Following the Horses (1932) review - 8 Minutes of Pure Horse Chaos

Skip this if you hate dusty old black-and-white footage of animals tripping over wooden fences. But if you have ten minutes to kill and want to see what passed for "extreme sports" in 1932, it's a weirdly fun time. 🐴

Basically, Fox had a bunch of leftover newsreel clips and decided to slap them together. They called the series "Adventures of a Newsreel Cameraman," which is a big lie because you never actually see any cameramen.

Instead, you just get non-stop horse action. Thrilling races, steeplechases, and some truly terrifying jumps.

Some of these spills look genuinely painful. I'm pretty sure a couple of these horses didn't walk away from these steeplechase crashes, which makes it a bit hard to watch now.

The narrator is incredibly loud. He sounds like he is shouting through a cardboard tube about how magnificent these beasts are while they faceplant into the mud.

There is one specific moment where a horse totally misses a water jump. It just belly-flops straight into the pool, sending a massive wave of gray water toward the lens.

The camera shakes violently right after. You can tell the cameraman was either laughing or trying not to get soaked by muddy water.

It has that same raw, chaotic energy you get in some old westerns like The Western Wallop, but without any pesky things like characters or a plot.

The music is just this endless, brassy loop. It plays over and over until your brain starts to melt a little bit, but it fits the weird speed of the whole thing.

Why did audiences in the thirties love watching horses fall down so much? It is a bit morbid when you really sit and think about it.

If you want a cozy story like Devotion, this is definitely not it. But as a dusty little time capsule of pure, unedited chaos? It is pretty neat.