Found Footage

What defines it

A found footage film presents itself as a collection of recordings that someone shot, lost and later recovered. The camera belongs to the story: a camcorder carried by a documentary crew, a phone propped on a dresser, a security camera in a hallway, a laptop webcam. Whatever the audience sees, a character in the film could in principle have recorded. The film may be shown raw, or as if an investigator, a journalist or a surviving friend has edited the material into a narrative.

Writers disagree about the name. The critic David Bordwell has objected that “found footage” already describes films assembled from existing material, such as compilation documentaries, and has preferred “discovered footage” for fiction like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. A San Francisco festival devoted to the form uses “in-world camera” to cover found footage, faux documentary and films staged entirely on screens. Fans and studios mostly still say found footage, and so does this library.

Horror suits the technique for a simple reason. A camera held by a frightened person shows only what that person is willing or able to look at. The frame shakes, swings away from the danger and sometimes cuts out, so the audience spends the film watching the edges of the picture and listening for what it cannot see. That is a different engine from the classic horror set piece, in which the camera shows the monster and lets the viewer judge it. It is also cheap, which has made the format one of the most reliable ways for small crews to reach theaters or streaming services.

A short history

The idea is older than film. The “found manuscript” and the novel told through letters and diaries gave readers a feeling of reality long before cameras existed; Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein both work this way, and so does H. P. Lovecraft's story The Call of Cthulhu. On screen, Shirley Clarke's The Connection (1961) pretended to be footage shot by a documentary crew, and Orson Welles began shooting The Other Side of the Wind in 1970, a film built partly from material supposedly recorded by party guests, though it was not released until 2018. Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), about a killer who films his victims, is sometimes cited as an ancestor for its focus on a camera in a killer's hands, though it is not itself found footage.

The first widely noticed horror example is Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, which premiered in Milan on February 7, 1980. Roughly half of it consists of film shot by a missing documentary team, which an anthropologist later recovers and watches. The film's realism got its makers into court in Italy, where Deodato and others were convicted of obscenity and given suspended sentences, and where rumors circulated that deaths on screen were real. The rumors were refuted, and a court later ruled in Deodato's favor. The film also contains real animal killings, which are widely condemned, and Deodato himself later said he regretted including them.

Through the 1980s and 1990s the approach stayed on the margins. Examples include Manson Family Movies (1984), the French television program Les Documents interdits and The Last Broadcast (1998). Television made one of the sharpest early uses of it. Ghostwatch, written by Stephen Volk and shown on BBC1 on Halloween night 1992, was staged as a live broadcast from a supposedly haunted house, with familiar presenters including Michael Parkinson. It had been recorded earlier, but the BBC received about 30,000 calls from viewers, and the Broadcasting Standards Commission later upheld complaints that it was too distressing. It has never been repeated in full on UK television.

Then came The Blair Witch Project in 1999, which turned the experiment into a business model. Paranormal Activity (2007), REC (2007) and Cloverfield (2008) followed within a few years. By 2012, when the anthology V/H/S appeared, the critic Scott Tobias was comparing the genre's growth to the slasher boom of the 1980s. The format has kept changing with the equipment people carry: security cameras, webcams, phones and video calls.

Hallmarks

• A camera that exists inside the story and is usually held by someone in danger.
• Handheld or fixed, low-fidelity images, with shaky framing, lens flare, autofocus hunting and abrupt cuts.
• Little or no musical score; the sound is whatever the camera's microphone picked up, so footsteps, breathing and off-screen noises carry the dread.
• Natural-sounding, partly improvised dialogue and performers who often use their own first names.
• An opening card, a title or a marketing campaign that says the material is real, or that treats the question as open.
• Timestamps, battery warnings or night-vision modes that give the audience a way to measure time and danger.
• A reason to keep filming, which is the format's central problem and the source of its best jokes and its best scares.

Cannibal Holocaust and the idea of a document

Cannibal Holocaust, directed by Ruggero Deodato and written by Gianfranco Clerici, was made on a reported budget of about $100,000. Its structure is the part that matters for this subgenre. A New York anthropologist travels to the Amazon to learn what happened to four filmmakers making a documentary called The Green Inferno, and returns with their canisters. We watch the footage through his eyes, in a screening room, and the film keeps cutting between the polished present and the rougher material the crew shot.

