I think my first movie with the found footage subgenre was The Blair Witch Project. I had to wait a while until I was allowed to watch it, as my parents weren't big on letting me watch horror, especially when I get bad nightmares. Fortunately, I did end up watching it, but my first time around, I never fully appreciated how good it was, so I had to give it another watch. I honestly think the reason I didn't appreciate it the first time around was because of the prescriptive nature of using found footage.
Once I got past this and looked into this sub-genre, I soon learnt how clever they had to be in order to get the right type of footage to cause the audience to feel uncomfortable. How can you make a movie look homemade, like you're seeing someone's recordings, whilst also gripping the audience? Some of them haven't quite grasped how to get this across (I'm looking at you, Apollo 18). Others have been able to execute this very well, take Grave Encounters, for example, I liked how the raw footage felt raw. The only exception that irritated me was Sasha, who felt like she was doing way too much and began to annoy me a lot. I'm a sucker for super natural fouund footage movies, and watching them all lose it in that psychiatric hospital whilst seeing what they see from their perspective, had me gripped, especially with how time and space were changed for them.
I hate how people will brush off watching Found Footage because of the bad reputation it gets. Once you get past the cheesy actors and find the right kind of found footage movies, you kind of get hooked on that genre. There is something so raw and uneasy about seeing someone's reaction firsthand, looking for clues around them on a blurry and fuzzy camera and trying to see what they could be seeing, especially in a dark environment. Creep does a really good job of this; it was definitely one of the scarier movies I've watched from this genre, and it still sticks with me to this day. If you are going to watch Creep, make sure it's the 2014 movie, not the 2004 movie; they are two completely different horrors that people get mixed up.
Thanks to the digital world, we can be as creative as we want with found footage. Imagine being able to manipulate the audience with the use of a camera in that way? The Unfriended franchise does this really well, especially Unfriended: Dark Web. I honestly wouldn't have guessed the spin that they would put on it; it made me feel very paranoid after watching it. You just don't know what people are really capable of. When I studied Media at college, we did a mixture of media and filmmaking, and editing was included. I would have loved to have been given a chance to make my own found footage mini movie, unfortunelty we were never given a brief to make anything like that, but I did get to make my own version of the Gadget Show set in the 90's, I suppose that is an upside. I still have lots of ideas on what kind of found footage movie I would make, perhaps not your typical supernatural movie, but maybe a very eerie and uneasy take on horror/thriller.
The best thing about Found Footage is that you can make it about anything; it doesn't always have to be focused on scaring you. Due to it having so many sub-genres, there is so much to work with. Movies such as Project X, Europa Report, and how can I forget District 9, only one of my favourite movies ever! Found Footage will always be my go-to horror, along with Japanese horror (that's another subject I could ramble on about). Next year, I want to get back into watching them, even if I have to rewatch ones I've seen to refresh my memory. I will happily sit and watch anything when it comes to movies, no matter if it's badly rated, how else will I find a hidden gem that I could possibly like? There are a lot of found footage movies to go through that are rated poorly, so it will be a nice little project to add to my Letterboxd. Reddit will be my best friend in terms of honesty when I do this; users seem to be a lot more honest over there in terms of movies.
Have a cosy day
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