Nobody likes to admit they enjoy the found-footage horror movie. After the novelty of The Blair Witch Project wore off, they’ve started to seem like nothing more than a ploy for producers to choke a couple million out of a bottom-budget project. They’re Watching is very much one of the genre, and it falls into some of its silly pratfalls, yet it makes just enough interesting moves to earn a real response and not just an eye-roll.

First, the setting is the infrequently mined symbols and stereotypes of post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Set in Moldova, an American home-improvement reality show is on its way to film a follow-up segment. A sweet, flame-haired artist from the U.S. (Brigid Brannagh) had set out to remodel a remote hovel there with her asshole-ish, football-playing boyfriend (Cristian Balint) (that’s European football mind you, so think reedy body, confounding arrogance, and a haircut that is presumably fashionable somewhere in Europe.) The cynical crew is coming to town to see what she’s managed.

Our three protagonists — a princess without any film experience but with strong family connections (Mia Faith), her strong-but-silent love interest who is scarred from his stint in Afghanistan (David Alpay), and an asshole (Kris Lemche) who blessedly actually has great comic timing — stumble around the city to gather establishing shots and B-roll footage. Babushkas — that’s old, trundling, Slavic women with head-scarfs and old-world incantations — make sudden, jump-scare appearances. Beefy, mustachioed, alcoholic men with axes become increasingly menacing. Even an Orthodox church service is featured in the early moments of establishing that ‘something’s not right here’ à la Russe.

As it narrows its focus to witchcraft and the villagers’ bloody history lynching said witches, the filmmakers’ lack of familiarity with Slavic culture starts to show. Using Eastern Europe as the unsettling, pre-modern ‘Other’ as opposed to your more typical American Southerner or tribal South American is rare, so this movie got points for novelty, but the Eastern Europe’s own rich and decidedly freaky witch mythologies aren’t mobilized. Why would you not use the gut-freezing image of Baba Yaga’s house, standing on chicken legs in a dark wood, in such a movie?

All of this is mostly redeemed, though, by the narrative focus on the camera itself. Here is where They’re Watching starts to rehabilitate the found footage genre. Rather than allow the it to languish as a ploy for low budgets, They’re Watching comments on the potency of recording an event, the horror of witnessing passively, and the moral turpitude of peeping inadvertently. The final sequence is unfortunately overwrought and explicit in its action, which effectively squashes all fear in the viewer. But never the less, this commentary on the camera takes it from a thinly-plotted circumstance that allow for a couple final minutes of footage into a clever recognition of the potential power behind recording, and those that are helpless before their desire to harness it. By the end, you realize the cleverness of the title and realize this movie is more Cabin in the Woods than Blair Witch knock-off, so be prepared to actually leave the theater excited.