The tapes in I Have Proof are not props aged up in post. James Cullen Bressack shot the film on secondhand VHS-C cassettes that other people had already filled. Fragments of whatever was on those tapes before sometimes survived between takes, leaving other people’s memories inside the finished movie.
Bressack spoke at Fantastic Fest with Larsen Deane, who plays Alex and also ran the camera,and Lilly Van der Meer, who plays Mary. In a year when anyone can generate a video of anything, they kept coming back to the format as a receipt.
Evidence You Can Hold
“We’re scrolling through our phones, constantly seeing AI generated videos nonstop,” Bressack said. Analog runs the other way. “There’s something that feels so real about analog and so handmade,” he said, and for the crew it doubles as a signature: “This is us going, hey, we really did this, we really made it.”
That went past texture. The evidence tapes Alex submits inside the story were recorded as the scenes played. “We were physically making the tapes on set,” Bressack said. Deane, stepping outside the cast to judge it, called the result “as raw as you can make a movie nowadays,” and thinks it lands because of “how oversaturated the market is nowadays with a lot of AI slop.”
Put On the Detective Hat
The plot is still hidden, so I asked what Bressack wants an audience carrying in the door. “I want everybody to put on like a detective’s hat and like an investigator’s hat,” he said, describing a viewer as an officer handed six evidence tapes. The first long stretch runs with almost no dialogue, which he treats as part of the assignment.
He wanted footage that feels unauthorized. “This is not something I’m supposed to see. This is dangerous,” he said. His preferred reaction is blunter: “You’d be like, the fuck is this?” Van der Meer described Mary as a woman working out who she is who slowly realizes a man is following her, which is about all the plot anyone gave up.
I Have Proof had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2026 in the Burnt Ends section. No distributor has been announced. Bressack said the film is built to be watched twice, and that he would explain why after it comes out.
