The Blair Witch Project (1999) was not the first “found footage” horror film, but it did go a long way toward establishing the modern approach to the style. Shot cheaply with a 16mm film camera and a Hi-8 camcorder, The Blair Witch Project paved the way for filmmakers to use increasingly affordable video technology to make their own “found footage” movies.

Additionally, the film had a brilliant marketing campaign that used the Internet in a way that had not really been done before, causing many potential viewers to question whether or not the story behind the film was fictional. This was a crucial part of the film’s appeal, and this prototypical viral marketing campaign both helped get word out about the film and muddled the question of its authenticity. People had only to read about the story of the film on its web site (archived there from April of 1999; note sound autoplays when site is loaded) to get creeped out; the film itself was almost superfluous.

That is not to say The Blair Witch Project was not successful on a number of levels. It certainly was, and a large part of that was due to the fact that in the pop culture landscape in which it was released — before seemingly every home in the U.S. had a ready Internet connection — it was possible to maintain the illusion of the film as actual “found footage” even up until its theatrical release.

It is difficult to overstate the huge impact the film and particularly its marketing has had on how films are produced and marketed. It cost very little to produce the film and not much more to distribute it, and it went on to make an enormous profit. But despite this massive success, a relatively small number of “found footage” films attempted to capitalize on the success of The Blair Witch Project in the years following its theatrical release.

August Underground: A Lack of Mythology

Probably the most important and influential genre film in the “found footage” style that followed the release of The Blair Witch Project is August Underground (2001), a “home video” style faux-snuff film. It appears to have been shot with a VHS camcorder or something similar, with layers of video noise and degraded image quality to suggest the tape is an nth-generation copy.

Allegedly, the director originally “released” August Underground on unlabeled VHS tapes he placed around his hometown of Pittsburgh. If that’s true, it is hard to imagine how terrifying it must have been for any unsuspecting viewer unlucky enough to have found one of those tapes when she popped it into her VCR. It’s entirely possible to believe a person who just found one of the tapes and didn’t know the director, Fred Vogel, or his collaborators could have been convinced it was authentic footage of people being tortured and murdered.

However, some of the same things that would have made August Underground convincing to an unsuspecting viewer are the same things that make it a rather tedious watch on DVD. Vogel arguably did too good a job of mimicking the look of a “home movie” tape pulled out of a camcorder. In addition to its scenes of queasily convincing torture and murder, there are long stretches where its characters hang out and don’t do much of anything. They go to concerts, they drive around aimlessly, they sit around and talk.

Indeed, the boring parts that help sell August Underground as an authentic video tape — presumably made by serial killers and discovered by the viewer — are dull when viewed in context of the movie as a movie. Watching August Underground (and its two sequels, 2003's Mordum and 2007's Penance) on DVD feels more like watching an impressive makeup and effects reel than a disturbing home movie.

This problem of context can plague the entire concept of the “found footage” film. Filmmakers of The Blair Witch Project did it right. They created a promotional campaign that provided a context for the film itself, planting information online suggesting a long history of Blair Witch-related mythology. This extra-textual material is complemented in the film with title cards explaining the circumstances regarding the discovery of the footage included in the film. Knowing the backstory of the Blair Witch mythology helps sell the reality of what is being shown to the viewer, even if they know the film itself is fiction.

Conversely, August Underground provides the viewer with absolutely no context. The movie begins in media res, again mimicking the style of an actual tape pulled out of a camcorder used by someone with the intent of documenting banal everyday events.

On their initial release, both The Blair Witch Project and August Underground used context as a way to cause the viewer to question the reality of the footage in question, but both used opposite approaches to enhance the horrific nature of the film. Fast-forward to now, when the viewing context for both films is the same as any other — this arguably works more to the detriment of August Underground than The Blair Witch Project.

The potential viewer probably chooses to watch it based on what they might know about it: it’s “found footage,” it’s a “horror” movie, it has a reputation for being gruesome and disturbing. August Underground, like any other movie released on DVD and available through (for example) Amazon, is now a commercial product and thus is obviously fictional. No one could manufacture, distribute, screen, or sell the film legally if it depicted the actual murder of human beings. The filmmakers could not continue working if they documented themselves committing the crimes shown in the movie.

