The Big Picture
- Found footage horror movies that draw upon folklore and history can create a powerful and atmospheric viewing experience.
- Apollo 18 takes advantage of the public's existing distrust of the government during the 70s to create a story that feels close to the truth.
- The claustrophobic atmosphere and sense of hopelessness in "Apollo 18" make it a chilling and memorable found footage film that relies on the fear of betrayal and the unknown.
Folklore and history are often great starting points for horror, and the found footage subgenre has produced some very compelling movies from this angle: Willow Creek looked at the legends of Bigfoot, As Above So Below centered on a hunt for the Philosopher’s Stone, and Chernobyl Diaries speculated on what might be left over at Pripyat. Taking pre-existing ideas and superstitions and crafting a narrative around them can be a really powerful storytelling device. One such gem is a widely maligned found footage horror set in space, which put its own spin on the well-worn moon landing conspiracy theories. Although Apollo 18 was not highly regarded upon release, it took an interesting premise and created a chilling and very atmospheric viewing experience, and even cared to take extra steps to sell the realism.
The Space Race dominated the zeitgeist of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, with much national pride and public interest attached to pulling off successful moon landing missions. Of course, these pioneering feats of science and technology were expensive and dangerous, and following a number of disasters and near-misses, the remaining scheduled Apollo missions were canceled for a variety of reasons. Conspiracy theories relating to the moon landings have been around for decades, so the idea of "what if the Apollo missions weren’t really canceled" is a simple and quite brilliant launch pad for an effective sci-fi horror that would feel just close enough to the truth to get audiences invested.
What Is 'Apollo 18' About?
It’s December 1974, two years after the supposed final mission of Apollo 17, and Commander Nathan Walker (Lloyd Owen), Lieutenant Colonel John Grey (Ryan Robbins), and Captain Ben Anderson (Warren Christie) are informed that the Apollo 18 mission is back on, under absolute secrecy, and they are hurriedly launched into space with none of the preparation or fanfare that would usually accompany such an event. Neither the press, the public, nor their families know where they have gone or why. This alone is a great set-up full of intrigue and endless scope for disaster. Supposedly, they have been sent to the South Pole of the moon to install detectors that will warn NASA of Soviet activity. When Ben and Nate land, however, things quickly spiral out of control, and the men come to realize just how much they have been kept in the dark about.
It’s supposed to be a quick, in-and-out mission, and at first, things seem as normal as can be under the circumstances. Their tiny vessel is equipped with static, motion-detecting, and handheld cameras, and they install the detectors without incident. But the cameras start picking up small movements on the surface of the moon, then the guys start hearing noises outside the craft. It’s when Ben and Nate venture a bit further out that things get decidedly creepy: First, they find footprints different from their own NASA-issued spaceboots, then they find an abandoned Russian craft that is still in working order, but trashed inside and covered in blood, revealing that there has been Soviet activity here that either no one knows of, or nobody told them about. The discovery of a cosmonaut’s corpse, with a shredded spacesuit and smashed helmet, deep in a dark crater understandably sends them into a tailspin of panic, and they start pondering just how trustworthy their bosses are.
'Apollo 18' Deals with Governmental Distrust and Political Paranoia
In the early ‘70s, there was a great deal of political unrest and public distrust of the US government, particularly spurred on by the Watergate scandal. It made the public aware of just how much went on behind the scenes, and the deceit and treachery inherent in politics, and suddenly, people were distrusting of authority figures, never quite believing that what they were being told was really the truth. It is with this cultural backdrop that Ben and Nate start to question everything and wonder what the hell they are doing here under such secrecy and apparent urgency. “How could there be Russians on the moon and nobody knows about it?” Ben asks. “Nobody knows about us,” Nate retorts. The fact that Houston won’t allay any of their concerns only rubs it in. Ben insists that they focus on getting home and asking questions later, but suddenly their craft is compromised, they lose power and communications with Houston, and they have to contend with the notion that they may very well die up here, cold and alone, with their families never knowing what has happened to them.
But it gets worse: they venture out again, and something gets inside Nate’s suit. He has a huge gaping wound on his torso which Ben digs a moon rock out of, and the resulting infection quickly spreads, sending Nate into a state of delirium which exacerbates his paranoia about what NASA and the government really intended for this mission. As Nate goes mad and Ben tries desperately to support his friend and find a way to get back to Earth, the helplessness of their situation is realized. This is only worsened when they discover that these are not just any old moon rocks, but living creatures, gross little crabby moon spiders that burrow into organic matter and use it as a parasitic host. This must have been what became of that abandoned cosmonaut.
Atmosphere Is at the Center of 'Apollo 18'
What Apollo 18 thrives upon is its claustrophobia and sense of utter hopelessness. The posters of Alien declared that in space, no one can hear you scream, and the look and feel of this movie really dives into that idea. (Although its own tagline is also a stroke of genius — "There's a reason we've never gone back to the moon.") The craft itself is very small and cramped; forget the Nostromo with its corridors and labs and communal eating areas, this is the tin can David Bowie sang about in "Space Oddity." There is nowhere to run, nowhere to trap a crazed colleague and no way of barricading oneself against danger. To accommodate this tiny confined space, the static cameras are placed in the upper corners of the craft, which helps to visually communicate the suffocating feeling of being inside it. The vast, empty wasteland outside is no more appealing. It is cold, bleak, and colorless, and presents as real a danger as staying inside. The atmosphere of nothingness that the movie creates is really chilling, to the point that slowly dying of suffocation seems like the easier option.
'Apollo 18' Had an Imaginative Marketing Campaign
It’s a solid approach to the found footage format, one that offers a reasonable explanation as to why everything is being filmed and helps to sell the stifling atmosphere that the characters find themselves trapped in. To take the realism one step further, the movie takes a page out of The Blair Witch Project’s book, framing the action as real events, and ending on a plug for a website called lunartruth.com. If you retrieve this now-defunct page, it brings up a frame of 16mm footage that says “The following is the recovered footage from Apollo 18,” with a caption underneath reading, “This website was forcibly censored. Its contents can be seen in the film. Discover the truth." It was promoted almost entirely online, with the trailer doing the legwork and social media taking care of the rest. Executive producer Bob Weinstein even claimed, “There are secrets that are really true to the world. It’s not bogus. We didn’t shoot anything, we found it.” As a story that leans heavily on the idea of government conspiracy and a grain of real history, this is a brilliant gimmick that would certainly have got at least some viewers thinking pretty hard.
The ending of the movie reveals that the higher-ups have been in on the whole thing, know exactly what has happened, and tell the men in no uncertain terms that they will not be rescued. It’s a wonderfully bleak ending that could explain a cover-up, and further push the realism that the movie is going for. Don’t go into Apollo 18 expecting the thrills of Alien, because its forte is in the creep factor. The action and visuals intertwine to create a found footage that kicks the conspiratorial brain into overdrive, and it delivers on telling a creepy, understated story that doesn’t rely on jump scares or even the monsters that it eventually reveals. The real fear here is of the more everyday kind: what if your friend and only ally turned on you? What if powerful entities betrayed you, left you to die, and lied to everyone about what your final hours really looked like? What if it turned out that nobody could be trusted? The idea of the danger being much bigger and more influential than monsters, aliens, or madmen with chainsaws is what makes Apollo 18 work so well, and demands that naysayers and first-timers alike take a second look at this thoroughly creepy sci-fi horror.
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