That layering became a template. The recovered reels let a filmmaker mix two kinds of image, one that looks like cinema and one that looks like evidence, and the audience supplies the connection. Deodato has said he was frustrated that the later American film received so much praise for its originality, since its marketing also presented the footage as real. The film itself remains hard to recommend without caveats, because of the real animal deaths and its brutal treatment of its subjects. It matters here as history rather than as a model of taste.

The Blair Witch Project

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, working as Haxan Films, conceived the Blair Witch legend in 1993. They advertised for strong improvisers in a 1996 ad in Backstage, and cast Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard, who played characters bearing their own names. The script ran about 35 pages. During an eight-day shoot in Maryland that began on October 23, 1997, the cast carried their own cameras and received daily instructions and clues hidden in film cans, so many of the reactions on screen were genuinely unsettled. About 20 hours of footage, mostly from a Hi8 camcorder, were cut to 81 minutes.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999, and Artisan Entertainment bought distribution rights for a reported $1.1 million. The publicity became part of the work. A website launched in 1998 offered fake police reports and interviews, posters listed the actors as missing, and a Sci-Fi Channel special called Curse of the Blair Witch aired on July 12, 1999. The film opened in limited release on July 14 and went nationwide on July 30. Its budget is reported differently by different sources, from an original plan of $35,000 to $60,000 to a final cost of several hundred thousand dollars once post-production is counted, but the worldwide gross is cited at about $248.6 million.

Critics have argued about what makes it work. The film never shows its witch. What the audience gets is three people, a map no one can read and a growing certainty that something is nearby. The Blair Witch Project is also one of the few horror films in which the filmmaking process itself becomes the plot, because the cameras that record the terror also keep the characters moving toward it.

Paranormal Activity and the haunted house on a schedule

Oren Peli wrote, directed, shot and edited Paranormal Activity in his own home in San Diego, reportedly spending about $15,000 and seven days. The cast, led by Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, worked from outlines and improvised their dialogue. The camera sits on a tripod in the bedroom for much of the film, and a time counter runs as night passes. That simple device turns waiting into suspense: the viewer looks at a still frame and tries to catch the first sign of movement.

After a festival screening in 2007, the film was acquired by DreamWorks and then by Paramount, which re-edited it and replaced the original ending with a new one; the original appeared only at Screamfest. The release was unusual. It opened in about a dozen college towns on September 25, 2009, with a campaign that invited audiences to request screenings online, and expanded nationwide on October 16. The worldwide box office is reported at roughly $194 million, and the franchise that followed turned the format into an annual Halloween event. Claims that it is the most profitable film ever made rest on figures that usually exclude marketing, so they should be read with caution.

The film also belongs to the lineage of the supernatural story. Its fixed camera means the audience, like the couple, is stuck watching and waiting, and the sound of something heavy moving in the next room does more than any visual effect.

REC and the reporter's camera

REC, directed and co-written by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, was released in Spain on November 23, 2007, after screening at the Venice Film Festival. A television reporter, Ángela Vidal, and her cameraman follow firefighters into a Barcelona apartment building for a late-night human-interest segment. When authorities seal the building, the crew keeps filming. The directors described the approach as television-like, with a single camera, long takes and chronological shooting, and the cast was not given the full script. The budget is reported at about $2 million and the box office at about $32.5 million.

What sets the film apart is how plausible the camera is. A news crew has a reason to keep recording, to narrate and to push toward danger, which solves the question that haunts the genre. The finale switches to a night-vision mode filmed on a small consumer camera and transferred to film. The film won a Goya Award for Best New Actress for Manuela Velasco and another for Best Editing, and Balagueró and Plaza won Best Director at Sitges. An American remake, Quarantine, followed in 2008, and the Spanish series continued with REC 2 (2009), REC 3 Genesis (2012) and REC 4 Apocalypse (2014). The setting and the outbreak also connect it to zombie and apocalyptic horror.

