When found-footage is good, it’s really good, because it deprives us of distance. Distance is, in my opinion, the enemy of horror films. The more we can distance ourselves from what we’re watching, the less effective it is. Unsympathetic protagonists create distance. Highly implausible behavior and contrived situations distance us. Bad special effects distance us. Self-reference distances us (and this is why The Cabin In The Woods is not a horror film, but instead a film about horror films). Basically, everything that discourages emotional investment and reminds us that we’re watching a movie distances us, and the more distant we are from the film, the less power it has to move us, really affect us. And I think some people like it that way - what they’re looking for isn’t horror, it’s violent entertainment.
But I’m not one of them. I like it when a film sticks with me, haunts me, makes me feel things. For me, that’s kind of the point. And writing about scary movies on a (mostly) weekly basis for the last several years makes it harder for that to happen. It’s hard not to have a critical eye over time, and so I really value the films that pull me out of that critical distance, that sort of force me to experience them. And the thing about found-footage (and mockumentaries, to a degree) is that by not using conventional cinematic language, by presenting what purports to be raw footage, we’re denied the distance of a typical movie-watching experience. If we buy into it, then this isn’t a movie - it’s a document. We’re no longer an audience - we’re witnesses to something unfolding. And even though that’s not really true, the easier it is to forget that, the easier it is to get pulled in. It’s not just films, either - I’m a sucker for stories told this way in almost any medium. I like stories presented as recovered correspondence, as oral histories, as collections of official documentation…I really like that feeling of witnessing or unearthing something. It’s another layer to that feeling of discovery that can make a story feel powerful.
And so this is why I have such a love-hate relationship to found-footage horror films. As a style of filmmaking, it has so much potential, and I love that. But that potential is so often squandered, and I hate that. They’re films that are very easy to make, but very difficult to make well, and they really do have to be made well for me to get invested in them, because the instant you present something as a document, anything that reminds me it’s a movie is going yank me out of the illusion faster and harder than the same sort of slip-up in something that doesn’t pretend to be other than a movie. Too much contrivance in a film is distracting and can make its quality suffer, but any whiff of contrivance in a found-footage film immediately puts me off. And most films - even legitimate documentaries - are contrivances to one degree or another. They’re put together according to a design. Hiding that design to preserve the idea that this was unintentional footage is tough. Paradoxically, it takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless, and it requires, I think, a very different way of approaching filmmaking from conventional cinematic technique. Not just in how the film is shot, but also what is shot, how the story is told, how you approach the idea of acting, and the degree to which you need to consider point of view. And in found-footage, you are much more constrained than you are in conventional film narrative. You don’t have your whole toolkit and arsenal of cheats to fall back on. And so lots of found-footage films reveal the limitations of their filmmakers in the degree to which they fall back on these tools in ways that end up breaking the illusion.
And so after watching a whole bunch of found-footage horror films of wildly varying quality, I want to talk about the genre by looking at The Blair Witch Project, the film that arguably kicked off its proliferation. It wasn’t the first found-footage horror film (that was arguably Cannibal Holocaust, a film I have no desire to watch), but it was the one that really highlighted how effective, successful, and -let’s be realistic - profitable they can be. I think it may be the best example of the genre there is, it’s one of my all-time favorite horror films, and so I want to talk not just about it as a film, but what it gets right about found-footage that a lot of other films get wrong.
The film opens with no music, just the title, white on a black screen, and a title card that says:
“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary.
A year later their footage was found.”
That’s it. No “the horrible and bizarre events of that day” or anything like that. Just, these three people disappeared, and here’s the recordings of their last known days. Simple, straightforward. The first time I saw that title card, I got chills. Whatever I’m about to see, the three people involved vanished afterward. It immediately gives everything to follow a sheen of dread because you know however it ends, it isn’t going to be good. This is one thing a lot of found-footage films get wrong…they tip their hand too early by telling us what we’re going to see is because of something awful and evil and horrifying and it’s just trying too hard to get us on board. Going this minimal and matter-of-fact reduces any feeling of contrivance. This just tells us that what we’re about to see is recovered footage from three filmmakers who disappeared a year before. It set up the premise, foreshadows something bad, then gets out of the way.
