Director – Devin McGinn, Co-Director – Steve Berg, Screenplay – Adam Ohler, Story – Steve Berg, Ken Bretschneider, Devin McGinn & Murphy Michaels, Producers – Steve Berg, Ken Bretschneider, Devin McGinn, Murphy Michaels & Tobijah Tyler, Photography – Mike Black, Music – J. Bateman, Visual Effects – Bluefire Studios (Supervisor – Murphy Michaels), Production Design – Murphy Michaels. Production Company – Deep Studios.
Cast
Jon Gries (Hoyt Miller), Steve Berg (Sam Gruene), Devin McGinn (Cameron Murphy), Erin Cahill (Lisa Moreau), Kyle Davis (Ray Reed), Matt Rochleau (Matt Johnson), Michael Horse (Ahote), Nash Lucas (Cody Miller), Michael Black (Britton Sloan)
Plot
In 2010, at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, the owner Hoyt Miller’s son Cody disappeared in broad daylight. Blamed for the disappearance and accused of abusing his son, Hoyt invited a team of investigators from Modern Defense Enterprises to come and record the paranormal phenomena on the ranch. As the six-person team moved into the house and set up equipment, they began to witness the phenomena for themselves from lights in the sky to cattle mutilations and ghostly appearances from Cody to their being attacked by creatures and mysterious forces.
Skinwalker Ranch is an existing ranch near Ballard, Utah. Since the 1990s, it and the surrounding area has been the source of reports of UFO sightings and cattle mutilations, along with other paranormal phenomena. This has created much urban legend about the place, although scientific enquiry has failed to turn up any evidence. It is believed some of this was exaggerated for the purposes of inflating the ranch’s sale price. Its popularity has expanded into the media with History Channel documentaries and then this film.
The influence of Paranormal Activity (2007), which had just gone massive four years earlier, very much hangs over the film. This is most noticeable in that a reasonable percentage of the film takes place via cctv cameras that have been placed up to monitor the house and farm, where the film mimics Oren Peli’s style of having us sit watching nothing happen until something unexpectedly does.
Mysterious lights over the pasture
The film gets in a number of eerie and unexpected jumps. There is the scene where Erin Cahill is in the kitchen doing the dishes and a phantom child unexpectedly runs through the room behind her unnoticed. After this is found on the recording, it is discovered that the child has turned up at the same time every night, while in later scenes the ghost child is seen standing over the bed watching Erin sleep. We get other scenes with the appearances of lights in the sky; the dog being levitated in mid-air by an unseen force; the mystery girl on the videotape from 1967 who demonstrates powers that kill all who try to examine her; the giant wolf-like creature that attacks the SUV; or where Matt Rochleau is in a field and is picked up and abruptly thrown away by the lights.
As is usually the case with these type of films, there is no real explanation offered of the paranormal events. In one scene, the camera-equipped party find a cave and some Indian bones and drawings that indicate the UFOs have been coming there for hundreds of years. Whereupon Matt Rochleau is given to start comparing this to other ancient cultures that have ‘documented’ examples of aliens visiting, pushing Skinwalker Ranch well into the territory of Erich von Daniken – for which see Ancient Astronauts.
Skinwalker Ranch is co-directed by Devin McGinn and Steve Berg, both of whom also play the leaders of the investigating team on screen. Both have assorted prior acting credits. Of the two, McGinn has previously written The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu (2009).