In other words, once the film made the transition from unmarked video tapes left out in public for a viewer to discover to the mass-produced home video product it is now, it became impossible for a viewer to be convinced that August Underground is an authentic “snuff” film. Additionally, no one who is not already interested in watching explicit depictions of violence would actively choose to watch the movie.

Therefore, the only potential audience who could possibly be convinced that August Underground is a real “home movie” are unsuspecting viewers who are shown the movie by people who own a copy (and whom the viewer could reasonably believe would own such a thing as an actual snuff film).

“Found Footage” Officially Goes Mainstream

When the “found footage” style came back into vogue in the late 2000s, the problem of context became even more pronounced. There were only a handful of such films in the early 2000s, and the culture of film news was not such that fans had ready information on many films in production at any given time. It was therefore considerably easier to exert some control over the context in which a “found footage” film was seen. By the time Paranormal Activity hit theaters in 2009, though, it had built major anticipation from film festival appearances and its lead actors were appearing on the cover of major movie magazines like Entertainment Weekly.

Paranormal Activity opens and closes with title cards suggesting what the viewer sees in the film is genuine. But by the time of its theatrical release, a wealth of evidence, readily available to virtually any viewer, existed to disprove this assertion. As fan culture has become more and more focused on uncovering information about upcoming films in production as early as possible, it has become increasingly difficult for major studios to surprise an audience with a film and to convince them that a “found footage” movie is “real.”

This has not stopped “found footage” from becoming a popular approach to production for both major studios and independent filmmakers. The style’s allure is simple: these movies can be cheaply produced and marketed, and there is a certain built-in audience a studio can count on showing up for any genre and/or “found footage” movie. Further, they have a wide reach on home video and VOD where they can rake in even more money in rentals and sales. These movies are easy to justify for both independent producers and studios due to their low initial investment in production and their box-office and/or home video potential.

Following the success of Paranormal Activity, legions of low-budget “found footage” films began to flood the market both in theaters and on home video. Whereas a “found footage” movie was a novel concept at one point, it has now become commonplace to the extent that the continued insistence by filmmakers and distributors to make any claims toward authenticity is ridiculous. This is exacerbated by the fact that many modern films in the style no longer make any attempt to replicate the form and structure of actual “found footage.”

If a film is attempting to mimic real amateur footage, it must maintain a consistent point of view. In most cases, this means establishing the illusion that all the footage in the film was captured by the same camera. Perhaps the last major-studio “found footage” film that truly attempted this was Cloverfield (2008).

Cloverfield opens with a graphic informing the viewer s/he is about to watch video recovered from a camera after the events depicted in the movie, and all of the footage in the movie is presented as coming from that single source. Any “found footage” movie that includes video from multiple sources (camcorders, security cameras, phones, etc.) and/or non-diegetic music, sound design, or narration necessarily implies the involvement of an editor who has assembled the footage into the form of the finished film.

Even The Blair Witch Project featured footage from multiple cameras, presented as though it was edited by a third party. In that film and others, this can distract the viewer by suggesting a number of questions: Who edited the footage? Why? For what audience was the footage assembled? Why did the editor choose to include the specific footage that appears in the movie? Did the editor have a particular agenda in mind during the editing process?

Effectively Blurring Lines between Documentary and Reality

Again, context is key. The “found footage” films Alone with Her, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, and S&Man all provide the viewer with ample context for their “horrific” content and a clear editorial agenda, which make them more effective as genuinely unsettling genre films.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007) is an example of a film that implements a “found footage” concept in an unsettling way by providing context for said footage in the film itself. It is presented as a documentary about the discovery of a large collection of video tapes found in the home of a serial killer.

This Investigation Discovery-style approach includes excerpts from the “home movie” footage from the tapes shown in between interviews with police who worked the case and relatives of victims, along with animated graphics and dramatic re-enactments. The result is that the footage presented as that found on the tapes is somewhat similar in form and content to August Underground, but given the context in which it is presented, it is much more convincing as actual footage of torture and murder.

