All language subtitles for The.Found.Footage.Phenomenon.2021.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-PLiSSKEN

When found footage is done
well, it feels like

you're watching real people
in real situations.

And that means
that there's real stakes.

- It's subversive.
- Anything can happen.

You don't really know
what you're going to see next.

You know, now everyone has
cameras in their pockets, right?

We live in a world
that is found footage.

We've always told each other
stories that are, "This is real,

this has happened to me."

These films were
seen as really

sub-par and underground
and grimy.

You're sucked into that
hyper realism of normal people

going through this
extraordinary circumstance.

You want to believe
that that's actually happening.

I think it can mean a lot
of different things

for a lot of different people,
but for me,

a found footage movie is a movie
that you are watching

footage that is being created
or generated by the characters.

It's a movie that's supposed
to be made from footage

that is just like shot
in the supposed real world

and cut together
as if it were real,

as if it
were actually happening.

What we are dealing with
is a film form of style

that we recognize
as being a truth telling style.

So what that means
is it's unedited.

It's footage that was
discovered,

and the people who created
the footage are missing.

It indicates that something
bad happened

to the people who made it.

So the major component
of that is the notion,

the sort of lie that we all
share while watching it,

that the camera is a camera
in that story, in that movie,

and it's all supposed
to be happening for real,

regardless of how insane
the action or the story is.

It's a term that came up
after "Blair Witch."

We always used to call it like
P.O.V. cinema

or first person cinema.

The footage that the audience
is watching

was actually discovered,

you know, and being shown
for the first time.

It's the idea of something
that you're seeing

that's really real,
and it has this

dangerous quality to it,
which I used with "Hate Crime",

but I really feel the idea
of a found footage movie

is this dangerous thing of like
you're seeing something

you stumbled across a video,
be it on the dark web

or whatever, that you were
just not supposed to see.

So let's say that while
you're filming me,

a monster or a demon
or something, some entity

attacked you and ate you
and ate your camera.

A few days later,
when it should everything out

and you clean up the tape
of all the monster poop,

what you'd have left would
essentially be found footage.

It delivers authenticity
and realism,

which I think is
a wonderful contradiction,

because you're
really using reality

often with stories
about the unreal.

And that's what's really
delicious about the genre.

There's an expectation that
it's going to be

a very low end looking movie
because by and large, they are.

To get a look at something
that would be considered,

I would say contraband.

This is something that
shouldn't exist.

It's something
that was discovered.

And it's kind of like
coming upon someone's journal

where something
really fucked up happened.

That sense of a reality
that hopefully draws you in,

you know, hopefully kind of
makes you feel like this

is something that maybe
could exist in the world

that I live in potentially,

or feels like it's, because of
those aspects, feels more real.

The mistakes that were
discovered on this journey

were stunning.

Shoddy police work
and a judgmental video

presented the world with
a person guilty

before ever being tried.

And I think a lot of people
have this mistaken belief

that they're
somehow easy to make.

But to do it good
and to do it properly,

you need the perfect timing

and the perfect sound
and the perfect camera moves.

To do the funky chicken dance.

Just in everyone's life,

at some point, they've had
to go investigate something,

you know, whether it's
a bump in the night

or, you know, a monster under
the bed scenario or something.

And I think a lot of times
when you go looking for that,

you don't always expect
to find something.

A lot of horror works best

when it's based
in a kind of quotidian reality

where you look at something
and go,

"This is the real world,"

and then all of a sudden,
you get an eruption

of something that's very unreal
into a real world,

and it makes it
more frightening.

Your goal always
as a horror filmmaker

is to make people forget that
they're sitting in a cinema.

And I think a really good
found footage movie can do that

because it's using
the kind of aesthetic

that's become so much
of a part of our lives.

You know, the phone footage,
you know, back in the day,

VHS footage, it just gives you
that little bit less comfort.

The found footage film genre
came at a time

when the horror films
had staled a little bit,

and it was
a very invigorating format.

I think there are kind of two
different kinds

of film footage movies.

They're the ones
like "Cloverfield"

or the bigger budget ones
that sort of use it

as just a stylistic trapping.

And their goal is not really
to make you think

this is real footage.

But then there are ones
like "Blair Witch Project",

"Paranormal Activity",
a lot of the smaller ones,

where the goal is to trick

your sort of lizard brain
into thinking,

these are real people that real
things are happening to.

That to me is
when it's done well,

is what makes film footage
so terrifying.

And I think that it lends itself
very much to the horror genre

because it is that sort of
limbic lizard brain

sort of feeling.

A lot of other types
of horror films,

there's always
a certain distance.

There's always a sense of like,

"Well, I'm safe where I am
because this isn't in my world."

But, you know, found footage
makes it feel like,

well, wait, could somebody
be documenting me now?

Could I become part of a story?

Everything about this aesthetic
is telling you

that this is real life,
I'm watching something actual.

And so it doesn't feel like
when you see

something supernatural
in a found footage movie,

it doesn't feel like you're
watching an effect in a film.

It feels like you're actually
witnessing a supernatural event.

Micah! Micah! Micah! Micah!

Katie!

I think this is definitely
an argument to be made

that the found footage
as a filmic style,

sort of has its roots
in other art forms.

You know, in particular
the epistolary novel.

So if you look at "Dracula",
"Dracula", the novel is

supposedly a collection of
journal entries and letters

that people
are writing to one another.

The entire book is written
in what you sort of

what you would call
a "found footage" style

or a "found journal-age."

