Grave Encounters

Grave Encounters is a 2010 indie horror film shot in the First Person Camera Style about the crew of a Ghost Hunters -like reality show who surveys haunted locations in the hopes of capturing ghostly activity on film. A prologue mentions that this particular episode, centering around an abandoned mental hospital in the Danvers County area, was to be the sixth, and the raw footage shows how they play up the spooky factor to increase the atmosphere. However, they soon find themselves in the middle of a nightmare as the sun goes down...

Tropes used in Grave Encounters include:

• Abandoned Hospital
• Afraid of Blood: Nobody wants to be near the bathtub of blood in the bathroom except Matt but he's insane at this point so naturally everyone wants to leave. It's made even worse when Matt won't get away from the tub and T.C. gets pulled in by something, whatever it was, resulting in him vanishing. They even tip the tub over, he's gone.
• Alien Geometries: The hospital itself. The front door only leads to another corridor, the staircase to the roof ends with a wall etc.
• Always Night after everyone checks the time they realize it's the afternoon, 1 pm, yet there's no light whatsoever. This is played seriously in the movie as if the building is in some sort of dimension of its own.
• Apocalyptic Log
• Attack of the Monster Appendage: at one point the group is attacked by a series of black arms reaching out of the wall, and earlier in the movie Sasha is grabbed by an arm that busts through the glass of a door she's standing near, but the viewer never sees who these arms belong to, if anyone at all.
• Be Careful What You Wish For Lance did want one hell of a ghost hunting show.
• Downer Ending: The sole survivor, Lance, is shown having been lobotomized in the last scene.
• Body Horror: Multiple ghosts in the movie can distort their faces rather drastically and their eyes become glowing marbles, losing all eye color and iris otherwise.
• Camp Unsafe Isn't Safe Anymore: The group decides to house up in a defunct mental hospital overnight where ghostly apparitions exist, believing that it is safe and nothing but folklore, boy does that turn out wrong.
  • Also played with repeatedly througout the movie. Regularly the crew tries to hole themselves up in a room to try and rest, and every time they're attacked or spooked in some fashion.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: this trope could apply to a lot of the cast who are scared, thrown around, attacked, and overall killed, but none applies more than Lance's lobotomy at the end.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast
• Dark World
• Darkness Equals Death: and how. Any character moving around on their own or out of shot or view is effectively doomed.
• Death by Falling Over: Matt, in his insane state, looks down the elevator shaft with the camera. The camera shows him falling to his doom, and the two remaining members both rush over to find him dead having fallen over four floors to the ground and hitting solid concrete.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: One by one the characters die off, until even Lance is lobotomized and we never find out what happened to him when they found the camera equipment.
• Face Revealing Turn: When everyone finds the bathroom, a woman is looking in the corner. While she turns her head she appears normal, but after just a few seconds her face goes Body Horror and she screams.
• Fog of Doom: Sasha's vanishing.
• Found Footage Films
• Ghostly Goals: Type B, the ghosts in the hospital don't seem to have any purpose beyond running around scaring everybody, causing extreme harm, and killing.
• Hope Spot: The crew finds a door with an EXIT sign ... but every time it opens on yet another hospital corridor.
• Horror Struck: Members of the cast at first dismiss the stories of the hospital as garbage, and even bribe a man to make stuff up because they don't believe they'll find anything. Then, when every story they heard comes true, suddenly they're all believers.
• Humanoid Abomination: The ghosts look human, but their behavior, strength, and face contortions show that if they were, they aren't anymore.
• It Got Worse: You might think the ghosts have reached a high-level when they turn the hospital into a labyrinth of looping hallways. They haven't.
• Jittercam: Sometimes intentional, sometimes not.
• Jump Scare: There are a few of these towards the beginning, mostly replacing the jump scares with actual attacks later on.
• Medical Horror: The famous surgeon who did tons of lobotomies mentioned at the beginning of the film is in the hospital with the ghosts still doing lobotomies with his nurses and tools.
• Never Sleep Again: The crew tries to stay awake in shifts, because whenever they all fall asleep, something bad happens in creepy ways to remind the cast they're being toyed with. Sasha is effectively "killed" in the end when a fog envelopes her and Lance while they sleep, only to have Lance awaken unharmed but with no clue as to where Sasha remotely is: taken by the fog while they slept.
• Nightmare Face: Ooooh boy.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Somewhat Averted, unlike most of the movies in its genre, the ghosts in this film get bored of being subtle after 15 minutes. There are still some nice creepy shots where you're tense waiting to see what's around the corner next though.
• The End - or Is It??: The bodies of the crew are never stated to be found, and it's uncertain if the crew has become a part of the dead walking in the hospital or are gone, but it's certain that whatever is in the hospital is still there.
• Psychological Horror: They do have a lot of physical threats, but there are several indrect threats as well from sickness, lack of food, never ending corridors and no exits, culminating with the fact that time is passing very quickly and they have no light.
• Psycho Party Member: Matt totally loses his marbles altogether and becomes insane. Luckily he doesn't hurt anyone, although he does indirectly cause T.C.'s death and also kills himself.
• Room Full of Crazy
• Room101: The hosptial in a general sense, and the operation chamber in a literal example.
• Screamer Trailer: Several ghosts attack in the trailer, and at the end a table is thrown and Sasha goes berserk with screaming.
• Screaming Woman: Sasha. She doesn't ever stand still in the location, but she lets out bloodcurdling screams at the slightest activity of paranormal nature.
• Shadow Discretion Shot: Lance's lobotomy is not shown, you hear him plead sanity, then scream in pain before seeing the after effects.
• Shout-Out: The crew interviews a man who says that he and his cleaning crew were harassed by the mysterious presences in the building.
  • T.C's death seems to be a Shout-Out to a similar scene near the end of REC 2 and the end is similar to the one in REC
• Surprisingly-Sudden Death: virtually everybody, but T.C. and Houston especially, the former grabbed and vanishes, the second thrown through the air with no warning and dies.
• Take That: to Ghost Hunters and reality shows in general.
• Things That Go Bump in the Night: The bald man ghost.
• Torture Cellar: The basic purpose of the operating room was to test lobotomies, as history will say the methods were often very cruel and did not let their victims survive very long. the final survivor finds this out first hand.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Some of the earlier antics are partially reminiscent of how real ghost hunting teams such as Ghost Hunters do things, but when they actually start seeing ghosts it blows into its own story.