Found Footage - vo.rs

Lake Mungo: The Mockumentary That Grieves

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Most horror wants to make you jump. Lake Mungo wants to make you sit very still and ache. Joel Anderson’s 2008 Australian film is dressed as a television documentary — talking heads, archival home video, a sober narration of dates and places — about a family whose sixteen-year-old daughter drowned. It is, on its surface, a paranormal investigation. Underneath, it is one of the most exact studies of grief the genre has produced, and it earns its scares by refusing to treat them as the point.

Ten Found-Footage Films That Actually Work

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Found footage has the worst reputation of any horror form, and most of it is earned. The gimmick is cheap, so the field is flooded with films that mistake a wobbling camera for tension and a dropped torch for a scare. When it works, though, it does something no other kind of horror can: it removes the safety rail of the polished frame and tells you that what you are watching was recovered rather than composed. The whole form is a magic trick built on a single lie — this really happened, and someone kept filming — and the good ones commit to that lie with a discipline the imitators never manage.

Why Found Footage Refuses to Die

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Every few years a critic writes the obituary. Found footage is exhausted, cynical, a gimmick that ran out of road somewhere around the third Paranormal Activity. The shaky camera has become a punchline; the “why is he still filming?” complaint has hardened into received wisdom. And then a film like Host arrives, shot over lockdown on Zoom for a rumoured budget you could raise from a jam-jar of loose change, and the form is suddenly alive again, doing something no other kind of horror can. The corpse keeps sitting up. It is worth asking why the burial never takes.

The Blair Witch Project at 25: What Found Footage Cost and Gave

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

A quarter of a century on, it is hard to reconstruct how strange The Blair Witch Project felt in the summer of 1999, because everything it did became the water the genre swims in. Three young filmmakers go into the woods of western Maryland to shoot a documentary about a local legend. They never come out. The footage is found a year later. That is the entire film, and when it opened wide that July it terrified an audience that had — briefly, genuinely — no idea whether it was watching a horror film or a real object.