Non Believer

I really must stop watching those bloody supernatural 'reconstruction' programmes on TV.  You know the ones I mean: they restage some supposedly real life case of weird paranormal shit happening with actors, shooting and staging it all like a bad low budget horror movie.  The thing is that I'd never watch these things when they show on regular TV but, for some unknown reason, they exert a strange fascination over me when I stumble across half a dozen episodes being shown back-to-back on a streaming service.  Most recently, I found myself transfixed by multiple episodes of something called Believers, that was showing on Pluto TV's 'Mystery' channel.  It wasn't that it was any good, mind you.  In fact, it was one of the outright worst examples of this sort of show I've ever seen.  All of the stories, (there are usually two or three to each episode), are told via the framing device of one of the actual people involved, sitting in what is not their own house, but rather somewhere rented by the production company, telling their tale, with occasional prompts from an off screen director/producer, while a dramatisation of the story plays out, with actors playing the protagonists, including the narrator.  The show's 'gimmick' is that it also includes supposedly 'real' archival footage shot at the time of the incident by the narrator on their phone, or on security cameras, or a handy camcorder.  

There are multiple problems with this approach: not only do the actors playing the younger versions of the narrators usually look nothing like them, but it quickly becomes obvious that the allegedly actual narrators are, in fact, being played by actors themselves.  There is just something too 'dramatic' about the way they tell their stories.  Moreover, they never stumble or digress, giving the impression that they are reading from a script rather than telling their own stories.  As for the 'actual archival footage', well, it just looks fake - it always looks too deliberately grainy, to give the impression of age and low end, non-professional equipment, yet the shots seem too well framed, the camera too steady and the lighting just murky enough to make any alleged supernatural activity indistinct, but good enough that you can always see 'something'.  Perhaps I'm just too much of a sceptic, but the whole shebang just seems too staged.  On top of all that, the stories invariably all feel like variations on well established urban legends and ghost stories.  Yet still I watch this shit!  As I said, it exerts a strange fascination over me, in much the same way that classic Italian Mondo movies fascinate me - it is that sense that you've stumbled into some bizarre parallel world.  Except that the average Mondo was far more stylishly made, not to mention unreservedly outrageous in its fictions, with its reconstructions far more entertainingly made.