This, in addition to the film’s troubled release history — the film was shelved in the midst of distributor MGM’s financial troubles, never released theatrically or on DVD or Blu-ray, only surfacing on VOD years after its 2007 completion, and even then only officially available for a short time — help to make The Poughkeepsie Tapes a much more disturbing viewing experience than the arguably more “authentic” August Underground.

Two other pre-Paranormal Activity “found footage” films that provide a believable framework for their footage and an explanation for their editorial agenda are Alone with Her (2006) and S&Man (2006).

In Alone with Her, Doug (Colin Hanks) sets up an elaborate system of hidden cameras to watch Amy (Ana Claudia Talancón), a young woman with whom he is obsessed. The film is presented as footage taken by a number of cameras and audio recording devices placed by Doug in Amy’s apartment, as well as wearable cameras Doug uses to record his direct interactions with her once he begins to woo her by using information gleaned from his surveillance.

The implication throughout is that Doug has edited the footage together into the form of the feature film the viewer is watching, and aside from the presence of known actor Colin Hanks — maybe the film’s one serious misstep — the illusion of authenticity is uncomfortably convincing.

Like The Poughkeepsie Tapes, S&Man is presented as a documentary. Director J.T. Petty (playing himself) is making a documentary examining the concept of voyeurism in the horror genre. Petty pays particular attention to underground filmmakers like August Underground director/star Fred Vogel and prolific exploitation one-man-show Bill Zebub (director of movies with titles like Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist and I Told You Not to Call the Police), who both appear in the film as themselves along with Zebub’s frequent collaborator Debbie D and professor/film scholar Carol J. Clover.

One of the filmmakers Petty talks with is Eric Rost, creator of a particularly brutal series of videos called “S&Man.” Petty begins to suspect that the evasive Rost is producing real snuff films in which he kidnaps, tortures, and murders women, and the lines between documentary and reality becomes disturbingly unclear.

Post-Paranormal Activity: A Race to the Bottom

If modern/mainstream examples of the style post-Paranormal Activity have proven anything, it is this: without a compelling context, it seems the most a “found footage” genre film can hope for is to startle its audience by playing loud noises and having stuff jumping into the frame, usually at the same time.

This depressingly lazy approach to generating “scares” reached a nadir with the December 2014 U.S. theatrical release of The Pyramid. In addition to cutting between footage from several different video sources with no discernible authorial editorial agenda (including at least one camera that is obviously destroyed), the film features a non-diegetic score and a parade of sudden loud noises along with some highly unconvincing computer generated effects.

The viewer is left with little after the experience of watching other than exhaustion and ringing ears. Viewing this film in a theater was roughly equivalent to sitting in the dark while someone occasionally detonated firecrackers and hit a metal trash can with an aluminum baseball bat nearby while the viewer looked at digital photographs of sand and “Egyptian stuff” on the screen.

Aside from the reliance on “jump scares,” which is mostly an issue with horror films in particular, perhaps the biggest problem with “found footage” genre films in general is the question of who found the footage and where was it found? This is somewhat related to the question of the editor, but even before an editor can assemble the footage into a film, it must first be “found.”

If something occurs in the film that appears to make it impossible for the film to be assembled in the first place, the audience is forced to question how that footage could have been included in the finished film. The questions regarding the origins of the footage that makes up a film is especially vexing when the film in question takes place in a different time period, as this leads to even more questions regarding the manner in which the footage itself was captured.

A particularly troublesome example of this is Frankenstein’s Army (2013), in which the form and content radically differ from the context established by the film. The film takes place in World War II and follows a Russian army unit with an embedded cameraman. The characters find themselves trapped in a series of underground tunnels populated by bizarre monsters created by the experiments of a Nazi scientist.

