The Found Footage Phenomenon

-When found footage is done well, it feels like

you're watching real people in real situations.

And that means that there's real stakes.

- It's subversive. - Anything can happen.

-You don't really know what you're going to see next.

-You know, now everyone has cameras in their pockets, right?

We live in a world that is found footage.

-We've always told each other stories that are, "This is real,

this has happened to me."

These films were seen as really

sub-par and underground and grimy.

-You're sucked into that hyper realism of normal people

going through this extraordinary circumstance.

You want to believe that that's actually happening.

-I think it can mean a lot of different things

for a lot of different people, but for me,

a found footage movie is a movie that you are watching

footage that is being created or generated by the characters.

-It's a movie that's supposed to be made from footage

that is just like shot in the supposed real world

and cut together as if it were real,

as if it were actually happening.

-What we are dealing with is a film form of style

that we recognize as being a truth telling style.

-So what that means is it's unedited.

It's footage that was discovered,

and the people who created the footage are missing.

-It indicates that something bad happened

to the people who made it.

-So the major component of that is the notion,

the sort of lie that we all share while watching it,

that the camera is a camera in that story, in that movie,

and it's all supposed to be happening for real,

regardless of how insane the action or the story is.

-It's a term that came up after "Blair Witch."

We always used to call it like P.O.V. cinema

or first person cinema.

-The footage that the audience is watching

was actually discovered,

you know, and being shown for the first time.

-It's the idea of something that you're seeing

that's really real, and it has this

dangerous quality to it, which I used with "Hate Crime",

but I really feel the idea of a found footage movie

is this dangerous thing of like you're seeing something

you stumbled across a video, be it on the dark web

or whatever, that you were just not supposed to see.

-So let's say that while you're filming me,

a monster or a demon or something, some entity

attacked you and ate you and ate your camera.

A few days later, when it should everything out

and you clean up the tape of all the monster poop,

what you'd have left would essentially be found footage.

-It delivers authenticity and realism,

which I think is a wonderful contradiction,

because you're really using reality

often with stories about the unreal.

And that's what's really delicious about the genre.

-There's an expectation that it's going to be

a very low end looking movie because by and large, they are.

-To get a look at something that would be considered,

I would say contraband.

This is something that shouldn't exist.

It's something that was discovered.

And it's kind of like coming upon someone's journal

where something really fucked up happened.

-That sense of a reality that hopefully draws you in,

you know, hopefully kind of makes you feel like this

is something that maybe could exist in the world

that I live in potentially,

or feels like it's, because of those aspects, feels more real.

-The mistakes that were discovered on this journey

were stunning.

Shoddy police work and a judgmental video

presented the world with a person guilty

before ever being tried.

-And I think a lot of people have this mistaken belief

that they're somehow easy to make.

-But to do it good and to do it properly,

you need the perfect timing

and the perfect sound and the perfect camera moves.

To do the funky chicken dance.

Just in everyone's life,

at some point, they've had to go investigate something,

you know, whether it's a bump in the night

or, you know, a monster under the bed scenario or something.

And I think a lot of times when you go looking for that,

you don't always expect to find something.

A lot of horror works best

when it's based in a kind of quotidian reality

where you look at something and go,

"This is the real world,"

and then all of a sudden, you get an eruption

of something that's very unreal into a real world,

and it makes it more frightening.

-Your goal always as a horror filmmaker

is to make people forget that they're sitting in a cinema.

And I think a really good found footage movie can do that

because it's using the kind of aesthetic

that's become so much of a part of our lives.

You know, the phone footage, you know, back in the day,

VHS footage, it just gives you that little bit less comfort.

-The found footage film genre came at a time

when the horror films had staled a little bit,

and it was a very invigorating format.

-I think there are kind of two different kinds

of film footage movies.

They're the ones like "Cloverfield"

or the bigger budget ones that sort of use it

as just a stylistic trapping.

And their goal is not really to make you think

this is real footage.

But then there are ones like "Blair Witch Project",

"Paranormal Activity", a lot of the smaller ones,

where the goal is to trick

your sort of lizard brain into thinking,

these are real people that real things are happening to.

That to me is when it's done well,

is what makes film footage so terrifying.

And I think that it lends itself very much to the horror genre

because it is that sort of limbic lizard brain

sort of feeling.

-A lot of other types of horror films,

there's always a certain distance.

There's always a sense of like,

"Well, I'm safe where I am because this isn't in my world."

But, you know, found footage makes it feel like,

well, wait, could somebody be documenting me now?

Could I become part of a story?

-Everything about this aesthetic is telling you

that this is real life, I'm watching something actual.

And so it doesn't feel like when you see

something supernatural in a found footage movie,

it doesn't feel like you're watching an effect in a film.

It feels like you're actually witnessing a supernatural event.

Micah! Micah! Micah! Micah!

Katie!

-I think this is definitely an argument to be made

that the found footage as a filmic style,

sort of has its roots in other art forms.

You know, in particular the epistolary novel.

So if you look at "Dracula", "Dracula", the novel is

supposedly a collection of journal entries and letters

that people are writing to one another.

The entire book is written in what you sort of

what you would call a "found footage" style

or a "found journal-age."

You know, a "found written-age" style.

- "Frankenstein" starts in that way, about someone

recounting a narrative of somebody else.

-I've read this over and over again,

but they're just words, but I can't understand.

-"Dracula" certainly starts by saying, "It will become apparent

when you look at all these documents,

how they all came together.

And that's part of the selling of "Dracula"

as something real and of now,

rather than the gothic horror of Germany,

you know, 100 years before that.

You know, there were typewriters,

there were blood transfusions.

It was kind of right up to date

in the way that the best found footage horror is today.

-I mean, I think you see it in literature.

I think you see it in definitely

"War of the Worlds" is a great example.

-We know now that in the early years of the 20th century,

this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater

than man, yet as mortal as his own.

-That whole radio broadcast and that idea that we're going to,

you know, alter your reality,

make you think that something is happening that's real.

-It's really quite astonishing and brilliant the way

that they took the conventions of radio at that time,

the orchestra playing tunes, and then suddenly

being interrupted by a news announcer with...

And then the news gets more and more and more dire

as the program goes on, was really brilliant.

-Cars headlights throw an enormous spotlight on the pit

where the objects have buried.

Now, some of the more daring fellas now are

venturing near the edge.

Stand out against the metal cage.

One man wants to touch it.

He's having an argument with a policeman.

-People have a kind of false memory

that it was all a kind of live event

on the radio, but it wasn't at all.

-That's the way that found footage also works.

-It's all about creating a fake reality in a more realistic way.

-It's presenting as a fictional story

in the form of something that is usually aligned with

truth telling or news telling.

And by doing so, both the "War of the Worlds"

radio broadcasts and found footage horror

destabilize what is true and how susceptible

we are to believing these fantastic stories

about alien invasions or witches in Maryland.

- Ooh. - Ooh.

Do you believe in ghosts?