content warning: violence against children, sexual assault

Polaroid is a paranormal slasher film about a haunted camera. Bird is a high school student who loves photography. Her friend Tyler gifts her a rare instant camera from the 1970s, which she gleefully uses to start taking photos of her classmates. Then her friends start dying one by one under mysterious circumstances.

Polaroid is adapted from director Lars Klevberg’s short film “Polaroid” about two sisters discovering a haunted camera while clearing out their mother’s house. The haunting is a result of a traumatic event captured on film, which is an interesting enough angle. Blair Butler’s screenplay expands the concept into a feature length paranormal slasher film. Basing this on objects rather than a clear figure or presence is tricky business. If it had to be an haunted object causing the destruction, at least it was a haunted camera.

I’m reluctant to call haunted photography a sub-genre. It’s a motif, for sure. Perhaps a recurring image? It’s known in horror and certainly has recurring elements, but the entries are quite spread out. It’s not like the emergency of the torture film in the 00s, the American slasher in the 80s, or the psycho-biddy in the 60s. One story gets released, then another years later, then another. I struggle to connect Twilight Zone’s “A Most Unusual Camera” in 1960 to Say Cheese and Die in 1992 to Fatal Frame in 2001 to Polaroid in 2019*. Sure, the cameras can see more, but the form of the story is not as defined as other-subgenres.

The image of the evil camera is one that comes from the invention of still photography. It’s a fear of what the devices can do to a person. Painted portraiture was considered fine, but capturing the actual image so realistically was worrisome for a while. It’s why Victorian death photography developed. People wanted the photos to remember their loved ones by, but there was a fear that the photograph could capture the soul or impact the life of the subject.

Polaroid starts to lean into this angle in the third act. Once the characters understand that the camera is causing the deaths, they do everything in their power to research and stop it. It’s not unusual for the survivors to band together to fight against an entity in a paranormal slasher. It is unusual for so many of them to survive to the third act and actually be on board with research as the primary weapon.

Unfortunately, Polaroid doesn’t really come together in a particularly meaningful way. The concept and writing are solid, but the decision to censor the violence actually detracts from the story. The cause of the threat cannot be seen. The consequences can. It’s rare for a slasher of any kind to be successful when the deaths are reported like the obituary column. Polaroid goes for tell, don’t show, and constantly stops short of committing to its own premise until the final act.

Polaroid is current streaming on Netflix.

*This is not an exhaustive list, but a representative one. It also separates photography cameras from film cameras, as there are quite a few cursed video stories with clearer tropes and recurring elements to better argue for that classification.

***

Sketching Details is now on Patreon. Subscribe for as little as $1/month for access to exclusive articles, videos, and content.