James Cullen Bressack put the first teaser for I Have Proof online this week, five days out from the film’s world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin. It runs about a minute, explains almost nothing, and that is the stated plan.
What Is Actually in the Cut
The logline is one sentence long. “Alex has proof. He needs you to see it.” Everything around it is deliberately thin. “I have intentionally revealed almost nothing,” Bressack told ComingSoon, which ran the film’s poster as an exclusive earlier this month.
The teaser is a handheld descent shot largely from the killer’s point of view, tape hiss and tracking noise included. The texture sits somewhere between V/H/S and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the latter of which is screening at this same festival as a restored classic. What the cut withholds is the premise, the ending, and most of the cast. What it sells is a format.
VHS-C Is Not a Filter
This is the part worth slowing down for. I Have Proof was not graded to look like videotape. It was shot on VHS-C, the compact cassette JVC introduced in the 1980s so camcorders could stop being shoulder-mounted, with a plastic adapter that let the tape play back in an ordinary VCR. The cassettes ran thirty or forty-five minutes. Families filled them with birthdays.
The distinction matters because analog decay does not reproduce cleanly in post. Dropout, the head-switching noise that lives along the bottom of the frame, generation loss that compounds every time a tape is dubbed: those are mechanical failures, not textures, and digital horror has spent the better part of fifteen years approximating them. Bressack bought the tape instead. Roughly thirty VHS-C cassettes, per Nerdbot’s report when the film went into production in Los Angeles last April, sourced secondhand off eBay and out of other people’s home movies. Somebody’s birthday is underneath this.
Bressack’s reasoning at the time: “This is me going back to raw, stripped-down horror…We’re leaning fully into analog to create something AI couldn’t replicate.” Five months later, with the teaser out and the festival slot set, that last clause reads less like a production note and more like the pitch.
He Has Done This Before
Bressack made To Jennifer in 2013, a found-footage feature shot entirely on an iPhone 5, back when shooting a movie on a phone was a stunt rather than a workflow. Pernicious followed in 2014 and Bethany in 2017. I Have Proof reads as a return trip: another feature built around a consumer camera, thirteen years and one dead format later.
The Fantastic Fest Slot
I Have Proof premieres at Fantastic Fest on Monday, September 21, in a 5 p.m. CT slot per ComingSoon, and the festival lists the running time at 76 minutes. Larsen Deane leads, with Lilly Van der Meer, Augie Duke, B.J. Hendricks, Kelly Lynn Reiter, and David Josh Lawrence. Sandaled Kid, JCB Pictures, and Robotic Donut produced. No distributor has been announced, which is the ordinary condition of a film taking its first festival lap.
It lands on a slate we have been watching since August. Our Fantastic Fest 2026 lineup preview has the full rundown, and Quarxx’s ‘The Ones Who Grieve’ is another premiere worth clearing time for.
