This film is a dramatization of events that occurred October 1st through the 9th of 2000, in the Northern Alaskan town of Nome. To better explain the events of this story, the director has included actual archived footage throughout the film…Every dramatized scene in this movie is supported by either archived audio, video or as it was related by Dr. Tyler during extensive interviews with the director. In the end, what you believe is yours to decide. Please be advised that some of what you’re about to see is extremely disturbing.

That’s Milla Jovovich at the beginning of The Fourth Kind, breaking the wall in order to pull us into a strange world of psychological fury and alien abductions. Jovovich plays Dr. Abigail Tyler, whose work as a psychologist treating abducted patients is documented in this movie through, as the intro suggests, actual video and audio shot by Dr. Tyler during her sessions and actor-portrayed dramatizations, kind of like what you used to get on shows like Unsolved Mysteries or Rescue 911. Only there’s no Stack, no Shatner, but the search for the truth is pretty much the same.

So basically, Dr. Tyler is seeing her own shrink because she’s having trouble dealing with her husband’s death. She claims he was killed by an intruder while they slept in bed. In an effort to get her life back on track, she takes up his work in Nome, Alaska, counseling patients who all seem to share the same nighttime horrors — their lack of sleep, a presence they can’t explain, and creepy visits from a owl. Tyler begins to hypnotize her patients in an effort to draw out what they are having trouble remembering. This takes her patients to a scary place and they go completely hysterical.

When her patients start going off the deep end and killing themselves and their family, the town’s sheriff wants to blame Dr. Tyler, but she believes that there is something unexplainable happening to the people in Nome (who have been going missing in high numbers since the 1960s). Then one night Dr. Tyler is taking notes on a hand-held tape recorder in bed and falls asleep. When she plays the tape back the next day she is completely freaked out when after she falls asleep she hears her bedroom door open, someone enter, and her own blood curdling screams. As she’s screaming we hear a non-human, robotic-like voice in an unknown language (which is later confirmed by an author and expert as Sumerian, a very old and dead language). Now Dr. Tyler, her own shrink, and this author need to get to the bottom of what’s happening, and fast.

After more bad things happen to her patients, Dr. Tyler is placed under house arrest, and a cop is put on watch outside her premises. Suddenly the cop sees something hover over the house and when they get inside Dr. Tyler is in hysterics claiming that her daughter was abducted. Everyone believes she did something to her daughter, of course. In a last desperate attempt to find out what’s going on and to rescue her daughter, she gets her shrink to hypnotize her. Like her own patients, Dr. Tyler begins to recall the abduction and then her body appears to be taken over by an alien presence. The shrink and the writer attempt to help, but then they start screaming and everyone vanishes.

They return, the shrink and the writer remembering nothing, but Dr. Tyler is convinced they were all abducted. The sheriff confronts Dr. Tyler in the hospital one last time, asking where her daughter is, but when she claims again that her daughter was abducted, the sheriff tells her what really happened to her husband, and we’re left to wonder how crazy Dr. Tyler just might be.

Throughout the movie we are shown what is said to be actual, real video footage shot by Dr. Tyler during sessions with her clients; we see them freak out while under hypnosis. We get real audio in the instances of her screaming and during patient interviews. The scene where her patient kills himself and his family, and when the cop sees something over Dr. Tyler’s house, are all shown as real video from cruiser dashboard cameras. And we see the real footage of Dr. Tyler going under hypnosis and being taken over by something, speaking in that ancient language. Finally, the entire film is wrapped around a real interview with the real Dr. Tyler and the movie’s director, Olatunde Osunsanmi, in which Dr. Tyler recounts the whole ordeal. Many parts of the movie are even presented in split screen, so we get the real footage of a session, for instance, beside the dramatized reenactment.

So, is The Fourth Kind in league with all of those other movies that pass themselves off as real (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, etc.) so as to inject a believability of horror into their story or is it all on the up and up? I don’t know. Clearly, the real Dr. Tyler’s credibility is brought into question, but how can you explain away the real, archived footage (other than it’s all part of the movie that is)? There’s all sorts of stats about the town and the number of times the FBI has visited the town, but could those be made up? Are the people of Nome, Alaska being abducted or is just a theatrical hoax? As it says at the beginning, “What you believe is yours to decide.” Not a bad movie, over all, and should be fun for the X-Files fans and conspiracy theorists among us.

Check out the trailer for The Fourth Kind!

Young couple Katie and Micah (that’s pronounced Me-ka, not My-ka….so annoying) want to get to the bottom of the strange happenings that have plagued Katie her whole life, so Micah invests in some sophisticated recording equipment that will hopefully catch the evil spirits doing their haunting thing while the couple sleeps. The camera and microphones do what they’re supposed to and the couple’s suspicions are confirmed; footsteps, lights going on and off, doors moving, Katie’s sleepwalking — all of it is caught on video. Not sure how to handle it, the couple calls in a psychic to help, but he’s pretty much useless, and the haunting intensifies, completely fraying the ends of Katie and Micah’s sanity.

Paranormal Activity, with its guerrilla marketing and low budget approach, was supposed to confuse and intrigue the public as to its authenticity much like The Blair Witch Project did, but who’s that gullible these days? However, the movie kept true to that premise by offering extremely believable, psychological horror (which is my favourite kind of horror), a horror that wasn’t ruined by an kind of explanation or a visible ghost. We never find out why Katie is being targeted nor do we find out exactly what — or who — is targeting her. And it’s better that way! All we know is that shit is happening and it’s totally creepy.

Ok, so we have to put up with the usual “Do you have to have the camera on?” and “Turn off the fucking camera!” dialogue rampant in movies like this, and the constant bickering and crying associated with it, and Micah is a bit of a dick, and we really could’ve done without the cliched Ouija Board scene, but if you’ve ever heard noises in your house at night, this movie will probably freak you out just a little bit. Or more. I watched Paranormal Activity with wide-eyed, peak-eared intensity because it demanded it, and you’ll no doubt do the same.

Oh, one more thing. That divide I mentioned earlier between people who like this movie and people who don’t seems to have something to do with the ending. Or so I’ve heard. I guess some people saw one ending and some saw the other, but rest easy because the DVD release has both endings, so you can decide which one works for you. I actually liked both of them.

Check out the trailer for Paranormal Activity!