You know,
a "found written-age" style.

"Frankenstein" starts in that
way, about someone

recounting a narrative
of somebody else.

I've read this over
and over again,

but they're just words,
but I can't understand.

"Dracula" certainly starts by
saying, "It will become apparent

when you look at
all these documents,

how they all came together.

And that's part
of the selling of "Dracula"

as something real and of now,

rather than the gothic horror
of Germany,

you know, 100 years
before that.

You know,
there were typewriters,

there were blood transfusions.

It was kind of right up to date

in the way that the best
found footage horror is today.

I mean, I think you see it
in literature.

I think you see it in definitely.

"War of the Worlds"
is a great example.

We know now that in the early
years of the 20th century,

this world was being watched
closely by intelligences greater

than man,
yet as mortal as his own.

That whole radio broadcast and
that idea that we're going to,

you know, alter your reality,

make you think that something
is happening that's real.

It's really quite astonishing
and brilliant the way

that they took the conventions
of radio at that time,

the orchestra playing tunes,
and then suddenly

being interrupted
by a news announcer with...

And then the news gets more
and more and more dire

as the program goes on,
was really brilliant.

Cars headlights throw
an enormous spotlight on the pit

where the objects have buried.

Now, some of the more
daring fellas now are

venturing near the edge.

Stand out against
the metal cage.

One man wants to touch it.

He's having an argument
with a policeman.

People have a kind of
false memory

that it was all a kind of
live event

on the radio,
but it wasn't at all.

That's the way that
found footage also works.

It's all about creating a fake
reality in a more realistic way.

It's presenting
as a fictional story

in the form of something that
is usually aligned with

truth telling or news telling.

And by doing so, both
the "War of the Worlds"

radio broadcasts
and found footage horror

destabilize what is true
and how susceptible

we are to believing
these fantastic stories

about alien invasions
or witches in Maryland.

- Ooh.
- Ooh.

Do you believe in ghosts?

There are various kinds
of found footage movies,

and there are various movies

that have found footage
within them

but are not completely
found footage movies.

The first many found footage
horror film

is the opening of
"Peeping Tom."

No!

It was one of the first
that really involved the camera

in what was going on on screen
in diegesis.

So you have a man
following women with a camera.

He's looking through the camera,
so the audience are, too.

And that kind of implicates
the audience

in what is going on on screen.

So much of this story
hinges around

the act of filming itself.

The camera is present
in a way that is overwhelming,

and the horror of the film lies
in the presence of this camera.

The camera is rendered literally
dangerous in "Peeping Tom",

and it's indescribable
the impact

that that has had
on contemporary found footage.

Don't be frightened.

I'm frightened.

Halt.

Put that camera away!

I came to found footage through
watching these kind of

experimental films
at Cal Arts.

And so we ended up watching this
film "David Holzman's Diary",

where the main character
is filming himself,

and he's filming this sort of
like this film diary of himself.

This film was made in 1967.

Ms. Penny. See her?

That's Penny. That's Penny.

That's Penny. That's...
All those.

That's Penny.

She's my girlfriend.

That movie was probably
the first movie

I remember seeing in that class

that would fall
into this category.

That was the first film
that I saw

that really kind of shook
my sense of what real was.

This is Penny's house.

There's Penny.

Cinéma vérité in the late '60s,
all of a sudden,

cameras come off tripods,

they become smaller and people
can hand hold them.

So there's a natural inclination
to want to experiment with that.

One of my first introductions,
I guess,

to what vaguely might have
fallen into the category

of found footage horror were
what are called mondo films.

"Mondo" is the Italian
word for "world."

And these really spike in
popularity starting in the '60s,

The revolt of the Buddhists in
Saigon had as a prelude

the first public suicide,

which took place on
May 2, 1963,

when the monk Thích Quang Duc,
who with a terrible death

that would have condemned him
in the eyes of his master,

tried to show that in order to
fight every form of oppression

on equal terms, Buddhism, too,
needs its martyrs.

Now that this, we hope,
belongs to the past, it is time

that everybody should obey
his own conscience once more.

"Shock-umentaries" is often
what these films are called.

These films were being done
about world travel,

so those were being done on
a much lower commercial level.

At that stage, people were
making these kind of films

because they
had access to money.

The maimed, mutilated by
the voracious fish,

gather the sun dried fins
on the beach.

They'll sell them to the rich
Chinese communities inland,

where it is believed
they have aphrodisiac powers.

Each day, some fisherman leaves
the village and doesn't return.

Fantastic elements,
as people call them,

didn't come in until much later
as trying to find another way

to make these films bankable.

"Cannibal Holocaust" is often
considered really

a core, core moment
in the development

of found footage horror
more than anything else,

because the story line follows

the discovery of found footage
that is horrific.

"Cannibal Holocaust" was
the first attempt

of classical storytelling,

trying the audience belief
that the events

and the images were the truth.

Try to stay there
for the last shot.

I don't even know where
we are now.

Go on, George.
Go in closer to Deodato.

For more than three months now,
we've been living in the jungle.

Our only means of communication
with the outside world

has been this small plane,
which at the moment,

is under repair,
and the helicopter has been

bringing out our supplies.

Things like this happen
all the time in the jungle.

It's survival of the fittest.

In the jungle,
it's the daily violence

of the strong overcoming
the weak!

Jack!

Did having the war, you know,
the Vietnam War come in across

news, you know, while
everybody was eating,

was that like a precursor to it?

