Watching Emilija Skarnulyte’s short film “Sirenomelia” reminded me of found footage, a subgenre of horror movies that heavily involve cameras and employ a first-person point of view (POV), which also reminds me of why found footage movies are a thing. In found footage movies, a group of characters use cameras to record their “discovery,” which happens to be the home or resting place of a monster or a deadly nature spirit. Often, one of the members of the group will disrupt the monster’s home or break a rule, which will understandably upset the monster and give them cause to come after them. We always view the movie from the disruptor’s/enabler’s POV, but never from the monster’s POV. Perhaps the monster is going through a horror movie of their own, seeing someone disrupt their home and break their rules so brazenly.

“Sirenomelia” is an interesting short film because it feels like a found footage horror movie, but instead of being from the POV of a human exploring the decommissioned submarine base, we get it from the point of view of a “monster”–a siren. If this found footage film was made from the POV of a human, we would only get a view of the base at the beginning of the film. We’d see the mountains, the surface of the icy sea, the inside of the base, and the lonely expanse of the land. Without the siren’s POV, we wouldn’t be able to see the underwater rail and the sea life that has made its home on the metal poles holding up the base. Exploring the submarine base from the siren’s point of view essentially turns us away from our terracentrist, anthropocentric view and asks us to explore another POV that is not human and not land-based.