Low Tide: A Newly Restored Work by Thomas Wright

Shot on 16mm in 1991, just a year before Wright’s death, Low Tide is a gorgeously textured, newly restored film-essay documenting a short walk in coastal South Carolina. Low Tide exemplifies Wright’s approach to filmmaking and his interest in memory, the natural world, and the ways humanity encroaches upon them both. Low Tide: A Newly Restored Work by Thomas Wright is a 2022 experimental docu-fiction film, an exploration of the narrative possibilities established by the found footage horror genre over the last thirty years. It is not a horror film, but rather found footage of the mundane; a reinterpretation and rearrangement of the genre’s ruleset that takes the form of the pseudo-artifact left by a documentary filmmaker whose untimely demise is foreshadowed in the presentation of the film itself. In this way, its core structure mirrors that of The Blair Witch Project or Creep.