And this is just the first photo...
With a film focusing on the murder of a town and using the aspects of Found Footage through photography, it comes to no surprise it has some very unsettling moments.
SPOILERS WILL BE UNMARKED.
- The massacre of Sangre de Cristo itself is this, especially the constant segments we see of crime scene photos and police footage. As described by Ross, there were at best nothing more but remains and scraps of most of the townsfolk. All fifty-seven. There's also the mention that some of the blood trails would lead to the desert and into nothing...
- Sangre de Cristo itself comes off as this, considering before the massacre, the town was nothing more but a heavy decaying Dying Town, without a police force at that. Then it became a ghost town.
- While Salazar himself is later on shown to be a Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold who was fairly private and stoic, he comes off as very creepy, if not due to how much of a Shell-Shocked Veteran he became from the massacre. That's not even mentioning his rather peculiar obsession with taking photos (which only confused certain citizens).
- There's also the mention that a trucker who found Salazar on the road covered in blood and who eerily died after delivering the photographs Salazar took of that night.
- One of the first Wham Line: "Teeth marks". The fact only a few in tact victims of the massacre had bite marks gives us a rather insightful view on what happened in the town..
- At first, most of the people interviewed assumed that Salazar did that to the victims (as everyone rolls with the theory that Salazar did the massacre)…except he too had bite marks.
- The interview with Salazar with Renee Davies, a psychotherapist. The first thing he said: "They were the same people...but they were dead."
- Salazar basically says straight forward that he felt safer in a prison cell than whatever was outside that killed the townsfolk.
- "Some of them were bloody...blood everywhere...I had to get help. I took my camera.."
- While within context it's rather innocent, Salazar's photographs of Grace Putnam, not helped he had those photos of Grace (and of the other SDC kids) alongside his photography of road kill.
- The night of the massacre: Danny Montes (a teen of the town) came to Salazar's home, bleeding heavily, while he was prepping to take a photo. Salazar comments that he saw Danny die as he laid him down on his couch...only for Danny to come back and attack Salazar. Despite being dead. Salazar then was forced to fight Danny with a pick axe. A total of 37 stabs around his corpse.
- There's mention of murders at the water tower, which Salazar was charged for too. Despite Salazar wasn't near the water tower, which begs the question. Why run to the water town and commit suicide to escape one man?
- The audio of Duane Putnam's call, dear fuck...
"Grace is gone...where is Grace? Grace is gone... Don't judge me, don't you judge me. Only God can judge me...Only He knows...only He knows...I am Abraham.. A burnt offering on one of the mountains...I have done everything. I have no choice. I will deliver my family into God's hands. My lamb...My little lamb, my baby boy..! It's by His will that I will save them...I'm not a sinner..I am clean! We are clean...! We shall be clean..!"- The fact that Putnam murdered his entire family (sans Grace) with a machete makes it far more alarming..
- The crime scenes of the preschool. Death of a Child to a high degree, so much that Salazar, who has been super stoic from the trauma, begins to cry from what he saw.
- Salazar tearfully breaking down as he discusses to his failure to save Grace, even going as far as to use his flash (something he hadn't used since the event) to stop them. Which didn't work: the flash only stunned them for a second at a time. All he can do is relapse into singing a Spanish song that he sung to Grace as he held onto her hand. Also counts as a Tear Jerker.
"I just held her hand..." - And then comes the crux of the film: The photographs
and everything that happened that night:- Photo #1: While it seems fairly normal, closely one can see what seems to be something running down a hillside.. what prompted Salazar to immediately run into town.
- Photo #2-#4 focuses on a local from the other town Salazar runs into while he's running away from whatever came into town. It didn't work, with the last photo focusing on the local being taken down despite being an expert hunter.
- Photos #5-#16 simply focusing on the town trying to fight off the creatures, with Salazar describing it as "people hurting each other". And being unable to do anything except take photos and run.
- Photo #17: A simple lone shot of what seems to be citizens (or the debated "zombies") standing at the store next to the only landline in town. Doing nothing. Photo #18 is the exact same too.
- Photo #19: The church photo, where the Putnam family resided (who Salazar was friends with). Entities entering the building and in front of Salazar, with 19-22 focusing on the figures themselves.
- Photo #23: Putnam being attacked from behind by one of the creatures.
- Photos #24-34: More of the massacre, with heavy close ups of what are very clearly to be zombies.
- Photos #35-37: The final photos: Grace Putnam being trapped in a locked room and cry out for Salazar, all while she can only do is hold onto Salazar's hand from the window, with him being Forced to Watch as she's killed.
- The photos of the school building after the massacre cross heavily into Tear Jerker territory. Blood is spread all over the floor, and smeared all over discarded children's clothes and the pictures hung on the wall. To make it even worse, an interview with the sheriff reveals that forensic evidence indicated that some of the children tried to hide behind a curtain in their last moments, in the childlike hope that if they couldn't see the zombies, the zombies wouldn't see them.
- The mockumentary goes into heavy Humans Are Bastards mentality, as half of the interviewees spend half of their time either invoking Insane Troll Logic (The sheriff in particular) on how Salazar somehow was able to kill everyone in Sangre de Christo (despite most pointing out that it'd be impossible for him to do so) or trying to use the tragedy to further their own agendas (what Gus Greer and Ross do).
- The Wham Shot of what was next to Sangre de Christo: The Mexican Border. Just how far have these creatures travelled, and how many people have they killed along the way?
- They were heading North...
- The ending: Found footage of casual people camping only to be attacked by what took down the town of Sangre de Christo, with the Wham Shot of what seems to be Salazar's corpse joining them. It's happening again.
- In fact, it keeps happening again and again. The narration states that the camp attack left three dead and nine missing, presumably converted. Mixed in with the credits are lists of victims of other attacks, one of which has nearly forty names on it.
- Carlos Olivares, a second-generation border patrol agent, speaks about the things he’s seen while working for border patrol for thirty years. Horrible things like women and children dying from dehydration ten feet away from hidden caches of water seem fairly normal, if tragic. Then he comes out with this: In the last few years of patrol leading up to the events of Sangre de Christo’s massacre, he’s come across bodies that had been chewed on by something that wasn’t a natural predator or scavenger (buzzards or mountain lions, for example). The worst part of it? Nobody in his line of work will talk about it. This means that people in the government were likely aware that something wrong was going on long before the events of Sangre de Christo. And still they did nothing. Let that sink in.