While the character design of the monsters is unique and interesting, the presentation of the film causes immediate and ongoing cognitive dissonance for any viewer familiar with motion picture technology. The cameraman is shooting the footage that makes up the film with either an 8mm or 16mm handheld film camera (which may or may not have an attached microphone), but the image is color, high-definition digital 1.78:1 widescreen with 5.1 surround sound. Occasional “film scratches” and “light leaks” aside, there is nothing done to convince the audience that this is actual footage taken by a 1940s-era Soviet film camera.

Additionally, the sharp digital video has the unfortunate side effect of making Frankenstein’s Army look like a modern home movie taken inside a haunted house attraction: it is impossible to shake the impression that one is watching digital video of people running around in (admittedly impressive) monster costumes.

Another period “found footage” film that does make an effort toward creating an authentic look is Apollo 18 (2011). Taking place in the 1970s, this film is supposedly made up of footage from small film cameras used by the astronauts on the ill-fated final Apollo mission to the moon. In order to help create the look of film cameras of the period, Apollo 18 was shot on both digital and 16mm film.

This attention to detail pays off, with digital footage carefully graded to match the footage from the real 16mm film camera. The sense of realism is also greatly enhanced by the complete lack of any non-diegetic sound design or score. Unfortunately, the illusion of authenticity does not survive through the end of the film, which predictably ends badly for the astronauts and presumably their cameras.

The Plausibility of Recovery

This problem of how footage is used in a film when it appears from the in-film action that the cameras used to capture the footage are lost or destroyed is a common one among “found footage” genre films dating back to Cannibal Holocaust (1980).

Often considered the prototypical example of the style, Cannibal Holocaust ends with its documentary crew being murdered on film by the natives they have been terrorizing. While it had been established earlier in the film that the natives were fearful of the crew’s filmmaking technology, their footage was supposedly discovered properly stored in film canisters — including the footage taken when they were all killed.

This set an unfortunate standard for future films made in this style that continues to this day. Two features that are particularly noteworthy examples of how such actions confound the viewer’s sense of how the film they are watching could have been made are The Sacrament (2013) and Chronicle (2012).

The Sacrament follows a VICE magazine documentary crew as they visit a compound in South America that is home to a cult very closely modeled on Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. During the visit, two of the documentarians have cameras that they use to capture footage of people going about their everyday life and to record interviews with some of the people who live in the compound. At some point the cult’s leader decides the presence of the documentary crew is a threat and the latter part of the film follows the actual events of the Jonestown Massacre almost to the letter.

The major break with the film’s “found footage” context comes near the end of the movie, when one of the two cameras — from which we have clearly seen footage — is abandoned as the surviving documentary filmmakers escape from the compound. While it is possible for a viewer to guess that maybe one of the escaping men pulled the SD card out of the camera to recover the footage, from all appearances in the action of the film it was left behind entirely. Even a quick throwaway line could have smoothed this over, but instead any illusion of “reality” the film may have established collapses in an instant.

Chronicle is completely uninterested in sustaining any such illusion: the camera its lead character Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is using at the beginning of the film is lost and destroyed within the first 15 minutes. The action occasionally cuts to footage taken by other characters, and during the film’s climax there is footage from a number of different sources including police car dashboard cameras, news helicopters, and various security cameras around the city of Seattle.

While the film completely disregards the question of the editor, it does find a neat solution to how Andrew can both film and be in front of the camera at the same time. He and his two friends develop telekinetic powers, and Andrew uses this ability to handle a camera that follows him around wherever he goes. It is disappointing that the filmmakers were not able to find a similarly inventive approach to explaining how the footage of which the film consists was acquired and edited.

In addition to Chronicle, the “found footage” style has been used for other science fiction films, but given two recent higher-profile examples the genre seems ill-suited to it.

Project Almanac (2014) concerns a teenager named David (Jonny Weston) who discovers his father invented a time machine before his death. David and his friends decide to build the machine and use their video cameras to document the experiment and their travels through time.

Unsurprisingly, Project Almanac is a dense minefield of narrative problems related to both its time travel premise — there seem to be no consistent rules regarding its time travel conceit — and in its existence as a “found footage” film. Many of the cameras taking the footage, for example, would have to disappear into alternate timelines. Only an editor who could exist across multiple timelines/realities/dimensions/etc. and retrieve the cameras from them could have assembled the movie.