You know, like how much
of what was going on

in traditional broadcasting

and news formats
was pushing that forward?

I've been interested in found
footage ever since I seen.

"Cannibal Holocaust"
in the 1990s

when it was still a banned film
in the UK.

In this North London shop,
for instance, they took away

the so-called nasty videos,

but they left behind
the cassette boxes.

The attached wrappings
say simply.

"Not to be seen by those of
nervous disposition."

So of course all I wanted to do
was go through

all the video nasties
and just, you know, watch them

all as many times as I could.

And "Cannibal Holocaust"
was like,

that was right
at the top of the pile.

There's something about
just how raw that movie is,

even though you know
and you can read about it,

that it's... I mean,
the animal cruelty is real.

But, you know, the violence
at the end of the movie

that happens to the camera crew,

even though you know it's not
real, it feels so authentic.

I felt like properly
shaken afterwards.

This film contains very extreme
violence against animals

that is real, and it is
extremely distressing to watch.

But if I put my own
personal ethics about

how I feel about that
to the side, it's genius.

Because what this film does is
by showing real violence

with real animals, when we see
the fake violence

with human beings,
we interpret that as being real

by its proximity to the actual
real violence that we've seen.

So it's very, very effective
in communicating

how we read violence
and how we read authenticity.

Deodato was influenced
by some of the news at the time,

but also the Italian Mondo film
was a big influence.

And indeed there are elements
from the Mondo Film in.

"Cannibal Holocaust" in the
"Last Road to Hell" sequence.

I think there are certain kinds

of people who really
are fascinated by death

but have a morbid fascination
with that moment.

And there are people who want
to explore those dark feelings.

I don't think that necessarily
makes them bad people at all.

I think it's quite human
to be interested in death.

Even as a child,
I was fascinated by death.

So I really bang the drum
for what I call snuff fictions,

which are fictional films
that incorporate what is coded

within the fictional narrative
of those films

of being "real snuff film."

So we have Michael
and Roberta Finlay's "Snuff",

a very controversial film.

We have things like, you know,
the Nicolas Cage film "8 MM",

Paul Schrader's "Hardcore",
"Emanuelle in America."

All of these films, they're
almost a subgenre of themselves,

and they can cross
different genres.

They're not necessarily
just in horror.

We can find them in thrillers.

But they're predicated
on the idea

that snuff film is real.

And we have bits
of amateur footage

within these
traditionally shot films

that is coded as being raw
or authentic snuff film.

And the way that this footage
has a legacy in

found footage horror

is explicit because
this footage is discovered.

It's found footage that's found
within these snuff fictions.

And it's also extremely violent
and extremely distressing.

And it distresses the characters
within the films who discover

the snuff footage to the point
that it propels the narrative.

Holy shit. Holy shit.
Holy shit.

BuzzFeed and Bloody Disgusting,

those online portal publications
came out

and started doing articles
that were saying,

"Have you seen the first found
footage film? No, you haven't."

And then started kind of
outing me as the person who

did the first found footage
film, which I found amusing.

I asked for a paternity test
because they said I was

the godfather of found footage.

And I'm like, "Alright,

I'm going to I'm going
to need some DNA.

I'll give you some DNA.
Let's prove this.

I'm not paying goddamn
child support for this genre."

When I first ran across
the tape,

I was invited
over to a friend's house

who said he had a very
interesting UFO abduction tape.

Give me a poster.
Give me something here.

Yeah, yeah. Or please call...

Here. No, Mom, I'm going.

Oh, my God. Be careful.

Be careful, Michael.

I was stunned,
shocked by what I saw.

I thought the tape might be real
because it fit in very well

with so many UFO/alien
incidences that I know of.

It fit very well in fact.
Almost too well.

I thought no one
could fake something like that.

First of all, I didn't set out
to make a found footage film

because when I made my film,

there was no such thing
as found footage.

I was at a film school.

I needed to make
my first film by 25.

By 25, because all of my idols
had... Orson Welles,

Spielberg, Scorsese.

All of these guys
were able to achieve that

and be on their path.

Well, there I was up in
Northern California,

San Francisco,
trying to figure out

how am I going to achieve this?

I'm 24.
I've got a year left.

Freaking out,
and a buddy of mine says,

"Hey, you know,
when my father passed away,

he left me some money, so I'll
invest in your first film."

I'm like, "Awesome, great.
How much do you want to invest?"

6,500 bucks.

And I'm like, "Okay, dude,
the only thing I can do

is shoot a home video for that."

Just a smart ass remark.

And at the time,
there's no DSLR cameras.

It's only 35 millimeter or 16.
I didn't have any of that.

I couldn't even afford that.

Consumer grade
home film making technology

really started with actual film

and then moved into video,
and as technology advanced,

it became cheaper
and more accessible,

which meant more and more people
could make these things.

I'm banging my head,
trying to think what I could do.

What genre should I work in
with this home video format?

And then I get a copy of at
Whitley Strieber's book.

"Communion", and scared
the shit out of me,

and just terrified me to no end.

I couldn't sleep, but I couldn't
not put the book down.

And then it just hit on me,

what if I took
the alien abduction experience

and folded that
into a home video?

There's a ubiquity to home
movies that make them familiar.

Even if we don't have
our own home movies,

we know people who do,
which makes it a very familiar,

warm, recognizable kind of
film making that feels safe.

It's connected to not
just the domestic space,

but the domestic experience,
to small experiences.

So when we communicate
through home movies,

tales of horror, we have this
very, very significant tension.

