How Found Footage Horror Movies Have Evolved Since The Blair Witch Project

Found footage horror movies represent the best and worst backs of the category. On one mitt, they are indicative of the low-budget ingenuity that has inspired the imaginative filmmaking of repugnance classics. On the other hand, they symbolize the repetitive storytelling and tired tropes that connoisseurs have targeted the cruelty category for encompas. Since the landmark The Blair Witch Project, though, changes in technology and media have morphed the subgenre into different forms, proving that perceived footage is at least more than a static fad.

The found footage technique has crossed over into many categories over the years, but horror filmmakers have implemented it “the worlds largest”. Watching what feels like a piece of raw, unveiled footage is likely to be deeply unsettling, blurring the barrier between detail and story by evoking a mysterious sense that the spectator is witnessing something perverse and outlaw. In addition, the format lends itself to lower funds that fright heads often espouse in the incident to film inexpensive, grainy, DIY masterpieces.

Related: Why The Blair Witch Project’s SyFy Mockumentary Was Better Than The Sequels

For all their faultings and analysis, concluded footage cinemas is still a fascinating channel to look at how contemporary audiences exhaust media. The subgenre started off as a response to the Internet, world video, and easier accessibility to residence recording machines, and rose in popularity as viral videos become more commonplace. However, the needs of the these films shrunk after the turn of the 2010 s as the wording became worn-out. Still, though, as engineering continues to rapidly derive and filmmakers discover new visual modes of storytelling, the exhilarate of the found footage horror movie may yet survive.

Before The Blair Witch Project, there was Cannibal Holocaust, which was released in 1980 and is often cited as the first perceive footage movie. The movie, which follows a documentary crew’s journey into the extents of the Amazon rainforest, was and is still met with controversy due to its graphic savagery and real, on-screen killings of animals. The reaction was so viscerally violent that conductor Ruggero Deodato was arrested in his native Italy on indecency charges.

Cannibal Holocaust has more in common with ‘7 0s exploitation than it does modern conclude footage, but it did pave the way for the technique with its cheap, grimy aesthetic that disturbingly resembles a snuff-brown film. Deodato also formed a illusion behind his cinema, procreating it seem as if the footage are likely to be real by convincing his actors to disappear from the public eye after shooting. It wasn’t until the direct appeared in court that the superintendent was cleared of possible slaying costs, but the capability of sensationalized sell would have a profound impact on experienced footage horror cinemas decades later.

The Blair Witch Project arrived in a sweetened place in culture autobiography. Video recording and revising technology were becoming more accessible to the average person, but mass video-sharing had not become a staple yet. The Internet was still moderately new and energizing, right in the middle of the “dot-com bubble” with bountiful forums and blogs for online discussion but still far from the information hub it is today. Reality television was on the rise, and there was just enough amateur camcorder footage in circulation to convince audiences that this new horror movie might very well be real.

Related: Blair Witch Project Had A Negative Impact On Its Maryland Town

To be fair, a lesser-known movie called The Last Broadcast predated Blair Witch by a year, but the two were in production at the same time. Both movies took advantage of the zeitgeist and relied on consumer-level recording equipment to give the impression of a “true story”. While The Last Broadcast implemented a “mockumentary” approach utilizing faux interviews and documentary editing skills, The Blair Witch Project came across as more literal “found footage”, as if someone had discovered the camcorder and ended the raw, unedited material.

Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez used Hi8 analog videotapes and 16 mm cinema, which had traditionally been used in amateur home videos and documentary reels, to both enhance the feeling of watching home camcorder footage and to keep the budget down. The film is perhaps most recollected for its elaborate market safarus, which included a website detailing a police investigation of the case and a missing persons poster. The Blair Witch Project managed to make $250 million off of a $60,000 plan, an impressive stunt aided by the public’s stretching infatuation with candidly shot amateur videos and the strength of the Internet.

For almost a decade, the success of The Blair Witch Project was apparently a one-time gimmick. As the Internet rapidly expanded to a part of daily life, it seemed as if nothing could capture the same mythological dread. Meanwhile, in 2005, YouTube started to radically alter the notions of video sharing and viral material to its current form. In this path, a catch footage resurgence was inevitable, as long as it could pierce through the increasingly gathered kitty of viral content.

Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity weren’t the first movies of their nature to develop at this time, but they only certainly the most responsible for launching the found footage craze that engulfed pop culture at the turn of the decade. Introduction like the faux snuff-brown mockumentary The Poughkeepsie Tapes and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead failed to find a mainstream audience, but strange viral marketing and critical acclaim cured Cloverfield collect a comfy profit. Then, around Halloween of 2009, came the mega-hit Paranormal Activity, which had already been building up rumors about parties leaving the theater out of fright since its festival debut two years earlier.

Related: Why Noroi: The Curse Is Being Called The Scariest Found Footage Movie Ever

Paranormal Activity was perhaps the first and last film to captivate at least an ounce of Blair Witch’s is-it-real-or-is-it-not agitation, modifying the visual storytelling device from handheld camcorder footage to more intrusive-feeling home security cameras. The movie was a roaring success, quoth as the most profitable film at the time when box office returns are compared to budget. A renewed interest in the found footage style exploded as the sub-genre impacted cinema across all categories, including the superhero sci-fi Chronicle and the teenage humor Project X. However, the thunder turned into a deluge as the mystery and stimulate of detect footage started to wear off.

There were legitimately artistic seeks into the limits of located footage filmmaking, from the creepily voyeuristic to the compelling replication of contemporary media. The 2007 Spanish film REC, which followed a story gang instead of a group of amateurs, developed a faith following overseas and have contributed to an American remake announced Quarantine in 2008. District 9 received admire at the Academy Awards for the room it poignantly and relevantly presented imaginary information footage as a narrative machine in 2009. At the same time, duds like The Chernobyl Diaries and Apollo 18 proved that these types of movies were perhaps over-relying on style instead of story.

V/ H/ S arrived towards the end of the found footage upturn in 2012 and, in many ways, is indicative of the best and worst excess of the subgenre. The cruelty anthology experimented with different types of experienced footage vogues to varying levels of success, but it was arguably a segment filmed perfectly through Skype video announces entitled “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” that was a harbinger of what was to come. Phone footage and bulletin spools and already taken the place of camcorder engineering in both cinema and the real world, but video chat presented a new opportunity for found footage filmmaking.

Unfriended and its sequel were critically lambasted upon their exhaust in 2014 and 2018, but the use of Skype and video chat engineering was a fresh idea. Searching, though not a horror movie, was admired for its use of video chat footage in disclose a twisty mystery story. Host, the first cinema to be shot entirely on Zoom during the COVID-1 9 pandemic, has received critical adoration for its ability to make use out of the current barrier to filmmaking. In this course, Host represents the decades-old DIY mentality of repugnance filmmakers, and proves that attained footage cruelty movies aren’t necessarily dead. They simply need to find a brand-new, aroused channel for resurrection.

Next: Host vs. Unfriended: Which Virtual Horror Movie Is Scarier (& Why )

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