It can be challenging to find new ways to spin Found Footage. Many have done it, using things like Screen Life or mockumentaries to get scares from in-world recorded videos. Mashing it will technology as a conduit to connections to the supernatural, there arises other ways to squeeze terror from lenses and blinking red lights. That’s what Death of a Yellow Bird does, using a VHS camera and old videos as a medium between the living and the dead.

Ari Millen (sprinting to his moniker as a Canadian Horror Darling) leads as a man who has chosen to refuse treatment for his cancer and to visit his childhood home to gain a sense of closure. Digging through family relics, he dusts off some home movies that take him back to a time with his late younger brother, Danny. While his family is trying to pluck him out of his dour exploration, he falls deeper into his dark project when he discovers that Danny seems to be able to communicate with him through the retro camcorder. Speaking in code, as ghosts often do, Danny seems to feed him cryptic information trying to coax him to find the truth about his death. Flashes of a sparkling childhood, a mother with memory issues, and a sneering father, raise questions of reality, truth, and what levels of grief any one of us is able to accept.

This project was very personal for writer director Cody Calahan, as well as his lead. They used their art as a gateway to explore their challenging experiences in the way a camera was a gateway to another world. It feels baked into the story, how a man is in turmoil during his supernatural experience, willing to forgo anything rational on his quest for closure.

“The team behind Undertone” is an apt label, even though the creatives are different (Calahan produced that one, and his usual collaborators from Black Fawn worked somewhere on both). Like that horror banger, this one focuses on a single seen character in a trauma filled childhood home whose only connection to the outside world comes via phone call. Similarly, the lead is left to their own devices, often trying to find real-world corporeal connections to the audio that gets to them through their devices. But Millen’s character is doing something very different, dealing with sadness more than fear, as he focuses his energy on solving something instead of running from it.

It’s “grief” horror, but Death of a Yellowbird is using a medium mashup to explore that. There are jump scares, some brooding moments, and it’s all part of a slow burn leaving its lead to discover something more terrifying than the reality already set up in its opening. Videos are yellow tinted and shiny, the present is blue tinted and grim, and the movie revels in the lead slowly pulling those images together.

Death of a Yellow Bird had its world premiere Fantastic Fest 2026