Eric! Eric!

Oh, shit!

Set them up!

Watch out!

- That's one of them!
- Watch out!

- Oh, shit!
- Get that camera out of here!

The Belgian film
"Man Bites Dog"

from 1992 is really important
in the history of

found footage horror because
it brings the tradition

of mockumentary as a comedy form

and brings that together very,
very, very closely with horror.

A camera crew,
like in "Troll hunter",

following some crazy serial
killer around,

filming this person
murdering people.

And as the movie went along,
the crew, the camera crew

got more and more involved,

and they actually started
arranging the murders.

This is really punk rock stuff.
It's shot on black and white.

It's rough, and it's immersive,
and it's overwhelming,

and it's funny,
and it's dark, and it's twisted.

The camera is definitely
another character in a film

when you're making
a fan footage movie.

It's really the kind
of number one question

in a found
footage horror movie is,

how does the camera
fit into your plot,

and why does it stay there
throughout filming,

capturing this all?

I was very conscious while
we were making the movie

of every single shot
that we were making,

because every single shot,
I needed to, as a filmmaker,

I needed to back up saying,

"It makes sense that this
character would have shot that."

You have to be able to say,
"Here is a legit reason

why someone would
pull a camera out.

That's challenge number one.

Challenge number two is,

what is the reason you're
keeping the damn camera on?

- You saw a spaceship, right?
- Right!

I saw the lights!

Little green man, I guess.

Mom, I had it on tape!

Put the camera down.
What are you doing?

It's almost like a running gag
in these films.

It's like, you know,
you see a couple of these,

and it becomes comic.

It almost becomes comedy.

It's like just
put the camera down

and get the hell out of there.

Why do you still have this
stupid thing?

Just put it down.
- I think it's...

This is the only way you
can see it.

Just the way
the camera's rolling,

there's always that one point
where someone asks why...

"Why are you still filming?"

See, this is for you, Steven.
Even though we don't know

where you are,
we just want you to know

that we're being
really loyal to this whole

shoot, everything.

And so for us,
one of the things we wanted

to expose at the beginning
is we wanted to create

these filmmaker characters
that were very committed to

the idea of documenting
their trip.

This is the frame of mind
they're coming from initially.

And then ultimately,
once they realize

that they're witnessing
this supernatural event,

that if vampires are real
and that is something

that we need to document
and we're going to believe that

because of how we've set
these characters up

at the very beginning
of the movie.

I can't in good conscience
just let you stay here

and hurt yourself.

We have to go home, okay?
It's the right thing...

Aah! Jesus Christ.

Look at films like
"Ghost watch."

They've got this rich culture
of the BBC behind them

and the real life news presenter

and this real, actual
crossover into reality.

But this was a kind of way
of talking about TV

at the same time
as doing a ghost story.

So we were kind of
exploring areas of,

do we believe what we watch?

Did we see that?
Did we not see that?

Is that expert telling us
the truth? All those things.

I've got eight or nine
phone calls here which are like

Emma Stableford's
we had earlier on.

They, too, have seen
a mysterious dark figure

in the background of that shot
in the children's bedroom.

Michael?

Dark, mysterious figure,
doctor?

Have you got that
sequence ready yet?

It was a time when reality TV
was at the foothills,

really beginning
in the early '90s,

and there was a real
kind of gray area

between documentary and drama.

Dramas were using documentary
techniques like hand held camera,

non-fiction TV were using actors
to dramatize events.

So there was a whole blurring
of the boundaries

between the two genres.

And I think that was the climate

that we were working in
at that time, really.

And we wanted to
kind of explore the idea

of what does reality TV become?

"Ghost watch" was very, very
ahead of its time,

very powerful
and very political.

This was the time of the first
Gulf War, that they used,

I believe,
the same camera technology

that was being used
for war coverage.

So it was a very,
very important program

in that it demanded
of its audience to step up

and start thinking critically
about the media that we consume.

This footage was shot
by parapsychologists

investigating the case.

Now you're about to see
one of the incidents

that have earned this house
its reputation.

For very political reasons
that Steven Volk has expressed

in extraordinary detail,

challenging his audience really
to think about the questions

that lie at the heart of
found footage horror, which is,

do you buy this,
do you believe this?

I'm telling you a story
about ghosts in the middle

of suburban London.

Do you really believe that

just because
I'm presenting it to you

in a format
that looks like it's true?

The fact it was anti-BBC,
that the nation trusted,

you know, from the wartime,
you know,

you trust BBC for your
global news.

Still do, you know?

And the fact
that could be subverted,

you know, I'm still kind of
proud of that.

We've been inundated
with hoaxes...

The Rosenheim poltergeist
affected a telephone exchange.

Rang up endless bills,
misdirected calls.

There are no poltergeists.

They're seeing it now,
for God's sake.

Don't close the lines.

We need to know
what's happening out there.

You're the expert.
What is happening out there?

And that was deliberately so,

and that was a very hard battle
to get across

the head of head of drama
and all the other execs.

It was more controversial

than I ever thought it was
going to be.

Because it was tapping quite
directly and quite playfully

into the success of things
like "Crime watch."

These were serious programs
about serious subjects,

and "Ghost watch"
played with that.

It will always work
as long as it changes

with the times,
so if it's reflecting

the zeitgeist and the equipment,

as new technology comes in
and uses it their own way.

I'm quite close to you, though.

I mean, what about... what
about the people down here?

