YMMV / Grave Encounters

• Complete Monster: Dr. Arthur Friedkin is the mastermind of the horrors of Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital. A brutal authoritarian who ran Collingwood under harsh conditions and lobotomized nearly 150 patients under his care, Friedkin used the hospital to cover up his heinous, Satanic rituals to transform Collingwood into a nightmarish gateway to hellish dimensions. Friedkin would vivisect patients and sacrifice infants in his goal to twist Collingwood to his will, and even after death he continues to haunt Collingwood, tormenting the spirits of his old victims while helping the sapient hospital find new victims for Friedkin to terrorize.
• Fridge Logic: How the tape was edited together and sent to the producer who is interviewed at the beginning is left unexplained.
  • He does state that there were over 70-something hours of footage, and what we see has been edited for time by his staff.
  • What's more interesting is that, if they edited raw footage, why did they have archival footage of the hospital from 1942?
    • Possibly the crew had already collected it from the back stacks of a local library or courthouse, before they visited the site. They'd want to know in advance if there were specific rooms or equipment they should make sure to capture footage of, that they could show before-and-after in their finished episode.
• Fanon Discontinuity: To most fans, Grave Encounters 2 never existed. This is mainly due to how it screws up the mythos of the first film, which not helped by the incredibly Narmy CGI, which really contrasted to the first film's lack of CGI unless necessary.
• Fridge Horror: The first Logic above is rather simple - Lance's last lines of the film are "He said I'm all better now, and that I can go home. For Grave Encounters, Lance Preston... signing off." So given the events of the sequel, Friedkin and/or the hospital allowed Lance to leave so he could send in the footage and lure in more "patients" by doing so.
• Genius Bonus: The Spooky Photographs Lance takes get progressively creepier. The first appears to show nothing, the second shows a blurry human-ish shape, while the third shows a screaming ghost on the other side of the window, hands pressed against the glass. Most people will only note the latter two pictures as creepy, but anyone reasonably familiar with ghost hunting shows (or just ghost hunting in general, really) will notice that the first photo contains a few orbs. As paranormal evidence, orbs are largely considered dubious at best, but a savvy viewer might notice them and appreciate the nod to a common ghost hunting trope.
• Narm:
  • It looks like Houston dies from a ghost kicking him in the ass.
  • Parts of the sequel's climax being filmed by the ghosts actually don't look at all like a Found Footage film, instead looking like a more mainstream movie. The contrast is surprisingly jarring.
• Nausea Fuel: Lance killing and eating a rat, complete with gruesome closeup of him tucking into it.
  • Earlier on, the rotten food.
  • Some of the medical photographs, too.
• The Scrappy: T.C. for some. While his constant spouts of anger and frustration is understandable, the way he constantly gets on Houston's case and how he argues with everyone makes him unbearable at times, so it's a surprise any fan was sad when he was taken away by the ghosts.
  • And In-Universe, Houston himself grates on the others due to how optimistic he tries to be ("Maybe we took a wrong turn" or "Maybe an electromagnetic field made our clocks all go faster, so it's actually 6:30 instead of 8:30!"). Although it should be noted that the only person that gives Houston crap is T.C, a Scrappy out-universe.
• Signature Scene: The girl in the corner.
• Tear Jerker: Sasha crying for her mother towards the end. Grown woman or no, many of us would feel like doing the exact same thing after vomiting up blood. Poor girl just needs a hug.
• The Woobie: All of the Grave Encounters crew by the end of it all, especially Sasha.