Ian Austin's Red Goes to Hell: The Final Herring is Found Footage Madness

by Isaiah Swanson

It' been a while since I've written one of these, and recently I decided I wanted to bring more of my human voice into the mix in the zine material. So, you'll get a little bit of the human and a little bit of the wolf perspective in these writings going forward. I call it the Best of Both Were-worlds!

And what better human for a human to talk about than Ian Austin, indie horror filmmaker of the Barbatachtian series of films​ as well as Red Herring's Found Footage Nightmare, a single take screen life horror about a grifting influencer who fakes a paranormal encounter during a livestream, but things go terribly wrong. 

I had a blast watching Red Herring. Austin manages to do a great deal of world-building within the confines of his own flat, and doing all of this in a single take completely alone poses a wild acting/directing challenge; Austin's improvisation skills work to his favor here. In addition to being funny, Red Herring has some genuinely creepy moments as Red encounters demonic, deific, and other kinds of paranormal forces.

The saga continues with Red Goes to Hell: The Final Herring, or Red Goes to Heck as it's written in some places, for Austin has an affinity for inconsistently spelling/pronouncing the titles of his own movies, and this sequel leans even harder into an eerie absurdity that takes this franchise into the very depths of b-movie glory. 

In The Final Herring, Chad (also portrayed by Austin) attempts to investigate his brother Red's disappearance by visiting the flat where the events of the first film take place. Soon, Chad finds himself exposed to the whirling vortex of ultimate doom and destruction that is hell made manifest inside of a standard flat.

Austin takes on a number of roles in Red Heck, as he does in his other movies, and genuinely manages to give them a ridiculous life of their own, like the Archangel Rafael or a musical shadow vampire thing. What other actor do you know who has portrayed Dracula as well as God in the same franchise?

At times, you feel like you're stuck in hell right alongside him, because Red's flat/Chad's heck harbors this intense disconnect from any kind of narrative or filmic reality, leaving the audience unsettled. Like its predecessor, this movie occasionally builds into something genuinely freaky, but Austin is smart enough to undercut these moments with physical comedy and self-aware bombast, like when his disembodied hand is meant to be flopping about on the floor, but you can clearly see it still attached to his wrist. Or one of many times when Austin halfheartedly punches himself in the face, under control of some entity, and falls down.

It takes a deranged sort of mad scientist to even make this movie in the first place, assuming the mad scientist was Dr. Frankenstein, as in Gene Wilder's Frederick Frankenstein from Young Frankenstein, or perhaps more fittingly, whatever weird stuff is inside of that Abby Normal brain. Because Austin doesn't just make you watch it once. No, he makes you watch it twice - only this time, everything is backwards, like if David Lynch's Black Lodge was inside a random dude's flat in England. 

On that note, I must segue to add that this film is in direct conversation with and will undoubtedly take seat in history alongside grand masterworks like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust, Dante's Divina Comedia, Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer, Tommy Wisseau's The Room, Jason Goes To Hell, and even Sesame Street's Bert & Ernie.

But Ian Austin's Black Lodge is in his own flat, which he uses as the primary setting in most of his movies, the centrifuge of his personal madness, and he manages to make every use of it feel new in some weird way.

In this case, the flat evolves into a special kind of hell; "special", as in what you say to your nephew when he gives you a drawing and you go, "Oh, isn't that special . . . ", laugh nervously, and tuck it away under the couch cushion.

I don't mean that in a derogatory manner at all. For b-movie lovers, it's a gift.

And if I could print out Red Goes to Heck, I would stick it on my fridge with a smiley magnet, where it would quickly grow on me, and it would grow on you, too, as things stuck on fridges frequently do. 
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Yet, the mystery remains: Why was this brilliant footage found in a dumpster?



Watch Red Goes to Hell: The Final Herring, Red Herring's Found Footage Nightmare, and all of Ian Austin's Barbatachtian series on his YouTube channel here.