Found footage film

As a storytelling technique, found footage has precedents in literature, particularly in the trope of found manuscript, ^[4] as well as epistolary novel, which typically consists of either correspondence or diary entries, purportedly written by a character central to the events. Like found footage, the epistolary technique has often been employed in horror fiction: both Dracula and Frankenstein are epistolary novels, as is The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft.

Earlier films used versions of the device. Shirley Clarke's The Connection (1961) presents itself as footage shot by a documentary crew,^[5] while the birthday-party sequences in Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind, which began filming in 1970 but was not released until 2018, are assembled from footage recorded by people attending the party.^[6] In horror, Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is widely regarded as a foundational work of the found-footage form.^[7]

Les Documents Interdits [fr] (1989–1991) used many of the techniques later associated with found footage.^[8] Michael Gingold of Fangoria has described the 1993 film America's Deadliest Home Video as an early example of the format in horror and crime cinema.^[9] The Blair Witch Project (1999) brought found-footage horror into the mainstream.^[10] Reviewing V/H/S in 2012, Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club compared the genre's growth in the 2000s and 2010s to the popularity of slasher films in the 1980s.^[11]

Found footage is also well suited to low-budget filmmaking, as its rough, amateur-video aesthetic can help give the images a sense of authenticity.^[12][7]

Film scholar David Bordwell has criticized the term "found footage" for fictional films, noting that it had already been used for films assembled from pre-existing material. He uses "discovered footage" for films such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, comparing the device to the literary tradition of the found manuscript.^[13]

The Unnamed Footage Festival in San Francisco uses the broader term "in-world camera" for films in which the recording device exists within the fictional world, encompassing found footage as well as related forms such as screenlife and faux documentary.^[14][15]

In a 2016 Cinema Journal article, film scholar Cecilia Sayad argues that found-footage horror plays with the boundary between fiction and reality through framing, both by presenting the film as documentary material and through the use of handheld cameras and static shots.^[16] Discussing the Paranormal Activity films, Sayad notes that timestamps and cameras placed throughout the characters' homes give viewers access to time and space beyond that of a conventional narrative film. At the same time, the limits of the frame leave viewers watching for threats that may remain unseen.^[16]

Sayad contrasts found-footage horror with self-conscious horror films such as Scream. While Scream openly presents itself as fiction, she argues, found footage presents its images as real even as unstable framing draws attention to what the camera can and cannot show.^[16]

• Analog horror
• Cinéma vérité
• Epistolary novel
• Fictional book
• Hoax
• Mockumentary
• Point-of-view cinema
• Pseudo-documentary
• Screenlife