Dawn Keetley Director of Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), Jordan Peele is best known for films that are relatively unambiguously horror. His third film, Nope (2022), though, appears to take a turn away from horror. Indeed, in numerous interviews before and after the release of Nope (2022), Peele described his primary influences as science […]
Kari Sawden At the end of the first official trailer for the 2014 found footage horror movie As Above, So Below (AASB) the audience is invited to journey into the Paris Catacombs to “discover the truth” (Rotten Tomatoes Trailers). This statement, paired with the frightening images teased in the trailer, implies that there is something […]
Isaiah Frost Rivera Though often excluded from the found footage genre, mockumentary horror films offer a fascinating look at how contemporary found-footage media consistently reestablish and redefine horror conventions through innovative storytelling techniques.[1] Two independent films by first-time horror directors that embrace this generative quality are Savageland (2015) and Butterfly Kisses (2018), each a chilling, […]
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. A variant of the “found footage” film can be found in 2013’s WNUF Halloween Special (hereafter WNUF). The film is presented as a video recording (VHS) of a local television newscast followed by a television special about a local haunted house on Halloween night, 1987. The action is interrupted every few […]
Amira Shokr In the pictures we take, the videos we save, and the printed-out images of ourselves in old photo albums, we exist amongst our ghosts; we see the shell of ourselves through the camera lenses we use. We don’t acknowledge the frightening mode of existence this reveals, running parallel with our “reality.” Media can […]
Elizabeth Tussey Abel Gance’s 1919 silent film, J’accuse, “I Accuse,” captured the terrestrial horrors of World War I in real time and features authentic images of battlefields and soldiers. In 1938, during the early rumblings of World War II, Gance rebooted his own film. While the narrative of the first half of these films features […]
Callie Ingram Riddance: or, the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children (2018) by Shelley Jackson is a multimodal gothic novel that straddles the boundary between the literary “found manuscript” trope and “found footage” aesthetics. A 512-page dossier about the Sybil Joines Vocational School (SJVS), a spiritualist boarding school where children […]
Kevin Cooney H.P. Lovecraft traveled the world without leaving Providence, Rhode Island. Knowledge of riots, famines, scientific breakthroughs, and fresh archaeological discoveries came to the New Englander via America’s flourishing newspaper industry. From that flood of information – often forwarded by fellow writers – Lovecraft wove stories from his fear-filled weltanschauung. I contend that Lovecraft […]
Lauren Gilmore Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. A handful of film students disappear in the woods and all we know about what happened to them is contained on recovered recordings. Or maybe you remember the one about a single mother searching for an antidote for the omen passed to her son from […]