Please Don't You Watch It: The Invocation of Enver Simaku

When mockumentary meets horror, a good old found-footage/hand-cam horror is right around the corner. Marc Lledó Escartín, the director of The Invocation of Enver Simaku (2018) went for something else: he made a mockumentary with immensive narration. The plot of Simaku follows Julien whose wife was murdered during a pogrom in Albania. 18 years after the incident, the footage of that fateful night still haunts Julien’s dreams, so he returns to Albania to find out more about the circumstances of his wife’s death. Simaku is an awful movie, but it’s also an interesting cautionary tale on how not to shoot a horror movie.

First of all, the coherence of the narrative is quite arbitrary. Even though we readily “suspense our disbelief” and buys into Julien just returning to Albania to find out more about the killer of his wife, the Communist “Anti-Paranormal Brigade” is much harder to get us do the same. However, Escartín’s blunders in building a narrative would be easy to forgive, the exceptionally large amount of narration can’t be disregarded. It seems that such narration could effectively kill any horror movie. Why is that, though?

On the one hand, narration is an element of organisation and order, which is alien to the development of thrillers and horrors. Especially if it’s a past-tense narration, which builds upon the premise that the narrator’s and the story’s present are two different plains of time, that is, no matter how terrible the events are, we can be sure of the fact that the narrator is still alive. As opposed to that, horror mockumentaries feeds upon the audience’s uncertainty on the characters’ well-being. Not only does Simaku break that uncertainty principle, its non-diegetic narration (ie. a narration with a narrator who’s “outside of the story”) also relieves the tension, in that it comes from an external space, so it tears down not only the fourth wall but all four walls at the same time. The viewer is not trapped into a world of suspense, there’s a way out, no need to worry!

So, Simaku as a movie is a great disappointment. It is rather a failed experiment with non-diegetic narration in horror movies. And that’s about it.