As Cannes comes upon us new horror film, Lucifer Effect is gearing up for it’s screening riding high on the wave of found footage horrors.

Anyone would have thought that these found footage, low budget horrors might have been getting old by now but after a number of film studios have opened up whole new departments just to commission them the Lucifer Effect is no big surprise. It is also trying very hard to add some extra levels to the whole filming phenomenon even going so far as subliminal messaging within the film.

Sadly, unlike the days of the Blair Witch they have to rely on an unforgiving internet crowd to spread rumours about the film as opposed to word of mouth which is far far more convincing and far harder to disprove.

To put it into context The Lucifer Effect is a film about exactly that, The Lucifer Effect. This is a term that describes when good people turn evil. A famous experiment at Stanford Prison looked at the effect and took 24 normal students and assigned them to be either ‘prisoners’ or ‘guards’ in a mock jail set up in the basement of the university’s psychology building. The planned two-week experiment was terminated after just six days due to the emotional trauma suffered by the participants where the ‘guards’ rapidly became sadistic and with the ‘prisoners’ descending into extreme passivity or depression.

This film centers around this belief that a mixture of position and situation can turn the best people bad.

There is a lot of marketing surrounding the film that includes rumours of directors going missing, filmed footage being confiscated by police and actors going a bit nuts.

This would all be good hype only it’s not really hyping anything as a quick google for any of these story lines just throws up a few pieces on the film.

Wether their marketing strategy adds to the film release when it is so easy to disprove is debatable, the concept and implementation of the film however is an interesting one.

First director (who has now apparently disappeared) Tim Burke used the ‘Enigmatic technique’ technique for the film which is when actors are kept as much in the dark as possible, as detached as possible from any production crew. Then they are subjected to frighteningly realistic situations allowing them to react naturally to whatever happens.

The actors in The Lucifer effect were apparently found through the website buyamovierole.com and on arriving on set were locked in a house where things started to happen.

Whether it is true or not we don’t know but after filming some of the cast are apparently suing the film makers for false imprisonment.

We’ll watch it…. but we’re witholding judgement for the time being.