By: Kristen Anderson
Remember those green night-vision commercials for Paranormal Activity showing the audience absolutely freaking out? And the news stories about The Blair Witch Project making people nauseous?
Few movies prompt visceral reactions in viewers the way that found footage does. A subgenre of horror, found footage movies are shot to be realistic, the conceit being that we’re watching something shot and experienced by real people that remains in its raw, unedited form. The most famous found footage movie, the one that created a seismic boom in Hollywood, is 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. To me, it’s inarguable that it was the first of its kind, but there’s another type of film that gets conflated with found footage: the mockumentary. Make it a horror mockumentary, and the subgenres are even more fused together.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter too much in terms of what’s found footage and what’s mockumentary. It either scares you or it doesn’t, you enjoyed it or you didn’t, and that’s basically it: your experience. I don’t find a ton of usefulness in dividing movies up and categorizing them down into teeny bits. But because it’s common practice, I do find my brain moving that way and wondering whether I agree or not, and I find it interesting. Categories can be useful in life in general as a way to organize the world, but they can also be confining. Either way, they exist, and examining them is a fun little exercise.
Mockumentaries differ from found footage in that, as opposed to found footage, which consists of unpolished material that wasn’t meant to be seen by other people, (either yet or at all), the mockumentary presents itself as a finished work that’s in the style of a nonfiction documentary—it just happens to actually be fiction. In my opinion, the film that some people point to as the earliest found footage movie lives in this mockumentary realm.
1980’s Cannibal Holocaust (which, full disclosure, I’ve never seen because it sounds exceptionally Not For Me) undeniably straddles the line. We’re presented with network executives in a screening room viewing found footage of what was supposed to be a documentary about a group of anthropologists heading into the Amazon jungle, looking for a lost group of filmmakers who were working on a documentary about tribes of cannibals. What these executives see (and what we see) are extreme acts of violence and brutality, and in the film, they agree to burn the “documentary” footage rather than air it so that no one has to see it again.
Not unlike The Blair Witch Project, there was a lot of real-life controversy around Cannibal Holocaust. People thought what happened in the film was real, so much so that the director, Ruggero Deodato, was arrested in Italy on obscenity charges and was later charged with several counts of murder. The Italian authorities believed that actors in the film were actually killed (again, similar to Blair Witch), but upon investigation, Deodato was eventually cleared of the charges and released. It’s worth noting that violence against animals in the film WAS real—if you’re someone who checks Does the Dog Die?, a crowd-sourced site of head’s-ups about emotionally wrenching moments in movies, maybe skip this one.
Even with Deodato’s legal exoneration, Cannibal Holocaust’s notoriety was set in stone. The film was banned in multiple countries, with some later revoking the ban and some maintaining it to this day.
This line-blurring between reality and fiction understandably puts it in league with Blair Witch, and the found footage element is certainly there, but it’s couched within a traditional movie storytelling setting. It’s splitting hairs a bit, but I still think it’s a significant enough difference to note. The experience of The Blair Witch Project presenting itself as a documentary was the first of its kind. We were the executives in the screening room for this one, and we sure as hell did not burn it and send it away.
In fact, more of its kind came. It took some time for another found footage movie to become a real hit, but when Paranormal Activity was widely-released 10 years later in 2009, audiences latched onto it in a similar way.
Director Oren Peli acknowledges the film’s similarities and the inspiration he took from Blair Witch, saying:
After ‘Jaws’ came out, people were saying, ‘Oh, I’m never gonna go swim in the ocean anymore,'" said Peli. "After ‘Blair Witch’ came out, people said, ‘I’m never gonna go camping in the woods anymore.’ But what happened in ‘Paranormal Activity’ is in your own house, in your own bedroom, where you’re supposed to be safe. People can’t say, ‘I’m never gonna go to sleep in my bed anymore.
Paranormal Activity is about a couple who moves into a new house and is terrorized by a demon that the wife feels has been following her around her whole life. The reason there’s even footage to be found is that when Katie tells her husband Micah that something is haunting her, he sets up a still camera to try and catch activity, using a handheld camera to document their efforts to rid themselves of the demon as well. The result is a combination of static camera footage where nothing happens (until BOOM, it does), mixed with traditional mobile footage that follows our characters.
Not many people seemed to have illusions about the movie being real the way they did with Blair Witch or Cannibal Holocaust, but there is a certain meta lore about Paranormal Activity.
The world-of-mouth whispers that made it so popular largely revolved around stories of audiences freaking out and tales of how terrifying it was. So much so that Paranormal Activity’s marketing team cleverly used night-vision footage of audiences watching the movie and losing their minds in the trailer more than actual clips from the movie itself.
The strategy worked, and Paranormal Activity was a huge hit, becoming the most profitable film ever made based purely on money spent versus money earned. It spawned five sequels with 7th and 8th movies planned.
It’s the conventional understanding that a new wave of found footage movies followed suit, but actually, a number of them were in production at the same time as Paranormal Activity. It seems that the idea of creative ideas as intelligent, conscious entities that demand to be acted upon, as Elizabeth Gilbert posits in her book Big Magic, must be true, and the found footage revival idea knocked on a lot of doors around this time.
REC, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, and Cloverfield were all in production around the same time as Paranormal Activity and were released in close succession to each other. A number of other found footage movies of varying success followed. The format was given a twist for the digital age with 2014’s Unfriended, which solely gives the audience a view of a laptop screen as the characters video chat and contend with a vengeful ghost.
It’s natural that found footage would change as technology does, since its premise is wholly dependent on it. The computer screen POV-style of found footage is having a moment, particularly since we’re all so wed to our screens during the COVID-19 pandemic (but, hopefully, coping with it a little better than some). Host came out in 2020 and shrunk the computer concept down even smaller. In Unfriended, we watched our main character click around different websites and use her email and chat, but Host consists of just the screen view of a Zoom video call between six friends and the medium they’ve hired to hold a virtual seance. And a demon, naturally.
It’s going to be interesting to see how found footage changes along with technology, both because it frees up filmmakers to get creative with behind-the-scenes techniques and expands on-screen opportunities for storytelling. Yet no matter how much the opportunities change, the core desire to walk around documenting your surroundings and yourself seems to stay the same. The Blair Witch crew did it then and we still do it today, albeit in different ways. Is a horror podcast movie inevitable? A TikTok slasher? Not impossible, and chances are high that we’ll be right there, clicking whatever button means “Yes, please.”