DEMENTER and the Nuascannán blurring of the 'Other'

Chad Crawford Kinkle’s Dementer (2019) is perhaps the most emotionally raw entry in the global Nuascannán canon. It represents the movement’s commitment to Radical Empathy. The film follows Katie, a woman who, after escaping a backwoods cult, takes a job at a center for adults with special needs. She becomes convinced that a supernatural force from her past is coming for one of the residents, Stephanie. It is a film that exists in the friction between a gentle, observational documentary and a jagged, strobe-lit psychological horror.

What makes Dementer a quintessential Nuascannán movie is its casting and blurring of reality. The character of Stephanie is played by the director’s real-life sister, Stephanie Kinkle, who has Down syndrome. By filming in a real facility and utilizing a "non-professional" cast of residents, Kinkle bypassed the artifice of "acting" disability. The camera captures the genuine rhythms, sounds, and interactions of the center. This is the Nuascannán Dissonance: using the lo-fi camera to capture two conflicting realities at once—the mundane beauty of the care center and the terrifying, fragmented flashes of Katie’s trauma.



The production was a labor of familial love and micro-budget grit. The "special effects" were often just a shift in frame rate or a sudden, discordant sound edit, proving that Nuascannán Horror is a psychological state, not a solely visual one and bringing to mind The Green Marker Scare. The digital grain in the cult flashbacks is pushed to the point of disintegration, making the images feel like they are rotting. Critics praised its "unflinching honesty," noting that it avoided the sentimentality often found in films about disability. 

In the chronicle, Dementer stands as a reminder that the lo-fi ethos is the only one capable of documenting the "Other" without the condescension of the mainstream gaze. It is a film that demands the audience look, and keep looking, until the "Other" becomes the "Self."

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