If we move down here,
how fast can you move

with that thing
on your shoulder?

- Quite fast.
- It's not bad.

Who needs the Steadicam
when you got Chris Miller?

That's what I say.

Since its inception,

found footage has
kind of adapted

to its cultural context.

And I think of all
the subgenres,

it's probably the most engaged

with what's going on
because it has to be,

because it has to keep this
connection with its audience.

It has to keep up with what
people are perceiving

as being reality.

Does your computer have
a modem?

I think so.
My grandpa bought it for us.

It has all the latest
high tech stuff.

Here's Alison. Can you explain
what Internet is?

Not everyone had access to it.

It wasn't the Internet
that we know today.

It was a lot more kind of basic.

In 1981, only 213 computers
were hooked to the Internet.

As the new year begins,
an estimated 2.5 million

computers will be
on the network.

What do you write to it?
Like mail?

The little mark with the "A"
and then the ring around it.

- @?
- See, that's what I said.

Mm-hmm.

Kay said she
thought it was "about."

- Yeah.
- Oh.

For any of our viewers
who have access to Internet,

we invite your comments.

We're here in the Pine Barrens,
southern New Jersey,

live and direct, coming right
at you in your living room,

first ever web simulcast,
cable cast.

And everybody is on the edge
of their seat.

And I know you are because I am.
And I'm sure Steven is, too.

"The Last Broadcast"
is, you know,

it's basically an examination
of what is real and what is not.

It's looking at the media
that's shaped and the media

that we digest
or how we shape our own truth.

And so I think that that film is
really kind of a time capsule

when I look back on it.

It's kind of...
It's this unique moment

that captures
the mid to late '90s, right?

And, and I think when I think
about "The Last Broadcast",

it's even more relevant now
I think in some ways because

we live in this age of kind of
misinformation and deception.

We are really trying
to comment on media

and fact and fiction.

What you're seeing, you know,
in terms of reality

versus manufactured truth.

Lucas, you joker,
you knew it all along

that we were on, did you?

Yeah.
Welcome to our new show.

Well, actually,
it's not a new show.

It's got a new name.
Thanks to everybody out there

who helped us come up
with this great name.

- "Fact or Fiction?
- That's right.

The fake cable show they had
was called "Fact of Fiction."

And then the we were framing
found footage within

a documentary,
within a narrative.

So that kind of onion layer

was something
that we were intrigued by.

The other side was
the practicality of it,

like the liberation
of being able

to make something, you know.

So it was like, "Oh, let's get
a bunch of friends together.

Let's just try to make
this movie,

and let's see what happens."

And so by dispensing with
actors and putting ourselves

in it and our friends,
it kind of very quickly

became a thing where we're like,

"All right, well, how can
we make this convincing?

And so there was
the evolution of that

it was going to be
kind of a "mock-doc."

It was as much a comment
on society as it was a comment

on the industry at that time.

It was like, you know,
pushing against

permission based culture
and saying,

"You know what, we can make
our own work.

We can green light
our own movie."

The technology kind of arrived.

It was pretty rough at the time,
but it arrived where, you know,

we could make a movie
because up at that point,

if I wanted to edit a film,

I either had to go into a studio
and rent the studio time,

or I had to rent
a flatbed editor, film editor

for 400 bucks a month,
you know?

So it was a big deal
to actually chop

two things together.

If I wanted to shoot,
I had to rent an Aton

or some camera to shoot.

We used a hybrid of
consumer grade gear

to shoot "The Last Broadcast."

There's definitely a really
interesting democratization

of the process going on there.

You know, where we're making
the movie for like $900

using prosumer grade equipment
and kind of just going at it.

So I think in that sense,

the accessibility of the tools
were just starting to happen.

The movie was supposed to
take place in 1994,

so we were kind of stuck,
at least

with what the filmmakers
were going to use.

We were kind of stuck at,
you know,

at a certain technological
plateau, you know.

So we shot the movie
on Hi8 video,

which was kind of the video
of choice for, you know,

just kind of home video
at the time.

Hmm. Eight hours,
one free bonus blank tape

and quick charge.

Seems to me that this is
the one to go with.

What if I had to use
the camcorder

and recharge the battery at
the same time?

That's when you need
the optional battery charger.

The ACV 700 is recommended
for use at home.

Tell me about this tripod.

What's wonderful about kind of
"The Last Broadcast"

and "The Blair Witch" is that,
you know, they're exploring

similar things
at a similar time, right?

You know, it's like,
I've said in the past,

like 100 monkeys go up
a mountain with typewriters.

Two are bound to come down
with the same thing, right?

So there was something
in the zeitgeist.

I think that in the sense of
the way that we were

rolling it out and what we were
doing is we were fiercely

independent, right?

Ours was a DIY project
all the way through, you know?

So we didn't... we kind of
fought of a battle with

that movie that ushered in a
whole new wave of film making.

Brian is an audio wiz,

and supposedly he's been
able to document...

Supposedly he's been able
to document, you know,

paranormal occurrences on tape.

We were definitely, you know,
borrowing from movies

like "The Legend of Body Creek"
and the TV show "In Search Of."

Definitely like "Alien Autopsy",
was once something that

I like remembered when
I was younger.

I loved it, you know,
the idea of just showing,

throwing this footage out there,

and even though it looked
pretty fake or whatever,

but just the idea that you could
kind of like try to just,

you know, this kind of
disinformation campaign.

I think we were definitely
kind of tapping into that stuff

when we were coming up with
the idea for "Blair Witch."

