Film / Savageland

Savageland is a 2015 mockumentary horror movie about a small town of 57 in Arizona who all end up being murdered in a single night with only one survivor who ends up being the prime suspect in the murder case. The film is framed as a documentary dedicated to discussing the tragedy and the media circus that followed.

---

This film provides examples of the following tropes:

• Adam Westing: Author Lawrence Ross plays a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing version of himself.
• All Issues Are Political Issues: A major theme of the film is apolitical violence and tragedy being hijacked for the sake of pushing a political agenda. In this case, a small-scale Zombie Apocalypse is twisted into a debate about border control policies, and the real problem is ignored at best, or actively covered up at worst.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Debated, but in the film's end, it's implied that Salazar became a zombie who attacks some campers.
• Apocalyptic Log:
  • Salazar's photos, which paint a picture of him surviving the night of pure chaos and death that embroiled Sangre De Cristo.
  • Duane Putnam's phone call during the massacre just before he commits suicide, the only call to come out of Sangre De Cristo that night. It's a broken, nigh incoherent rant in which he justifies mercy killing his family
• Axes at School: The last victims are at the town's preschool, where a teacher and nine students were killed.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Apparently what happened at the water tower, where eight people climbed up and then jumped off. It's heavily implied that the zombies had started to follow them up, and they chose to die rather than face the inhuman horror pursuing them. The more skeptical families of victims question how a single human Spree Killer could frighten a whole group of people that badly.
• Beware the Living: Salazar survives the massacre in one piece, though he's understandably traumatized by it. It's the living who claim his life by using him as a scapegoat and sentencing him to death. On the whole, the film makes clear the people trying to cover up or spin the destruction of Sangre De Cristo for their own ends are just as much endangering the public as the monsters themselves.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: The sheriff comes off like a nice guy, but it’s implied he knows more about what’s happening than he lets on and knowingly let Salazar take the fall.
  • Lawrence Ross becomes this as well: While he presents the argument that Salazar had no way of actually committing the massacre of Sangre de Cristo by himself, he uses the massacre as a soapbox to present his own argument that it was a racially motivated massacre somehow involving the state of Arizona (either perpetuating it or covering it up).
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: The beings in Salazar’s photos have eyes that apparently reflect light like an animal’s, making clear they aren’t entirely human.
• Children Are Innocent: Grace, the little girl Salazar befriended and tried to save. He failed.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Even before the massacre, Salazar is noted to have been a very strange guy prone to doing weird things like constantly taking photos of everyone and everything — including random dead animals — and to have been a loner prone to lurking on the outskirts of the town instead of interacting with his neighbors even though they all liked him. Unfortunately, the media spins his odd behavior to make him look creepy and guilty.
• Convicted by Public Opinion: What the government of Arizona and prosecution tries to invoke with Salazar, making up for the total lack of any case against him by spinning his strange behavior and stereotyping as signs of him being unhinged. The successfulness of this is dubious at best, but he does get convicted, if only because the whole trial is blatantly rigged.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Part of the reason people point out it's impossible for Salazar to have committed the massacre. It was a complete slaughter in which the townsfolk were totally outmatched, when it logically should've been the other way around given the townspeople outnumbered Salazar by several orders of magnitude and, even more pivotally, had guns while Salazar was armed with nothing but a machete and pickaxe.
• Death of a Child: It’s explicitly stated that Sangre De Cristo’s children were amongst the many victims. Grace, despite being the main person Salazar was attempting to save, is sadly killed by the monsters attacking the town.
• Deconstruction: Of the horror genre in general, exploring the aftermath of a typical gore-fest zombie movie; confusion and debate over what happened, an innocent man getting convicted for the crime because nobody believes that monsters did it, people hijacking the incident for their political views, and massive controversy ensuing when evidence of unnatural events become public.
  • The film also drops the conventional found footage style for a documentary-like perspective. While this within itself isn't anything new in the genre, what does make it work is the usage of photographs to fill in the "found footage" aspect.
