunting Matthew Nichols’ Reinvigorates the Found Footage Subgenre

In the late aughts, found footage horror was everywhere. Strange as it seems, it wasn’t The Blair Witch Project that incited a huge shift in horror’s raison d’être, but Paranormal Activity. Oren Peli’s unprecedented success not only gave rise to a gargantuan franchise of its own but also encouraged the horror genre to broadly emulate what made that low-budget shocker so successful. We had The Devil Inside, As Above, So Below, The Gallows, The Visit, and innumerable more on the VOD front. Filmmaker Markian Tarasiuk is longing for that era in horror, and his debut, Hunting Matthew Nichols, feels like the kind of movie you’d see in a hot theater in the dead of summer back in 2013. I mean that in the most complimentary sense.

In a meta-twist, Markian Tarasiuk stars as himself alongside Miranda MacDougall. MacDougall plays Tara, a young woman who recruits Tarasiuk for his filmmaking prowess to document her search for her missing brother, the titular Matthew Nichols (James Ross). Matthew and his friend went missing two decades before, basically vanishing without a trace over the course of one mysterious Halloween night.

Hunting Matthew Nichols’s first strength (among many) is its technically proficient verisimilitude. Horror mockumentaries all adhere to the same cadence, and this one’s no different. Yes, the most serious scares are reserved for the final 10 minutes, and everything that comes before is a slow-burn of new evidence and ooky-spooky findings. So, there are a lot of cuts to other talking heads—detectives, anthropologists, and even reporters—remarking on the disappearance. And it looks… great?