Found Footage
About Found Footage Films
Found footage works by pretending the camera should not be there. That is its whole dirty trick. Horror had used subjective panic long before the format got a name, but once cheap digital cameras, camcorders, and post-Broadcast News media paranoia converged in the late 1990s, found footage horror movies stopped looking like a gimmick and started looking like a broken public record of psychological horror.
The Blair Witch Project remains the key text because it understands that absence is more frightening than revelation. You do not need a monster if the woods, the map, and the argument inside the frame are already collapsing. Cannibal Holocaust is earlier and nastier, less blueprint than contamination source, but its idea of recovered images as moral evidence never went away. By the 2000s and 2010s, the form had become elastic enough to absorb demonic infestation, internet anxiety, and domestic surveillance, all without giving up the cheap, immediate shock of a camera dropped at the wrong second in stories that often tilt supernatural.
The important directors each understood a different pressure point. Sam Raimi is not a found footage filmmaker in the strict sense, but his kinetic camera grammar hangs over the mode. George Romero helped define horror as mediated social panic. And Wes Craven knew better than most that once audiences distrust the image, the image can do almost anything.
That is why the subgenre keeps returning. Found footage is horror rebuilt for every new recording device, and every new reason not to trust what a screen claims to show.