• Devoured by the Horde: The fate of anyone unlucky enough to be caught by the monsters.
• Downer Ending: Salazar is convicted and executed for the tragedy, and the photos that could’ve saved him only come out afterwards. And it’s implied a second massacre is about to begin...
  • Bittersweet Ending: On the other hand, the film's ending credits (and the dialogue presented early on) make it clear that the more savvy people know the truth (or at best can agree that Salazar had no way of actually killing everyone in Sangre de Cristo) and Salazar becomes a martyr within the Mexican community, who arguably will use his experience as a way to prepare for whatever attacked the town and fight back.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Several interviewees keep trying to make the massacre a political issue and end up completely missing the obvious implications of what happened; most notably, a journalist keeps insisting it was a racist hate crime, while a Howard Stern-style shockjock tries to frame it as an attack by illegal immigrants. They’re both laughably wrong.
• Driven to Suicide: Several people climb the water tower in the town to escape the threat, and jump to their deaths rather than face it. Which only makes the idea of Salazar as a One-Man Army even more ridiculous.
• Dying Town: Even before its destruction, Sanger de Cristo was a very small, very poor community with little to no economic prospects. People who wanted more out of life simply moved away.
• Elephant in the Living Room: It's suggested the monsters may have existed for a very long time prior to this and that the attack on Sangre De Cristo was just the first time they got bold enough to target a population center, as Carlos Olivares notes that the area has a long history of the border patrol periodically finding corpses that are partially eaten in ways that don't match typical predator patterns, around which the officers have built of culture of simply not talking about for some reason. On a bigger scale, discussion of the massacre is hampered by the reluctance of pretty much everyone to acknowledge that it looks a lot like a zombie movie.
• Everything Is Racist: One of the main interviewees is a journalist who keeps insinuating that the whole thing was a racial hate crime based on flimsy evidence. Becomes especially bad when it’s revealed he was the one to get Salazar's roll of film and develop the photos, so if anyone should have been able to figure out the truth, it was him.
• Forced to Watch: Salazar is unable to save Grace and can only hold her hand as she is torn apart by the zombies in front of him.
• Gas Leak Cover Up: The cover-up of what happened in Sangre De Cristo is an especially bad one of these, pinning the deaths of fifty seven people — the entire population of a small town — on a single man using mundane weaponry, despite massive and abundant evidence to the contrary. Predictably, very few people believe it and the fact that Salazar is convicted and executed despite the prosecution's borderline nonexistent case raises even further suspicion.
• Government Conspiracy: It’s speculated by in-universe conspiracy theorists that the massacre in Sangre De Cristo was a racist attack of some sort that the government covered up for whatever reason. What they’re actually covering up is the Zombie Apocalypse that destroyed the town, though their motives for doing so go unrevealed.
• Hate Sink: Gus Greer, the sheriff, and later on Ross are basically this, spending 99% of the time focusing less on the tragedy of Sangre de Christo and more of turning the massacre into a political tirade about race (or in Greer's case, endlessly attacking immigrants and Mexicans). The townspeople outside Sangre de Christo as well considering they happily mock Salazar for being odd and jump into stereotyping immigrants and the like.
• He Knows Too Much: Implied to be part of why Salazar is scapegoated for the massacre. Also, the trucker who picked up Salazar after the disaster and had his camera dies under mysterious circumstances soon after delivering the photos to Ross…
• Here We Go Again!: The ending heavily implies that a second massacre is about to start, with a group of unlucky campers coming under attack by the monsters.
• Hope Spot: Salazar is convicted of the massacre in his first trial, by just as his automatic appeal process starts, the photos he took that night are released to the public. These images show monsters attacking the town and appear to exonerate Salazar. Unfortunately, the judge rules the images inadmissible as evidence in the second trial, so Salazar’s conviction and death sentence are upheld, and he is ultimately executed.
• Humanoid Abomination: The monsters come off more like this than traditional zombies.