So the film we've all heard
about and a few people

have already seen its
sneak previews

in the past week,
"The Blair Witch Project."

It was just kind of this
crazy snowball

that kept getting bigger
and bigger,

this kind of avalanche of stuff
that was happening to us.

The hit indie blockbuster
has now grossed

$350 million worldwide.

We never knew that we were
going to be on the covers

of Time and Newsweek
the same week.

Did you ever expect it to
be this big?

Obviously, you didn't.

No, I was kind of expecting

maybe to have a copy of it
on video.

For us, it was just like, "What
the hell is happening here?"

Daniel Myrick
and Eduardo Sanchez

are the co-directors of
what's now the most

profitable film ever made.

We did like two days
of press in L.A.

Dan and I are literally like sat
next to each other and just,

you know, one every 15 minutes
for like the whole day,

for like 10 hours a day.

You'll get over it.
It's all right.

No, I'll never get over it.

- Okay.
- I'm gonna get out of here.

The first thing we came up with
was the scene of them

going into the house.

Like, that was like... we were
like, "Imagine, you know,

having a video camera
and you're, you know,

walking toward a house,
and you see this creepy house,

and there's no lights on,
and it's dilapidated,

and you go in, and there's all
this satanic stuff,

and, you know, just being
kind of stuck in that P.O.V."

I always found that,
you know,

something that's not scripted
and feels real.

Think of the joy of being
in a really good film.

- Hey, shut the fuck up.
- Okay, I'm quiet.

I can connect to it
a little bit more

than something that I know
some guy who wrote that.

And, you know, people are
reading lines and acting that.

And "Blair Witch", you know,
showed how it can be done in

like the most effective way.

The horror genre needed
some refreshment at the time

it got "Blair Witch Project."

It had gone through the '90s,
which had its quality

horror movies,
but probably in hindsight,

can be considered
a little bit of a dry spell.

What "The Blair Witch Project"
did is throw the rule book out.

And was just like, "No,
everybody dies, no one survives.

This is horribly nihilistic."

And it just kind of reset
the horror genre.

So I think for audiences,

maybe that's why everyone
just gravitated towards it.

Because it was
just so different.

We started talking about
horror films

and what kind of films scared us
when we were little kids,

and we had kind of
the same horror films,

you know, "The Shining"
and "The Exorcist."

So we felt "Blair"
was in that same spirit.

Something that was
a psychological horror,

which we feel is much scarier
than, you know,

just getting a knife in the neck
or something like that.

There was something
that was happening.

We were we were tapping
into something

that made that interesting
at that time,

you know, coming off
of all these, like,

polished kind of slasher films
in the mid to late '90s,

and this desire for something

that was more visceral
in a different way,

in a way that felt like
it was real.

At the same time, like the
Internet is starting to ramp up.

It was like 15 bucks a month
to host a site,

and I was doing
all the labor for free.

Mike Monello, my other partner,
was helping me out a lot,

and we just started
putting this website together.

It just hit at the right point
when the Internet

was really starting,
fan communities just,

you know, horror communities

were all starting to talk
on Usenet, things like this.

And there's been amazing
research done on how

Internet communities
responded to "The Blair Witch."

The word was spreading,
you know,

kind of like wildfire
at the time.

The Internet was so little,
but we were getting

new people all the time.

Blair Witch.com.

Really, the website was kind of
like a medium for the mythology.

So we all created the mythology
and threw it up

there kind of for people
to find out about

and formatted the site
in such a way

to where it was a kind of
interactive experience.

I just wanted the website
to just kind of be

just this kind of
investigative website that

basically treated this case
as if it were real.

And I think what people loved
about the marketing of.

"Blair Witch" which was that it
was not really marketing,

it was more story telling.

It wasn't about like,
"Hey, go see this movie

because it, you know,
stars Heather Donahue

and Joshua Leonard
and Mike Williams,

and it's directed
by these guys" and whatever.

It was not anything about
the movie at all.

It was like, "This is
a movie over here.

And now we're going to tell you
about the legend

of the Blair Witch."

"The Blair Witch" 's
relationship to the Internet

is not just important
to found footage horror,

but to cinema marketing
and film consumption

and fan discourse.

And that's a grassroots level
way that the fans gobble up

and discuss this
in their own spaces.

This is way before social media,
way before Facebook.

They used it in a way
you couldn't necessarily use it

today because you could make
a web page that says

these people are missing,
but you can very easily find out

that they're not really and that
that's an actress and so on.

So they did leverage it at
the time to the best ability,

you know, that they could,
but I don't think

it's necessarily replicable
in the modern day.

What "The Blair Witch Project"
did was exactly what

Orson Welles did to a completely
unsuspecting audience

who had no no framework.

There was no mental preparation
that was possible for audiences

to conceive
what this film was doing.

I just want to apologize

to Mike's mom
and Josh's mom and my mom.

And I'm sorry to everyone.

"Blair Witch" was a movie
that could only come

from independent cinema.

You know, it was the only movie

that Haxan... the five
Haxan guys made together.

Like, we never were able to make
another movie together again.

So, you know, there was
definitely some, you know...

"Blair Witch" was definitely
this high point in our lives,

but also it, you know,
caused a lot of turmoil,

and we changed a lot.

You know, we grew up a lot.

After the huge international
blockbuster success

of "The Blair Witch Project",
it surely was a given

that this is going to be
a thing now, right?