Similarly, sci-fi children’s film Earth to Echo (2014) is ostensibly edited by one of its young protagonists but film includes footage taken by the “eyes” of its titular alien. No clear explanation of how the editor obtained said footage is given.

The “Found Footage” Teen Takeover

One “found footage” film that directly addresses from where its footage comes and who is editing the footage is The Dirties (2013). In the film, Matt (Matt Johnson) and his friend Owen (Owen Williams) are a pair of high school friends obsessed with cinema. Matt feels ostracized and bullied, while more sociable Owen starts to find his place in the teenage social hierarchy when he starts dating a popular girl. Matt attempts to convince Owen that they should film themselves shooting and killing the bullies (“the dirties” of the title) who have victimized them. Owen takes part in the planning thinking Matt is joking, but as they drift apart this becomes less and less certain.

Most of the footage in the film is shot by Matt or his young “cameraman” and edited by Matt, although its ambiguous finale leaves open the question of whether Matt or Owen (or some other third party) edited the final part of the film. This actually makes The Dirties one of the most convincing modern “found footage” films, as well as being both surprisingly funny and an unsettling depiction of a deeply troubled young man. The Dirties was independently produced and distributed, so it has sadly not had the reach of other teen-centered “found footage” movies.

As the assumed principal audience for this type of film — typical of low-budget genre cinema since at least the 1950s — teenagers have made many “found footage” movies profitable even though they do not fare all that well as characters in the movies themselves. A notable example of this is The Gallows (2015).

After a fairly convincing replica of a 1990s VHS camcorder recording of a tragic death during a high school theater production of a play called The Gallows, a title card is displayed that suggests the rest of the film is footage recovered from a digital camera. The next 15–20 minutes are spent in the company of Ryan (Ryan Shoos), a hateful, bullying football player who makes fun of his friend Reese (Reese Mishler) for quitting the team to take the lead in the revival production of The Gallows. It is, for some inconceivable reason, being mounted for the twentieth anniversary of the tragedy depicted in the opening scene.

Reese is completely hopeless, a terrible actor who cannot remember his lines and has only taken the part because he has a crush on female lead Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown). The night before the first performance, Reese agrees to Ryan’s plan to sneak into the school and destroy the set so the performance cannot go on. The boys end up trapped in the school with Pfeifer and Ryan’s girlfriend Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford), stalked by a vengeful ghost. Due to their depiction, it is tough to imagine any viewer feeling much empathy for these characters.

Bizarrely, The Gallows almost plays as a somewhat inferior version of a low-budget independent teen “found footage” Christian horror film released over a year earlier. The Lock In (2014) follows three teenage boys on their way to a church lock-in who discover a porno magazine in a dumpster. Instead of leaving it there like any reasonable human being, they end up taking it to the lock-in, where it is discovered by one of the girls attending the event.

The boys get a stern talking-to from the church’s youth pastor and they burn the magazine in the church parking lot, but it mysteriously reappears in a backpack. Soon, the lights in the church have gone out and everyone but the boys and the girl who found the magazine have disappeared. As they sneak around the dark, silent church, something picks them off one by one.

This film was clearly made for a fraction of even the tiny budget of The Gallows, but it relies much more on at least an attempt to create sympathetic characters for the audience to worry about. It is not entirely successful on that count and its anti-porn message comes across as hysterical (in every sense), but it at least manages a few effective camera tricks with its minuscule budget.

“Desktop Horror” and the Future of “Found Footage”

Another teen horror film that some film writers considered a “found footage” movie is Unfriended (2015), but it is something slightly different. It is one of a recent line of films whose form mimics the experience of watching a story unfold completely on a computer screen. Two earlier examples of this are The Den (2013) and Open Windows (2014).