• Hypocrite: Ross, the journalist, has his moral high ground rather badly undermined when it’s revealed that he had gotten a hold of Salazar’s photos, which could’ve exonerated him, but didn’t make them public until after the appeal.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The monsters bite and eat parts of their victims, which Salazar's accusers try to spin into him being a cannibal.
• Immune to Bullets: Ron Templeton's efforts to shoot the monsters don't do anything to stop them. They're not invincible, though, since Salazar managed to hack one apart with a pickax. This is pretty standard fare for zombies.
• Insane Troll Logic: Gus Greer and the Sheriff constantly try to enforce the idea that Salazar somehow is the one who murdered all fifty-seven residents of Sangre de Cristo, despite multiple instances that it'd be impossible to do so. In fact:
  • The Sheriff insists that Salazar massacred the town in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Especially egregious is when he declares Salazar's pictures to be photoshopped, when professional photographers have found them to be authentic.
  • Gus Greer runs on this repeatedly throughout the documentary, from arguing that Mexicans and Immigrants are "obsessed" with death and ignoring all the obvious signs that Salazar had no way of committing the murders on his own (such as ignoring the fact that Salazar had bite marks himself from the victims that he "cannibalized").
• It Can Think: Maybe. One of Salazar's photos shows monsters not doing anything, just lurking around the one landline in the town as if guarding it in case anybody tries to call for help, which would suggest they are much more than mere mindless beasts. But if that's really what they're doing is impossible to determine from the available evidence.
• Kangaroo Court: It's abundantly clear that the "trial" Salazar was put through was bought and paid entirely by the people covering up the truth of the massacre to ensure he was found guilty, largely because the prosecution's case is embarrassingly weak and yet the judge sides with them on everything.
• Kill the Ones You Love: Duane Putnam murders his own family to prevent them from being killed by the monsters.
• Leave the Camera Running: Not in the documentary itself, but Salazar kept taking pictures (the closest thing he had to film) throughout the whole night. When asked about it, even he doesn’t seem certain why he did so.
• The Quiet One: Salazar says very little throughout the movie, too shell shocked to put his experiences into words.
• Manipulative Editing: The in-universe documentary is blatantly editing things in such a way as to support Ross’s "it was a hate crime" theory and portray those who disagree in an awful light.
• Mercy Kill: Duane Putnam kills his wife and son to spare them from the monsters.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: The sheriff uses Salazar’s entirely innocent pictures of Grace Putnam, next to his photography of dead animals, as “proof” that Salazar is a pervert. This is the only alleged motive the prosecution has, showing just how weak the case is.
• Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold: Francisco Salazar is a strange man who lives by himself at the edge of town and has an almost compulsive habit of photographing everything from people he knows to random dead animals, but he's nothing but friendly and helpful to his neighbors. Unfortunately, his odd behavior is used against him after he becomes the Sole Survivor of the town's mass murder.
• Mockumentary: The film is entirely shot as an actual documentary about the murder and trying to piece together what happened given the evidence presented.
• Mundanger:
  • Salazar survives against the monsters that attack his town. It's the living and their desire to deny what's really happening that claim his life.
  • At one point, Carlos Olivares talks about many of the spooky things he's seen over the years as a border patrolman. Some of them are eerie and unexplainable, but others are perfectly mundane, if tragic, like illegal immigrants dying of dehydration extremely close to hidden caches of water.
• Nightmare Face: In Salazar’s photos, the creatures attacking the town have monstrous and distorted features. To some extent this might be because of the poor photo quality or the monsters’ movement, but the actual people in the pictures don’t look nearly as unsettling.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Gus Greer is an obvious representation of inflammatory right-wing radio personalities like Alex Jones.
• No Endor Holocaust: Averted hard. One section of the film is dedicated to exploring the collateral damage of the massacre, like the effects it had on the families and friends of the victims.
• Nothing Is Scarier: There is little to no explicit gore or violence and little to no explanations. Just photos of what happened and even then they don't cover any actual deaths. Pretty much all of the horror is left up to your imagination...
  • It’s mentioned that a few of the bodies weren’t even found, with evidence that the attackers dragged them off into the desert afterwards. We never find out why.