(It also establishes that this footage has been recovered somehow. I’ve seen more than a few found-footage films that end on a really ominous note, but as a result leave hanging the question of how we’re seeing any of this in the first place. Even when the ending is good, that tends to leave me with a bad taste in my mouth.)
Everything after this title card is sourced from one of two cameras - a color camcorder and a 16mm film camera. The footage was apparently degraded in post-production to look more period-appropriate, but they did a really good job of it, because none of it looks like anything other than raw footage to me. There’s no corny camcorder overlay with battery indicators or recording lights (which wouldn’t show up on the recorded footage, just in the viewfinder), just either color video or black and white film. The camcorder has a built-in mic, and the 16mm has no sound source of its own - for that they have a boom mic and a DAT recorder for film audio. That’s it. Everything we see in the film is from one of those two sources, and having a film source independent of its sound source allows for things like voiceover in a way that makes narrative sense, and there are moments in this film where seeing one thing and hearing another (or having the sound source further away than the film source) creates feelings of tension and disconnection without stepping outside what’s possible in the situation.
If you’re going to present something as raw, recovered footage, that’s what it needs to look like. It can’t be obviously pro-grade footage with a camcorder viewfinder overlay, you can’t have montages or Steadicam shots. Things like that immediately communicate that this is a movie pretending to be raw footage and breaks the illusion. There are all kinds of similar techniques that directors employ to tell a story, but making a convincing found-footage film means forsaking those things and just telling a story using either one or two cameras as here, or being willing to cobble together something from a whole bunch of separate sources that vary wildly in quality and perspective. The addition of things like GoPro cameras and camera drones open things up a little, but it’s still a very limited palette by necessity. Here the filmmakers have to tell the entire story using only two cameras, and so then the burden falls to the acting and editing to tell the story, because the camera’s vocabulary is so limited.
And so this footage tells us about the last days of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams. They’re film students making a documentary about the local legend of the Blair Witch, the ghost of a woman burned for being, well, a witch in the 1800s.They’re going to Burkittsville, MD (formerly Blair), they’re going to interview some of the locals, and then head into the woods that she’s purported to haunt. Heather and Josh know each other already, and Mike is someone Josh brought in. Heather directs and narrates, Josh runs the 16mm camera, and Mike does sound. They pack up their stuff, do some grocery shopping, and head to Burkittsville. Sure enough, they find locals with all kinds of stories - after Elly Kedward was burned on suspicion of witchcraft in the 1800s, a little girl reported seeing a woman whose feet didn’t touch the ground out in the woods. A hunting party was found ritualistically dismembered at a site known as Coffin Rock. In the modern day, the Blair Witch is a bogeyman parents use to get their kids to go to bed, people hear strange noises and see mysterious vapors in the woods, and a man named Rustin Parr murdered a number of children, claiming to be under the influence of the Blair Witch.
Of course, these are all just local legends. As they move into the woods, it starts to become apparent pretty quickly that none of them are really outdoorspeople. Heather’s leading the expedition, but even though she insists that she be the one to read the map and compass, everything takes longer than she says it will. A 90-minute hike to a cemetery takes hours. The hike from the cemetery to Coffin Rock also takes hours. They get maybe three segments done on their first day before making camp, exhausted from entirely more hiking than anyone planned, and it isn’t clear that Heather knows how to get back to their car. Meanwhile, Heather insists she has everything under control.
And then the mysterious noises start.
It’s a short film - not even quite 90 minutes - but it’s very well-paced. It all begins with strange noises at night, escalates to mysterious objects, and then worse, then much, much worse. None of that is especially unusual for films about people in the woods when and where they shouldn’t be. But the tension starts early. Part of that is the premise - we know these three people disappear, never to be found, so there’s already a sense of impending doom. But another part of it is the friction between the three characters. Heather is driven and ambitious, a little intense, and it starts to become abrasive soon enough. Mike doesn’t know her well, so he gets annoyed pretty quickly. Josh does know her, but you sort of get the sense that he’s maybe getting a little fed up with her, like he’s tired of dealing with her when she gets like this. And she does have an obsessive quality to her - she records all kinds of stuff with the camcorder, like she’s making the behind-the-scenes featurette for their documentary as they go, and constantly having a camera in their faces makes Josh and Mike really, really irritable. Her insistence that she knows what she’s doing even as they get more and more lost makes things even worse. This film is as much about the psychological disintegration of these three young people as they get increasingly more tired, hungry, and lost as it is anything else.