Monsters, anthologies and screens

The same format can carry other kinds of story. Cloverfield (2008), directed by Matt Reeves and produced by J. J. Abrams, uses a camcorder to show a monster attack on New York from street level. Paramount kept the project secret, attaching an untitled teaser to Transformers and building a viral online campaign. The film earned about $172 million worldwide. Roger Ebert nicknamed its shaky style “La Shakily Queasy-Cam,” and some viewers reported motion sickness. Critics split on whether its echoes of September 11 were opportunistic or effective.

Other directors kept shifting the frame. Trollhunter (2010) by André Øvredal followed a student film crew and a government troll hunter in Norway. The 2012 anthology V/H/S collected short films made by several directors and presented them as found videotapes. Unfriended (2015), directed by Levan Gabriadze, takes place entirely on a teenager's computer screen, a format now called screenlife.

Rob Savage's Host (2020) is the clearest case of form following circumstances. Savage, who had made a viral prank video of friends on a video call, directed the feature in about 12 weeks during pandemic lockdown, working with actors who set up their own cameras, lighting and makeup at home. It runs 56 minutes, cost reportedly about $100,000, and premiered on Shudder on July 30, 2020. Critics praised its pacing and its use of the video call as a place where anyone can be watched.

Why audiences argue about it

Found footage divides viewers more sharply than most subgenres. Supporters say it creates presence: the audience feels placed in the room and shares the characters' limited view. Detractors point to the shaking camera, the dull stretches before anything happens and the repeated, unanswered question of why anyone would keep filming. The Blair Witch Project earned a C+ from audiences polled by CinemaScore, even as it became a massive hit and received four stars from Roger Ebert, a split that shows how divisive the form can be.

Scholars have given the format serious attention. Cecilia Sayad, in a 2016 article in Cinema Journal, argued that found footage horror blurs fiction and reality by presenting itself as documentary, while its unstable framing draws attention to what the camera cannot show. She contrasted it with self-aware films such as Scream (1996), which openly present themselves as fiction. In the Paranormal Activity series, she noted, timestamps and cameras placed around the house give the viewer access to time and space that a conventional film would compress or skip.

Where to start in the library

Begin with The Blair Witch Project, which is the best single example of how the form works and how a marketing campaign can shape it. For a very different use of the camera as a prop inside the story, look at Ringu, where a recorded tape is the source of the horror, even though the film is not shot in the found footage style. The subgenre is closely related to zombie and apocalyptic horror, as REC shows, and to supernatural horror, as Paranormal Activity and Host show. To see how the library connects these films, use the Explorer.

Verified details

• Cannibal Holocaust premiered in Milan on February 7, 1980, and was reportedly made for about $100,000.
• Ghostwatch aired on BBC1 on October 31, 1992, and the BBC reported about 30,000 calls from viewers.
• The Blair Witch Project was shot over eight days in Maryland, beginning October 23, 1997.
• Artisan Entertainment bought The Blair Witch Project after its January 1999 Sundance premiere for a reported $1.1 million.
• The Blair Witch Project grossed about $248.6 million worldwide, according to Wikipedia's tally.
• Paranormal Activity was shot in seven days in Oren Peli's own San Diego home.
• Paranormal Activity opened in 12 college towns on September 25, 2009, before expanding nationwide on October 16.
• REC was released in Spain on November 23, 2007; its American remake, Quarantine, arrived in 2008.
• Cloverfield was released on January 18, 2008, and its early marketing never revealed the monster.
• Host runs 56 minutes and premiered on Shudder on July 30, 2020.
• David Bordwell has argued that “discovered footage” is a better name for fiction films of this type.

Sources and further reading

• Found footage (film technique), Wikipedia
• The Blair Witch Project, Wikipedia
• Paranormal Activity, Wikipedia
• Cannibal Holocaust, Wikipedia
• Rec (film), Wikipedia
• Ghostwatch, Wikipedia
• Cloverfield, Wikipedia
• Host (2020 film), Wikipedia

Related subgenres