‘Man Finds Tape’ Filmmakers Embraced Practical Effects For Occult Found Footage Feature Debut [Interview]

Found footage horror film Man Finds Tape weaves together paranormal and occult themes with a small-town setting and the fractured bond between a brother and sister to tell an unsettling story that goes to some unexpected places. The film features shocking, terrifying practical effects and a small, talented cast, and boasts an impressive list of producers.

Written and directed by Austin-based filmmakers Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman, who both have several producing credits and co-wrote the novel The Dead Friends Society together, Man Finds Tape is their feature film debut. The film is produced by the team behind Rustic (The Endless, Synchronic), David Lawson Jr., Justin Benson, and Aaron Moorhead, as well as Ashley Landavazo, with Kristen Bell serving as co-producer. Executive producers include C. Robert Cargill, Jessica Cargill, Nate Bolotin, Nick Spicer, Aram Tertzakian, Maxime Cottray, and James Shapiro.

Man Finds Tape follows a man named Lucas Page (William Magnuson), whose YouTube channel goes viral after he shares disturbing home videos he finds hidden in his childhood home. After he uncovers surveillance footage of what appears to be a murder, he convinces his estranged sister Lynn (Kelsey Pribilski) to return to their hometown to help him solve the mystery. In the process, Lynn and Lucas unearth dark secrets about the small town where they grew up that may be linked to paranormal phenomena. The cast also includes John Gholson, Brian Villalobos, Nell Kessler, and Graham Skipper. Man Finds Tape is a surprising, incredibly imaginative feature film debut that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

During a recent press day, Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of talking with writers/directors Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman about their creative process, the outstanding practical effects in Man Finds Tape, and assembling the masterful team of producers.

John Gholson in MAN FINDS TAPE, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

Bloody Disgusting: I’m a big fan of found footage, and I think Man Finds Tape is extremely creative. I love all the twists and turns the story takes. Did you have a specific inspiration for this story?

Peter Hall: We didn’t have a specific inspiration for this story in terms of a bolt out of the blue or seeing a video that inspired it. It was more wanting to tell the kind of story that Paul and I grew up loving, like an X-Files episode basically. One of my favorite things about The X-Files is that every episode is a monster of the week, and it’s going to investigate something in a weird, small town. So, I think that was kind of the driving factor for us, wanting to tell a small-town story, a weird thing that’s people falling down a rabbit hole of a mystery in their backyard. That fits really well with found footage, so that stuff kind of went hand in hand for us, but there wasn’t any singular a-ha moment; it was more of a cumulation of different influences and inspirations.

BD: This film has a great cast, and a small cast, and most of the story takes place in intimate settings. The conversations feel very organic. Can you tell me if it was all scripted?

Paul Gandersman: It was a full script that was very detailed. There was a lot more on the page than ends up in the movie [laughs]. We took out a lot of answers. But we really made sure in the casting process to identify actors that were really interested in being a part of the whole filmmaking process, not just showing up on the day doing their part and then heading home, but understanding that some of them are going to have cameras in their hands; some of their footage is going to be in it; and also actors that could really embody these characters in a way to challenge what we wrote, challenge what we’re asking them to do, and push back. With Kelsey Pribilski, who plays Lynn, a lot of what we’re seeing is a camera in her hand as a character. We had already cast William Magnuson, who plays Lucas, and we invited Kelsey over to do an in-person callback. It’s a scene where they’re in the kitchen, and they end up hugging at the end of it. I’m filming on my iPhone, and we do the first take, and we get to the end of the scene, and she doesn’t hug him, and we cut, and she goes, “I’m sorry. We just didn’t earn it.”

That was basically the moment where Peter and I were convinced, and we went, “Oh! She’s the one.” They did the take again, they did earn it, and they hugged. What we’re so impressed by is that as an actor, she wasn’t going to just force it if it wasn’t believable. That translated into the production where there were times where so much of what we’re seeing on camera is her point of view, and so there would be big effects moments and things like that and we’d say, “And now you stand here and film this,” and she pushed back and said, “As my character, I wouldn’t get close to this thing. I would get further away. I’m frightened of it.” We took that and kind of reconfigured and reshaped, and I think if we didn’t have incredible actors in every role who were down for that process, we wouldn’t have ended up with something that’s hopefully as authentic or realistic as it is.

William Magnuson in MAN FINDS TAPE, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

PH: I think we thought there would be more improv than there was, and there are some very crucial things in it that are improv. John Gholson as Reverand Endicott Carr, his opening, where he’s doing a prayer to the camera on his TV show, was improv; Nell Kessler, who plays Wendy, has a very emotional moment at the end where she’s sort of reflecting back, which was heavily improv; and then there are lots of little moments in between. Actually, the things the actors did the most that surprised us, in that we were glad they were on board for this, were sort of improv by subtraction, if that makes sense.

Let’s say we were shooting a scene that had two pages of dialogue and we just needed to get through it faster, we would sort of rewrite the scenes on the fly, without losing the heart of it, and the actors would step away for less than five minutes sometimes and come back and say, “Alright, I’ve got it.” So, their ability to feel ownership of the characters and understand the intent of where a scene was going and not feeling the pressure to be word perfect for the script, or it’s okay if they forgot a line as long as they were delivering the important emotional elements of it, was huge. I think it’s huge for any film, but it’s very important for our style of film that it has that sense of spontaneity to it.

A scene from MAN FINDS TAPE, a Magnet Release. Photo courtesy Magnet Releasing.

BD: Man Finds Tape unexpectedly turns into a creature feature, and the effects look fantastic. How much of what we see is practical effects and how much is digital, and can you talk a little bit about creating the creature?

