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Modern audiences and critics may groan at the mention of Found Footage Horror, but it presents one of the most uniquely terrifying viewing experiences an audience can consume.

The sub-genre crafts an authentic mockumentary aestetic with stills of photographs and interviews to convey authenticity or utilising cinema verite-esque POV shots to convey identity.

Either way, the found footage sub-genre has masterfully reflected the rise of media and technology in our daily lives, and imitates the same sense of reality that public media modes impose on us.

This ingrains the instinct that whatever found footage is presented to us as our own reality, and immediately creates a unique sense of fear.

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Many of these films, including the Paranormal Activity films (2007-2015), can also be analysed  as weapons of format war.

The influx of found footage horror in the early 21st century instills a sense of anxiety about the “repercussions for watching the wrong video or watching the wrong way,” and thus take their place in a long line of films that make watching films into a savage and deadly past time.

In Paranormal Activity (2007), breaking the rules also carries strong punishments within the film's own narrative reality.

The demon gets stronger and more aggressive as Micah (Micah Sloat) records it on video and watches the footage, ignoring Katie’s (Katie Featherston) warnings, smirking to the camera when he promises he won’t “buy a Ouija board,” fully intending to borrow one.

His mockery of her rules parallels the defiance inherent in piracy, albeit with more severe penalties. What later succedes is one of the few conventations of the found footage genre, that '...everybody dies,...especially the diagetic cinematographer' (Benson-Allott 2013: 168).

The structural shock of this diagetic narrators' deaths and the immediate malfunction of the camera afterwards heighten the fear of unseen authority and make watching the found footage feel like a terrible mistake.

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Paranormal Activity 2007 Talking Board Scene

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One could argue the use of savage content depicted through equally raw footage, obliterates any sense of taste. This becomes especially appararent with the inclusion of genuine attrocities to evoke a sudden sense of shock.

Seen throughout the new mondo documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s like True Gore (1987), Shocks (1989) and Savage Zone (1985).

The most influential of these to the found found footage sub-genre is Faces of Death (1978) due to its mixture of true crime archive footage and pseudo authentic footage purported to filmed by local news and members of the public. Brottman suggests in its focus on the moment of death, the mondo film is the hidden version of the mainstream horror film (Brottman 2004: 168).

This use of raw footage to provoke shock and fear is not merely limited to horror however. Mainstream expository documentaries like The Cove (2009) use short segments of animal violence to inform the audience of Japanese hunting practices.

But the success of the shocking and dread inducing mood is predicated on images whose effect on the viewer's pysche is visceral, immediate and pre-reflective.

This is supported by Jason Middleton who argues how 'Viewers have, in effect, learned how they feel about the issue being discussed because they already feel a certain way (at a bodily level) as they learn about it' (Middleton 2015: 287).

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A large part of any genre is the limitations and discipline assigned to it

In found footage, the fear is derived from the false pretence that the footage is real. As such this minmalist sub-genre has the potential to craft a wide variety of scares.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) widely considered the first found footage film, despite its adherence to the more traditional conventions of the Hollywood narrative.

What makes this film different than modern found footage horror is the how the footage is used a plot device rather than dominating the entire narrative structure of the film. 'The clever use of a film within a film questions the nature of watching (and faking) shockumenatries' (Odell & Le Blanc 2007: 43).

It was important to attain the new mondo aesthetic to evoke a sense of fear and disgust.  The director had real animals killed on film and requested the actors stay out the public eye for a year to solidify the illusion of their demise.

This would be later imitated by The Blair Witch Project (1999) 20 years later.

While the scenes surrounding the screening of gruesome footage remind us of the fictionality of this on-screen reality, audiences believed the found footage portions of the film were all too real to the point where Ruggero Deodato was arrested on obscenity and murder charges.

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The V/H/S anthology series brings attention to the plethora ordinary home video technologies increasingly figured as malign.

This mistrust is accomplished by allowing access to what is presented to audiences as rough, unedited footage cut together to save viewing time.

As Caetlin Benson-Allott suggests, these untreated long takes 'reveal the extent to which the amateur, unpolished technique of faux footage horror represents the psychic boundary between public and private' (Benson-Allott 2013: 182).

The domestic digital aesthetic gradually induces anxiety in the viewer with a continuous focus of their private moments heightening the fear as 'continuity editing belies the authenticity of the snuff coda as an actual murder would be filmed one take' (Heller-Nicholas 65). This fear of privacy escalates with penetration of faceless entities in the characters' refuge.

Unfriended (2014) spends the whole movie on a girl’s computer screen. It shows not only the cost of spending too much time on social media through it adherence to continuous long take of the teen's digital ordeal , but also how how unlikeable most teens in horror movies are.

A great way of moving your narrative forward and upping the atmosphere, using a very limited long take to evoke fear in the audience.

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Unfriended (2014) - The Note Scene (7/10) | Movieclips

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Found footage sub-genre must be close to reality, at least to how human relationships behave in the real world.

This can be seen in acting direction The Blair Witch Project. During production the actors were fed parts of the script daily so they were never completely sure where their characters would end up.

The actors were given a map and told each day to make their way to various points on the maps. Only told at what time to get there by, they had no idea as to what lay ahead for them. Hence, when the three arrive at said point to be greeted by stickmen hanging from their tress, their surprise, as is ours, is real.

Drawing on the naturalism of observational documentary promotes the idea that the camera can capture a a dire reality as it unfolds. Such notions of documentary as pure and untreated hold much cultural sway, and are reinforced through the spontaneity of the character's actions.

This fits with Roscoe and Hight's analysis of the sub genre, stating even if they focus on other subjects their real intention is to engage in a sustained critique of the assumptions which support the classic modes of documentary. (Roscoe and Hight 2001: 72)

A bad perofrmance can prove detrimental in found footage as it disregards the entire purpose of the sub-genre. That is to provide the clearest form of identity one can experience in fictional filmmaking.

If the narrative reality of the film is so far fetched that it disassociates the audience from the illusion, that narrative reality falls apart.

This is why sequels like Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015) became pariahs of the subgenre. The filmmakers began employing more gimmicks and more distracting visuals to distract from the increasingly poor performances that gradually took the audience out of the illusion.

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Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015) - Exorcism Gone Wrong Scene (9/10) | Movieclips

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In conclusion, found footage masterfully reappropriates the techniques of documentary in blurring the line between faux and factual footage to generate a truly unique sense of fear in comparison to conventional horror films.

Its imitation of the same public modes that govern our society's news and documentaries instinctualises the illusion of the terrors we're watching, helping viewers to identify with the plight of those characters who's perspective we share until their inevitable demise.

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Benson-Allott, C (2013). Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brottman, M. (2004). Mondo Horror. In: Prince, S The Horror Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Heller-Nicholas, A (2014). Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc.

Middleton, J. (2015). Documentary Horror: The Transmodal Power of Indexical Violence. Journal of Visual Culture. 14 (3).

Odell, C & Le Blanc, M (2007). Horror Films. Harpenden: Kamera Books.

Roscoe, J & Hight, C (2001). Faking It: Mock Documentary and the Subversion
of Factuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press.