It took a surprisingly long time for found-footage horror to venture into space. In fact, it was a full 12 years on from The Blair Witch Project before Hollywood recognized that the isolated, largely unknown surface of the moon should, theoretically, be far more terrifying than the local woods. Unfortunately, Apollo 18 was unlikely to scare off any aspiring astronauts.
Released 15 years ago today, Gonzalo López-Gallego’s English-language debut would have caused a few more nightmares had it come out 15 years earlier. “We didn’t shoot anything,” Dimension Films producer Bob Weinstein insisted about the film, which claimed to be edited down from 84 hours of previously classified NASA footage. “We found it.” In a further bid to establish authenticity, the cast was credited by their character names, and a website, lunartruth.com, was set up to deepen the mythology. By 2011, though, audiences were no longer so susceptible to the viral marketing machine.