PH: I think that it’s safe to say, without getting into spoiler territory, everything is practical, with one big asterisk that I’ll get to in a second. The monster movie aspect of it is practical. There were elaborate appliances that Meredith Johns, who was our head of special effects, crushed it. There are puppeted elements in it. All of that was practical, and it gave our actors a lot to work with on the day, which was huge. There are augmented VFX to it. Aaron Moorhead, who was one of our producers, also did ninety-nine percent of the visual effects, which most of the time was just cleaning up an appliance that maybe slipped loose or a shadow where we didn’t need a shadow, or maybe we’re going to add a little bit of extra goop in this. But we were still using Meredith’s ultra slime that would get goopy and gross.

Then there is one big set piece towards the end that’s one of our more cosmic moments, that was created by a guy named Tim Buell, that was our swinging for the fences moment, and we could not have been happier with how it turned out. We wrote ourselves a couple of different ways to get in and out of that moment, in case it didn’t turn out as good as it did, and then the first version that Tim sent back to us of that sequence, we were like, “What the fuck?” [laughs] He only iterated it twice. What’s in the film is version two, so he really nailed it.

PG: It was really cool, too, like Peter was saying, for the actors and everybody with the practical effects, just informing performance. When we’re all on set together, and we’re all universally creeped out and grossed out by what we’re looking at in person, that’s when we’re like, “Okay, we think it’s going to work.” Also, it just really helped in the postproduction process, where so much of what we’re getting feedback from people before we do VFX clean up, and that sort of thing, we’re getting feedback like, “Wow, these effects look really, really good.” Because that’s a gamble, right? In a movie of this scale, putting this much reliance on practical effects is dangerous [laughs], but we knew we had the right people to do it, and they’re super talented and were willing to work magic for us.

PH: One of the things that I love about it, and I would assume Bloody Disgusting readers will love, is that you can tell that it’s practical. We’re not fooling anyone into thinking that these are real things in a way. They look real, they look awesome, but they still have that very practical monster movie practicality to them that I think is really fun. It literally pops up in a way that I don’t think people will see coming because the movie leading up to that point isn’t necessarily that kind of movie. So, it becomes a really nice surprise, I think. Even if you tell people, “Oh, it’s going to go this monster direction, you’re not going to see it coming,” I think it still catches people off guard, like, “Oh! That was fun. I didn’t think it was going to do that,” which is cool.

A scene from MAN FINDS TAPE, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

BD: What was it like writing and directing as a team? Did you divide up certain aspects of making the movie, or did you do everything as a team?

PH: We do everything kind of as a team. Paul and I have been producing for a while. We produced some features for Emily Hagins, a movie called My Sucky Teen Romance, and then Grow Up, Tony Phillips, as well as some shorts and a couple of other features. So, we’re always thinking on the producing side of the practicality of doing something. Then, when it comes to writing and directing, we’re already sort of having a conversation with a phantom third party, which in a way allows us to act like a single party. When it comes to writing, we have a style. We wrote a book called The Dead Friends Society, and whenever we tell people that we wrote a novel as a duo, I think it takes their minds a minute to wrap around that, because that is a strange thing to do. We have a style where if I’m writing ten pages of something, I send it to Paul, and then he goes over those ten pages and then might write another five pages, and we refer to it as the lawnmower method, where we’re constantly overlapping each other’s work until we get to the end.

I was a little unsure of how it was going to work on set. Paul has more on-set experience than I do going into this, and it was a very natural thing because we didn’t separate duties in the writing, because we didn’t separate duties in the preparation, the planning, and the casting, or any of that. We have the exact same ideas and goals of how things should work, so on the day, whether someone came to Paul or myself, they were probably going to get the same answer.

Nell Kessler in MAN FINDS TAPE, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

PG: I think for us, working together over time, there’s Peter’s voice, there’s my voice, and there’s this voice in between that we kind of create. It gets to the point where, on the page, we start to lose sight of who wrote what; it all just kind of blends together and becomes its own thing. I think we both respect each other enough to know that if one of us is certain a thing is a good idea and the other isn’t, then it’s not the right idea. We’re always trying to find the thing that the third voice agrees on. But at the same time, we’re both willing to try things, audition things, that the other one isn’t sure of.

One of my favorite things in the movie is there’s a specific cut where it’s always written a certain way since the first draft, and Peter suggested about a week before we submitted it to Tribeca, “I think we should take this moment from the end of the movie and put it thirty minutes into the movie,“ and I was like, “You’re crazy. That is a terrible idea.“ But I took off my director cap and put on my editor cap, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to cut the best version of what Peter suggested because I respect him, so let’s see how it works.“ I did it, and I pressed play, and I just sat there, and I went, “Shit, he’s right!“ [laughs] So, we made a major change like a week before submitting to Tribeca, and it worked. I think if either of us were driven by ego in the process or just being completely rigid about it, we never would find that magic.

PH: It also really helped that we worked with Dave Lawson, Jr., Justin Benson, and Aaron Moorhead because Dave has been their producer for years, so he has been producing for a directing duo and doesn’t think there’s any weirdness to that. We were talking to other producer friends about this project and other projects, and we were getting some advice like, “You guys can write and direct, but you should take separate credits, one of you take the credit of director and one of you take the credit of writer.“ I remember the first time I told Dave that, and he said, “That’s stupid. Why would you do that? Justin and Aaron don’t do that.“ So, it gave us a lot of confidence that there was no one questioning us.

Man Finds Tape releases in select theaters and on VOD on December 5, 2025.

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