With Halloween just around the corner, the great majority of people (me included) will begin to watch horror movies. I will present here my favorite horror movie genre; found footage movies.
The most famous found footage movie is, of course, The Blair Witch Project. Released in 1999, it is the story of three film students recording a supposedly haunted forest. Without any spoilers, strange events start happening, and their trip takes a much scarier turn, and what started as a documentary quickly descends into madness.
An earlier trace of found footage can be found in another movie, however. The Blair Witch Project is often considered to be the first found footage movie, but Cannibal Holocaust, an Italian movie which was released in 1980 is actually the first. This movie features a professor from New York who stumbles upon lost footage of an American film crew who disappeared in the Amazonian rainforest while filming a documentary on indigenous cannibal tribes.
Looking deeper, the movie The Other Side of the Wind also features traces of found footage. It was actually filmed before the aforementioned Italian movie, but was only released in 2018, as the making of the movie had multiple setbacks. It was released after the death of its director, Orson Welles, who died in 1985. The Other Side of the Wind is a movie within a movie, hence where the found footage part comes from. It recounts the story of a film director who died in a car crash, and was trying to revive his film career with an experimental movie. The “found footage” part comes from bits of movies that the film director created.
Found footage became popular in the early 2000’s with Paranormal Activity, which released in 2007 and the aforementioned The Blair Witch Project. YouTube series also had a big part to play in the rising popularity of found footage, with series like Marble Hornets and other Slenderman-related series roaming around the Internet. Today, Kane Pixels is a big name in the found footage genre, having produced a series on the enigmatic Backrooms, as well as The Oldest View, a small series based on a real-life statue of Julien Reverchon, which actually existed. The fact that it moves on its own, of course, is not true.
Found Footage horror should not be confused with analog horror however. While they do have some similar traits, analog horror is usually filmed on older equipment like camcorders, and usually contains ads, or bits of shows that get cut off by whatever horror happens on- or off-screen. For example, the famous line “if you see someone identical to you, run away and hide” from YouTube series The Mandela Catalogue comes from a warning broadcast about alternates, or shapeshifters, which gets interrupted by those exact creatures.
For me, what makes found footage movies so scary is its realism. Scripts can be written more loosely than other horror movies. For example, the cast of The Blair Witch Project did not have an actual script, and were only given instructions on what their characters should do.
The fact that the camera is treated as a physical object also adds to the realism and kind of grounds it. In other movies, the camera is only used for filming. The characters do not notice it. In found footage movies, it is very present. A lot of the time, characters will ask the one who is filming to stop what they are doing. The cameraman rarely does so, however, as pointed out in the aforementioned YouTube series “Marble Hornets”.
All of this to say: if you want to get into the creepy vibes that October usually brings around, I definitely recommend watching found footage movies. If you are in the mood for more, “Marble Hornets” lasts around 9 hours total. If you are in the mood for a single movie, then Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project, Grave Encounters or even The Conjuring are great places to start!
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Wind
https://www.britannica.com/art/found-footage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibal_Holocaust
