Sub- Genre - Diving Deeper: Found Footage

Found footage horror movies are very divisive. Some people love them, but many hate them. I fall in the first camp. Yes, I know they are often shaky and have been known to inflict people with motion sickness. I also know that the idea of keeping the camera running throughout, often gets stretched very thin and is hard to believe. I also know some of them sneak in “cheats” where you see things the cameraman couldn’t actually film (Including himself sometimes). But I feel like these are issues that are more than compensated for by the sense of urgency and immersion into the action and horrors the characters are facing. Technically, many of the films categorized as found footage are not found footage at all. Actual found footage refers to movies that were supposedly “found” after some disaster or incident and are being viewed later. These movies often start with a title card letting you know that the people of the film went missing. The most famous of course, would be the Blair Witch Project. That particular movie had a whole story built up around the missing people and recovered film which was spread by fake internet sites long before the movie was even released; all of which helped build up hype for the movie; gave it more depth, and frankly, more appeal, than the movie had by itself. Still, any film put together from clips, raw footage, or other sources presented as “real” are often grouped into this category, meaning the thing that most of them share is a point-of-view or an “as seen through the eye of the cameraman” perspective. So, the camera is acknowledged by characters on screen instead of ignored as in most movies. It is in fact, a character itself. Sometimes the film has a stitched together feel as if someone took multiple sources and combined them to make a coherent film or “Mockumentary” while others just run as the camera runs, usually giving a more “you are there” feel but sacrificing a streamlined narrative which often leads to a lot of “filler” material. There is some debate as to what the first “Found footage” film was, with many people erroneously granting the Blair Witch Project (1999) with that honor. Actually, there was a found footage movie called The Last Broadcast (1998) which came out prior to blair witch. Even more so, it’s most likely the honor should go to Cannibal Holocaust, an Italian movie that falls into the cannibal cycle that was popular at that time. The movie starts out in standard movie format as it follows a man searching for 4 lost documentarians who set out to film the natives cannibals of the amazon rainforest and went missing. The second half of the film is presented as the recovered footage as he shows it to the backers of the film. This half plays out like a found footage film with a truly horrible resolution and several dark secrets learned about the film crew themselves, leaving us to wonder who the true monsters were. The release of blair witch brought the found footage movie to the forefront of the genre again since it was a cheap way to make a movie but capable of earning large dollar amounts. Unfortunately, as a one trick pony (investigating missing film makers) interest by moviegoers waned quickly and found footage went underground again. It began to resurface in the 2000s with the release and success of Paranormal Activity and its sequels. With that film and since it was used not just create a mythos of vanishing filmmakers and the discovery of their missing film, but as an actual technique to tell a unique story in a way that gives a sense of reality to a movie and to bring viewers deeper into the world and action of the film. With this expansion of its purpose, hopefully the found footage film will remain a staple of modern filmmaking.