While not strictly “found footage,” these “desktop horror” films do use digital video to tell a story in a similar way. And, like more traditional “found footage” films, they also have their own problems with context. None of them is really suited to be shown on a movie theater screen since the idea is to present them as unfolding on a computer monitor or laptop display. This is a big problem with Unfriended, which was picked up for distribution by Universal after making a huge splash with its world premiere at the 2014 Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal under its original title Cybernatural.

By all accounts, in its original Fantasia Cybernatural cut, the film stuck very closely to the idea that everything happening in the movie was being shown to the audience from a computer screen. In its theatrical wide-release version, the film features changes which severely compromise this illusion. The most glaring of these changes is the film’s new ending, in which the laptop belonging to Blaire — the screen the audience has been watching the entire movie — slams shut, leaving Blaire in the dark of her room before a Yūrei-styled ghost jumps at the “camera” just before the end credits roll.

This causes a distinct perceptual problem with everything that has come before in the film. During its running time, the viewer assumes they are watching the display of Blaire’s screen. When the laptop closes, however, it is revealed that the viewer is actually watching the laptop through Blaire’s eyes, which have somehow remained unblinking and totally stationary throughout the film’s running time, and with their field of vision perfectly edged by the borders of her laptop screen. These changes show how fragile the illusion is that these films can create, and how easily it can be broken.

A much more successful take on a similar “desktop horror” concept was the web series Marble Hornets (2009–2014). Particularly in its first season, the individual episodes of Marble Hornets posted on YouTube were highly effective in creating a sense of intense dread through a seemingly innocuous medium.

The series follows a young man as he searches for a friend who has gone missing, and who quickly finds himself involved in a dangerous supernatural mystery. In addition to the episodes in which the main character directly addresses the audience, the creators of the series provided a wealth of extra-textual context similar to the establishment of the mythology of The Blair Witch Project. This included “response” videos from a mysterious third party known as “totheark,” a Twitter account from which the series’ main character posted updates, and the creators’ interactions with the series’ dedicated and enthusiastic fan base on message boards and Facebook.

This immediate engagement with fans helped lead to creation on their part to related projects such as a Kickstarter-funded “Slender Man” feature and a huge amount of fan fiction and art based on the mythology created for the series. Like The Blair Witch Project, released ten years before the launch of Marble Hornets, the work its creators put into creating an interesting mythology behind the series helped make the series itself more convincing and unsettling.

While studios and independent filmmakers keep churning out “found footage” movies with minimal effort for easy profits from indiscriminate audiences, the popularity of Marble Hornets may point the way toward the future of the style in its canny merging of form and content. Whereas studios will produce films like Unfriended that would play better on a laptop screen and release them theatrically, Marble Hornets used the nature of viewing video online — on a computer, tablet, or phone — to its advantage.

It has at least proven that creating a substantial context in which a work exists can help engage, inspire, and unnerve an audience in a very direct way. Given the impact it has had on its audience, it seems at least possible that Marble Hornets will be remembered alongside The Blair Witch Project as a landmark in the evolution of “found footage” storytelling when lazy feature films like The Gallows are long forgotten.

There have been huge changes in film consumption and filmmaking technology since the theatrical release of The Blair Witch Project. Despite the best efforts of the film industry at large, it is now virtually impossible to control the context in which a viewer watches a movie. With the prevalence of social media, it would likely be impossible to keep the actors in such a film secret in order to maintain the illusion that the film is “real” anyway: the supposedly-dead “stars” would probably have Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts they would use to promote themselves and their film.

“Found footage” genre films can no longer purport to be real and depend on novelty to generate interest. Creating an extra-textual context and engaging with an active audience worked to set Marble Hornets apart from its feature-film contemporaries, but as technology continues to evolve, the problem of context inherent in the style will mutate along with it.

It is impossible to predict when or if there may be another Blair Witch-level genre sensation, or how audiences may be watching or engaging with it, but the “found footage” style is established enough that it certainly is not going away any time soon. It will be up to enterprising and inventive artists to adapt to these changes and provide new approaches to “found footage” genre cinema that will use the unpredictable contexts in which their films may be viewed in order to remain relevant.

Complete list of films referenced in this piece on Letterboxd

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