"The Blair Witch Project"
probably didn't start

a massive move towards more
and more found footage movies

immediately because it was
so very specific

as to what it was.

It was a found footage movie
like this,

which was footage that was
supposed to be shot and found,

and then somebody
stitched it together.

And if you were to immediately
make a movie like that

with that same conceit, it would
reek of being a rip off.

You know, I think the reason
that maybe found footage

didn't didn't catch on
after "Ghost watch"

or "Blair Witch" is because
it's just really hard

to fake authenticity.

You know, those movies were
so unlike anything that had

come out at the time,
and everything following them,

you know, even the better
found footage movies,

they still had this air
of imitation about them.

Even its own sequel didn't
attempt to try to duplicate it.

Right? There was a sense
in which like it

was such a unique and refreshing
and just totally visionary thing

that to try to copy it
felt impossible.

It felt like, okay, well,
that's not a thing you can do.

Like, that was this moment
of lightning in a bottle.

And after "Blair Witch",
of course,

everybody was parodying,
you know,

their famous scenes about being,
you know, "I'm so scared.

So the genre became
a parody of itself,

like, almost immediately.

And so it was very hard
to take it seriously.

So I think a certain amount
of time had to pass

for that to get washed out.

Things changed, however,
with September 11th.

Teenagers growing up
with found footage horror

have lived through things
like 9/11 and lived through

a lot of different kind of
cultural traumas.

And maybe it's more believable
to us that everyone does die

at the end.

We got used to seeing disasters
or very unusual stuff

caught from the point of view
of an everyday person.

Right? We all remember
the Twin Towers falling down

and that being filmed
on home cameras.

Most of the footage that we saw
of the Twin Towers on 9/11

were caught by bystanders,

by pedestrians,
people on the street.

So what we might have assumed,
quite rightly, I think,

to be the beginning of a trend

with found footage
horror vanished.

It just vanished because the
world changed really quickly.

There was national trauma

specifically
in the United States,

but also international trauma,
I think,

in the way
that the United States,

in the way that American film
and American culture

sort of bled out.

So torture porn, what's called
torture porn, really took off.

There are torture porn films
made globally very much

in response to this new world
that we found ourselves in

after September 11th.

And then found footage
horror came along,

and I think a lot of people
think of them

as two separate entities,

two separate subgenres,
and they're really not.

They're both trying
to present realism.

So torture horror
is going for, "Look at this.

This is what a body
actually looks like

when you do these things to it,"
and found footage horror

is saying, "This really
happened, this is really real."

So they're both going towards
this realism thing.

And I think some of
the most interesting films

from by subgenres
is when they kind of collide.

So stuff like
"Megan Is Missing"

or "The Poughkeepsie Tapes"

or the "August Underground"
films.

When the two subgenres collide,
I think, is when we start

to get some really
interesting stuff happening.

One of the powers of cinema
is that it can elicit

strong emotions
and shock and disgust.

You know, it's just one of
a range of emotions

that cinema can elicit.

This, I think,
ties in very fundamentally

to what makes footage horror
so unique,

and I think quite radical
in its own way,

in that traditional story
telling really privileges

narrative and characterization,

whereas these things are
revealed in found footage horror

as being a construct
in and of themselves.

We're really not that interested
in deep characterizations

in these films,
not in the way that we are

with more traditional film
story telling.

The industry's interest
in found footage

has always been cyclical.

And that, to be fair,
is the industry's approach

to any kind of trend,
is to find something

that's been successful,
focus in on it,

try and recreate it,

have loads of people
try and recreate it,

many of them fail,
very few of them succeed.

And then suddenly that thing
is no longer fun or cool

or sell able anymore,
and it drops out of fashion.

Until 5, 10 years later,

someone else makes a really
interesting take on it,

and it comes back
in a fashion with people

trying to recreate
that magic again.

People for the next
found footage movie that came

later, had to sort of tweak
the conceit, tweak the lie

that they were asking of you

to remind you
of "The Blair Witch Project"

without being
the Blair Witch Project.

One of the things I find
really fascinating about

found footage horror is that
in horror and genres in general,

we talk about cycles.

And found footage horror
doesn't really suit that because

it's so responsive
to changes in technology.

So what we have instead of
cycles with found footage horror

is that we have spikes and drops
and spikes and drops.

So every time a new technology
comes along,

a new media technology comes
along, we find these films

responding quite aggressively
and quite radically

in a way that audiences
just are hungry for.

We would not have had
a renaissance of found footage

horror in 2007 if Google hadn't
bought YouTube in 2006.

Full stop.

I think it's created
the perfect storm,

the perfect incubating chamber
for found footage.

I mean, it's like
totally acceptable now

for everybody to videotape
each other, you know?

Found footage and technology
are kind of intertwined, right?

The accessibility of
the technology fuels new stories

to be told with it.

At the same time, it creates a
new type of visceral experience.

So YouTube, all of a sudden,
you know, it's not just like,

oh, here's occasionally this
thing that looks found footage.

It's like everything
looks found footage, right?

I think the Internet and
YouTube helped found footage

become more mature
and more interesting

by actually normalizing
that sort of limited P.O.V.,

that cinema vérité,
all that in-world,

in-action kind of situation

where you're looking
at something crazy

through these grainy,
shaky cam kind of views.

So it just made what was a new
format an everyday format.

The Internet became
where footage could be found

for a lot of people
in real life.

So rather than that
sort of "Stand By Me",

hey, do you want to see the body
down by the tracks,

we'll go in poker with a stick,
it became,

"Have you seen this link?
I found it on the Internet."