  • Some of Salazar's photos show the monsters not really doing anything, just standing around, with one in particular showing them huddled around the only landline in town. Why they do this is as unexplained as anything else.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The monsters are probably zombies, but nobody ever dares use the word, even those who acknowledge that something unnatural happened. Deconstructed, as this just means everyone is too scared of sounding silly to directly discuss the very real danger.
• Off Screen Moment Of Awesome: Due to the nature of the film, all of Salazar’s badassery in escaping the mass murder is only talked about, not actually seen.
• Only Sane Man: Carlos Olivares, the second generation patrol officer. While he appears disconcertingly ambivalent towards the events he's seen as a border patrol man, even he knows that what everyone said about the massacre made no sense whatsoever and figures out his own conclusion based on the evidence. He even calls out Ross for his essentially using the tragedy as an excuse to soapbox his "race motivation" theory.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The monsters that killed the town are much faster and more brutal than Zombies are usually depicted, and implied to be the result of a Hate Plague. They also look downright demonic at times, though this may simply be due to the poor quality of Salazar’s pictures of them. They tend to appear warped or distorted even in images where other figures are clear, and some ambiguously look as though they might have inhuman anatomy. They also manage to disappear entirely after the massacre without a trace.
• Police Are Useless: Deconstructed; the cops probably could've done something, but it's speculated that the residents of Sangre De Cristo were scared to call them, since many of them were illegal immigrants. Worse, the town was poor and many residents didn’t own proper phones, meaning they couldn’t call if they wanted to. The only person who does manage to call anybody outside the town is Duane Putnam, and he's so traumatized that he's almost incoherent. The call was not sent to the police, contains no useful information, and is essentially a rambling suicide note justifying the Mercy Kill of his family.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: In-universe. Most of the characters refuse to believe that the town was attacked by zombies, despite the mountain of evidence.
  • Racist hate groups have been known to target white people campaigning to advance civil rights, most famously Viola Liuzzo in 1965. This knowledge makes Ross's staunch insistence that the townspeople, including the white folks, were victims of a hate crime at least slightly less ridiculous.
• Riddle for the Ages: Due the nature of the film, a lot of questions are purposefully left unanswered at the end for the audience to chew on. What were the monsters that attacked the town? Where did they come from and why did they attack? What precisely happened during the massacre? What happened to the bodies that got dragged off to the desert? Why is the Government Conspiracy trying to cover it all up?
• The Scapegoat: The government of Arizona is accused of using Salazar as one to cover up what really happened.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Salazar in all the footage from after the attack, with good reason.
• Shock Jock: One of the interviewees is a talk radio host who, when he isn't outright insulting immigrants, tries to portray the incident as the work of some nebulous Mexican gang.
• Sole Survivor: Salazar is the only survivor of the Sangre De Cristo mass murder, which of course makes him the prime suspect, however little sense it makes on further investigation.
• Spree Killer: Salazar is accused of being one, with the prosecution absurdly arguing that he personally murdered most of the 57 victims with a machete and a pickax.
• Spring-Loaded Corpse: Danny Montes, a local teen, shows up at Salazar's house bleeding heavily. Salazar tries to help the boy only for him to die on Salazar's couch… and then come back to life and lunge at Salazar.
• Stylistic Suck: The movie is framed as a rather poor documentary that blatantly tries to equate an unrelated tragedy to the American immigration debate to push the creator’s political view. We also see several in-universe ads and PSA’s, all of which do this in their own way.
• To Serve Man: Implied. Most of the victims were bitten to death, and many of the bodies are either missing parts or completely gone.
• The Unreveal: While the nature of the massacre is strongly indicated (a zombie outbreak), the source of it is never revealed, nor is the reason for the coverup with Salazar.
• Wham Line: "Teeth marks". The point where it becomes abundantly clear that the events in Sangre De Cristo were NOT natural.
• Zombie Apocalypse: It’s all but explicitly stated that this is what actually happened in Sangre de Cristo. The origins of the zombies go unrevealed, but they are implied to have originated in Mexico.