But then…there’s those mysterious noises. And for that matter, how is it that they’re following their compass and ending up right back where they started? It’s like the forest is conspiring against them. The annoyance and frustration of being lost turns into real fear - they’re due back at work, they have to get the production equipment back, they have family and friends and loved ones that are going to start worrying. The fear then turns into terror as they realize that if they can’t get out of the woods, they are going to die there. And all the strange noises, the mysterious rock cairns outside their tent, all of it…well, the only logical explanation is that they’re not just hopelessly lost, they’re hopelessly lost and some malevolent locals are messing with them. Because they certainly don’t believe in ghosts.
So if you can’t really create tension and fear with camerawork and lots of fancy effects, you’re going to have to rely on your actors to sell the story, and this is another place a lot of found-footage films fall down. Even if the footage
looks real, if the people in it don’t
act like real people, again, the illusion falls apart. What is supposed to be documentation of actual people going through something incomprehensible ends up looking like a conventional film made very much on the cheap. A lot of cruddy found-footage horror films fall prey to the same problem as cruddy conventional horror films - their characters aren’t people so much as archetypes or caricatures, walking embodiments of a single personality trait. And that might not just be the acting, that could very well be the writing instead or as well. It’s one thing to write dialogue, and it’s another to write dialogue that sounds like actual, spontaneous conversation instead of performed exposition. And this was another place where the filmmakers made a really smart choice - the dialogue in this film is improvised. They cast people with improvisational experience, those people developed characters, and then they were given a daily outline for what had to happen on any given day of shooting, but how they got there was up to them. As a result, the dialogue sounds like actual conversation, because it basically
is actual conversation. The interactions between them feel believable, because they’re happening naturally and spontaneously. As a result, it really does seem like we’re watching actual footage of actual people actually losing their shit, and once things really start rolling, it’s really raw and intense. It carries the tension that can’t be captured in the cinematography and then some. Too many found-footage horror films are scripted and acted like conventional films, and feel off as a result. If you’re going to make your story believable as a discovered document, then how people talk and act can’t be too polished or stagey, because that’s perfectly okay for movies, but it’s not how actual people talk and act. Likewise, the filmmaking has to be believable. The protagonists are film students, so they have some skill with their equipment, but the camerawork is believably shaky when they’re distressed, and it’s rarely if ever neatly placed to conveniently capture anything scary. It’s frenzied, blurred, pointed at the ground because the person holding the camera is
running for their fucking life. There aren’t a lot of conventional scares in this film, and hardly any effects. It’s all in mood and details and more mood. A lot of things happen in pitch black, with only sound from a camcorder mic to capture it. The end result feels raw and messy, exactly like it would if it were real footage.
As the film moves on, their increasing instability, the threat of exposure and starvation, and the really weird things happening to them all converge, sharpen to a point. They’re all at each other’s throats and on the verge of complete breakdown, there are things happening to them every night that defy any comfortable explanation, and they’re exhausted, hungry, lost, and terrified that nobody will ever see them again. No matter how hard they try, they keep going around in circles, and there’s something out there watching them. It all comes to a conclusion, a terrified crawl through an abandoned house in the middle of the woods, lit only by the lights on their cameras, leading to an end both enigmatic and awful. We’re denied any tidy explanation, just cameras left running, pointing where they fell. I saw this film in theaters maybe 7 or 8 times (I got a little obsessed myself), and the end didn’t get less powerful over time, it got
more powerful. It was some edge-of-the-seat, suck-your-breath out shit. And I think it worked because the actors sold it. They were identifiable, relatable people, so even if you didn’t especially like them, you could empathize with them, connect with their easily apparent humanity. And by the end, they’re in rough shape. This, again, goes back to how the film was made.
