Special Issue #7
Artwork by Andrew Foley
Found Footage Horror
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).
Essay Collection
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Introduction: Tracing Horror’s Archival Preoccupation
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A Weird Bunch of Cuttings: Newspaper Clippings as Lovecraftian Found Footage
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Haunted Mediums: The Dossier Novel and Found Footage in Shelley Jackson’s Riddance (2018)
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Witness, Prophecy, and Found Footage in Able Gance’s J’accuse (1919, 1938)
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‘Watch carefully what is about to happen’: Les documents interdits (1989-1991) and the Interrogation of France’s Cultural Memory
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‘If you are watching this tape…’: Found Footage Horror as Archival Record
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‘I offer what I know to be the truth’: The Defunct, Archival Horrors of Y2K Found Footage Websites
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Dismantling Time: Digital Existentialism in Lake Mungo (2008)
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Found Nostalgia, Satanic Panic, and Halloween Sadism, Tonight at Eleven! The WNUF Halloween Special (2013)
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‘There are no words to describe how distressing it is’: The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), Normalcy, and the Subversive Radicalism of the Mundane
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Folklore Fights Back: Visual Archives and Unsettling Cultural Landscapes in Savageland (2015) and Butterfly Kisses (2018)
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Discovering Truth: Found Footage Horror and Systems of Knowing
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Documenting the Miraculous: The Surprising Connection between Elliot Goldner’s The Borderlands / Final Prayer (2013) and Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022)
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Being and Knowing the Found Footage Monster in The Curse of Professor Zardonicus (2022)
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Do it for the Views: Laughing at the Horrors of Influencer Culture in Deadstream (2022)
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Isolation in New Media Found Footage Horror: Host (2020), Deadstream (2022), and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022)
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The First Found Footage Horror TTPRG: An Interview with John ‘Hambone’ McGuire and George ‘Geo’ Collazo, Creators of The Devil in New Jersey (2022)
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‘The player is gone’: Digital Meditations on Mortality in a Fictional Video Game
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‘I’m part of you now’: Found Footage Horror and the Interactive Viewer of Immortality (2022)