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Posted on June 10, 2023

Found Footage Horror: Special Issue #7

Our seventh special issue takes up found footage horror – and we have a real bumper crop of essays here, eighteen of them, along with the special issue introduction. We’ve made an point here of seeking to expand the canon of found footage horror, so you’re as likely to find unfamiliar as familiar names and titles: H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928); Shelley Jackson’s “dossier” novel, Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing Mouth Children (2018); Abel Gance’s World War I film, J’accuse (1919) and its 1938 reboot; the French TV program, Les Documents Interdits (1989-1991, 2010); The WNUF Halloween Special (2013); Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022); The Curse of Professor Zardonicus (2022); the first found footage horror tabletop role-playing game, The Devil in New Jersey (2022); What Happened to Crow 64? (2020), a collection of YouTube videos exploring a fictional video game; and the video game Immortality (2022).

But you’ll also find new readings of plenty of found footage favorites: The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Collingswood Story (2002); Lake Mungo (2008); The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), Savageland (2015), Butterfly Kisses (2018), As Above So Below (2014), The Pyramid (2014), Deadstream (2022), Host (2020), and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022).

Posted on September 16, 2022

Call for Papers — Special Issue #7: Found Footage Horror

Call for Papers

In today’s media landscape, questions of authenticity, truth, and manipulation of fact are more pertinent than ever. While journalists herald the dawning of a ‘post-truth’ era, and deepfakes bring to a boiling point the anxiety of online communication and documentation, the subgenre of found footage horror seems to encapsulate a terror that is both commonplace and elusive.

From the Unfriended films (2016, 2018) to Host (2020), recent years have heralded an uptick in digital iterations of the medium as an outlet for articulating our fraught relationship with new media technologies. But the concept isn’t new. If we consider Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film, Häxan—with its integration of truth claims and archived materials—as one of the earliest found footage horror films, then the legacy of the subgenre is approaching just over 100 years. Nor are the impulses of the medium confined to the screen. Foundational horror works like Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897), or found testimonies like Cotton Mather’s records of the Salem Witch trials (1693), all serve as precursors to ongoing experiments with the found footage subgenre.

Posted on December 30, 2021

When we were pagans: The Land of Blue Lakes

Dawn Keetley

The Land of Blue Lakes (2021) is an independently-produced film directed and written by Arturs Latkovskis. It is the first Latvian found footage horror movie, although that doesn’t quite do the film justice. It is also a Latvian entry (again, perhaps the first) in the folk horror genre – and, according to director Latkovsis, it is at least ‘half documentary as it is using the real history of the locations where it was set’.[i] ‘The Land of the Blue Lakes’ is a term for the Latgale region of Latvia, one of the historic Latvian lands, lying in the easternmost part of the country. The film is, among many other things, a beautiful visual record of the lakes and islands of the region, as five friends set off on a canoe trip – heading, in particular, to see the ‘stone of the sacrificed’, a key site in the mythology of the region.

Posted on October 4, 2017

31 Found-Footage Horror Films for October

Guest Post

Found-footage horror has been one of the most creative and provocative subgenres of horror since Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez released The Blair Witch Project in 1999. For your Halloween viewing, our guest writer Brooke Bennett has created a calendar of the best found-footage horror for you to watch in October. You can download the calendar as a pdf document (just in case you don’t get through them all in October). We hope you enjoy them–and feel free to jump onto the comments section and post your thoughts about our choices, along with any films we omitted. What found-footage horror films do you think should be on every horror fan’s list?

Posted on June 4, 2017

Unfriended: Unfairly Maligned

Guest Post

I have a confession. I love found footage horror and have an undying need to protect the often-maligned subgenre from criticism. I’m not trying to excuse the absolute tripe that sometimes passes for found footage horror, but hand on my heart, one example I feel that was dismissed a little too quickly and energetically by the horror community, is Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014).

In Unfriended, the internet is a place haunted by characters’ mistakes as much as the supernatural and the insidious potential of social media is at the heart of the film’s construction of fear. A large majority of critics received the film negatively on its release, suggesting that Unfriended was an example of found footage horror trying desperately to stay relevant by co-opting the aesthetics of social media into its repertoire after riding the surveillance-cam wave of Paranormal Activity for the past decade.