This film was shot in eight days, with all (or at least the overwhelming majority of) footage being recorded by the cast members themselves, using the cameras they were carrying in the film. They shot the film themselves, and just as the dialogue was improvised, so was the day’s action. The filmmakers used a lot of techniques I’d expect to see in live-action role-playing, a form of collaborative theater where the participants tell a story sketched out to varying degrees ahead of time through improvisation, often on location, with rules established ahead of time to govern the flow of action and the outcomes of conflict. It’s a form of theater where the actors are the audience, telling the story to themselves, for themselves, capturing the energy and spontaneity of live performance within a loose narrative framework. The filmmakers provided the cast with GPS units that would lead them from location to location (as well as escape routes out of the woods, in case they got lost, which they apparently did on three separate occasions), and once they arrived at location, they’d find a milk crate with supplies and instructions waiting for them. They’d drop off the film they’d shot the day before and pick up what they needed for the day, including an outline of the day’s story beats. The cast had agreed upon procedures in the event that they needed to break character (including safe words), and as long as they got where the GPS and outline for the day wanted them to go, how they got there was largely up to them. The production crew was out of sight, but never too far away.
This was also by design, both for safety concerns and because the production crew created the atmosphere to put the cast in the right head space. They invented an entire mythology for the Blair Witch and convinced the cast that it was a real local legend. When the cast filmed talking-head segments in town, the producers planted ringers among the townspeople to feed them stories about the Blair Witch, so the line between fiction and reality would blur. And that blurring extended to the remainder of the shoot. As filming went on, the production crew gave the cast less and less food and water in their supply drops, so all the discomfort on film was genuine. The cast wasn’t told what was going to happen to them on any given night, and the production crew would come into their camp while they slept to plant mysterious objects, disrupt their gear, and even shake the tent while they slept, and so all of those reactions of shock and fear that end up on film were real. The cast members used their own names to make it easier to stay in the moment (and to contrive their “disappearance” for a publicity campaign), they got more and more tired and hungry as the shoot went on, their tempers frayed from exhaustion and constant fear of what awaited them at night or the next day. They really were at each other’s throats. The more the line between fiction and reality blurred, the more believable everything that ended up on the screen seemed. When you inhabit these characters, immerse yourself in them, in a situation that isn’t on a soundstage, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next, everything comes much more from a place of real feeling, and it shows. You can tell a good story using conventional cinematic techniques in ways that allow for either artificiality or verisimilitude, but if your whole conceit is that this is recovered film footage, shot by relative amateurs, of something that happened to them, they’re going to need to be believable as real people going through real terrifying experiences, and in that way you really DO need something more like theater than film, because otherwise it’s too easy to spot the acting.
It’s not perfect. Few films are. Watching it again for the first time in about 10 years or so, a couple of things leap out at me, It’s supposed to be raw footage, but some of the talking-head segments at the beginning switch between video and film in a way that suggested it was edited somewhat in post-production, giving the game away a little, and the end, as striking as it is, relies a little heavily on the audience remembering one relatively small piece of information from the beginning of the film, and contextualizing it correctly, which a lot of people didn’t know to do. Apparently, multiple endings were shot (so it looks like I’m gonna need to get the Blu-Ray at some point to see them), some more conventionally sensationalistic than others, and I wonder how they’d hold up. The ending we get is a little confusing, but still a supremely creepy image nonetheless. There was originally a whole newscast-style framing device covering the discovery of the footage, but it was omitted for feeling too contrived. I think this was a good instinct on the part of the filmmakers - you don’t want to overexplain (though the detail that the footage was discovered embedded in the middle of an otherwise-undisturbed foundation of a house from the 1800s would have been a nice touch - it’s unsettling without being too specific) and a lot of found-footage films make this mistake, and just like it’s hard to nail the mundanity of actual behavior, it’s hard to nail the mundanity of local news coverage as well (a lesson that The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Hell House LLC failed to learn). But even though there are flaws, this film, in my opinion, more than gets over on both its willingness to let the footage tell the story without overexplaining or spelling too much out for us, and in the strength of performances that are as much authentic anger and distress as performance. If you’re going to make a horror film that purports to be the last recorded document of a bunch of people who met a terrible end at the hands of something potentially unexplainable, then you can’t just make a regular movie and slap some viewfinder graphics on it. You have to be willing to immerse your cast in the experience and let them document it, and be willing and able to tell a story with messy, flawed, imperfect footage. You have to be willing to abandon as much distance as possible. Anything less risks being just another gimmick. That's the reason so many films have tried to capture the lightning in a bottle that this one did, and the reason so many have failed.
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