Something starts going down
in real life.

You're almost always...
There's somebody there.

I mean, there is somebody there
with a camera to capture it.

If a cop pulls you over,
you videotape it.

You know, if you're asking
somebody to marry you,

you know, somebody
is videotaping.

So I think that pretty much
everybody on the Earth,

you know, obviously
there are exceptions,

but most people on the earth
have a phone.

On the one hand, you would
expect it to like help

the found footage genre in that,
like we're used to that.

On the other hand, because
we are now sort of

it's a thing that we have
experience of every single day,

we're better at seeing
the seams when it's not real,

but we're much better
at picking up on,

okay, this is actually
found footage,

this is an actual person
versus this is a staged thing.

We've all, you know,
gotten much better

at determining the bullshit
from the from the real.

And I think that in some ways
is a disservice to people

making found footage movies
of the sort that are trying to

sort of feel real because it
gets that much more difficult.

I think found footage
rises up in moments

where it's culturally
significant.

The tools are accessible,

and there's something
that somebody wants to tell

that's a reflection of the world
that we live in.

We're looking for what?
Weapons of mass destruction.

- Weapons of mass destruction?
- That's right.

I don't give a shit what
anybody says.

They're here, and we're
going to find them.

There is nothing here,
and you know it!

- What are you...
- last week!

- There's nothing here.
- They're just like,

Oh, you rip them up.

They're all back
the next day, aren't they?

- She's a 15-year-old girl.
- She's a 15-year-old girl.

We're going to
accomplish this mission.

- Don't do this.
- We are going to conquer

the human race.

She's a cunt, just like
everybody else

in this fucking country..

We have this really
interesting trajectory,

I think historically between,
I guess, what we might call

the first wave of found footage,
horror with.

"Blair Witch Project" and then
what happened around 2007.

Look at this fucking guy,
chowing down while his buddies

are shoving a corpse
in the back of the van.

Okay, I'm ready. Let's do it.

Some of this footage
was never broadcast.

It was secretly uploaded
by the cameraman who shot it.

It was his way of trying
to tell the truth

about what was happening.

Bree Reno reporting
live from Homestead,

where tragedy befell
an immigrant family.

An unidentified man
has shot his wife

and 16-year-old son to death

before turning the gun
on himself.

All of these big name
filmmakers in their second phase

started making
found footage horror films.

And it's very, very interesting,
I think with the case of

"auteur" directors, especially
auteur genre directors

like Romero and De Palma,

because they were riffing
on conventions

that were already established
by "Blair Witch Project."

So what they were really doing
was taking these conventions

and reimagining them
or even rebranding them.

Through their own particular
authorial signature.

When you look at, you know,
directors like George Romero

or you look at directors
like Brian De Palma

or anyone else who is trying
to express themselves

or find a way
to tell their story in a medium

that can be done
in a variety of ways,

you know, like, you could go
back and you can say,

"Oh, well, De Palma was doing
interesting things with.

'Hi, Mom!', you know, or was
doing interesting things

in the early parts of his work
where he's finding

influence from documentaries."

George Romero did
"Diary of the Dead."

I thought that was like
really cool.

I thought it was fun
to take it that way in

the "Of the Dead" series.

But I think by the time
he did that,

he didn't do that
to pioneer the genre.

He did that because the genre
was already taking off.

You know, it was just a craze.

It was like a phase,
you know, like a fad.

You know, I think they just...
They're just ideas that work

well in the found footage
medium, and they were like,

"Let's just do it found footage

and let's just shoot it
this way.

We'd heard that George Romero

was making "Diary of the Dead",
and the concept of that

was it was another
of his "Dead" series

but shot like
"The Blair Witch Project."

And that was exactly
the premise of our film.

Yeah. Any last minute
confessions before we head

into the countryside
to pursue this documentary?

Yeah. Thanks, but this is not
my good side, by the way.

When we were making the film,
all we really wanted

was some sort of DVD release

just to try and get our foot
in the door somehow.

But when "Diary of the Dead"
came out, that was so...

It was huge for us because
we secured UK distribution

straight away, and the
Weinstein Company in the U.S.

had purchased the rights
to "Dawn of the Dead"

for the American market.

And because there was
this other film out there

that was competing,
they paid quite a lot of money

to take our film off the shelf,
so to speak,

so they control both releases.

And that's what happened,
"Diary of the Dead" in the U.S.

came out first, and then our
film followed afterwards

because our film
was the smaller film.

So we kind of felt a bit
like "The Last Broadcast" guys,

and they had a similar premise
to "Blair Witch."

It was a year before,

but in some ways,
they were sort of seen

as being a rip off of
"The Blair Witch Project",

which wasn't true,
and we were accused of

the same thing back then.

I was sort of, "Oh, you know,
I can't believe these people

have made a rip off of
George Romero's film.

How dare they?"

But they didn't really know
the truth behind it.

We'd shot the film in 2005.

That's what's wrong with them.

Oh, God!

There's others.

Try the head, try the head!

Yeah, shoot him in the head.
Shoot him the head!

Horror mokumentaries that
incorporate elements

of found footage horror
into them in that

there is found footage
within them

and they really structure
the narratives of that film,

but they also incorporate
other documentary modes.

So we have our interviews
and documents

and other kinds of material

that are incorporated
in these films.

We received a call around
6:00 p.m. tonight

over a missing girl,
and on discovering

the nature of the situation,
we called in

the search and rescue divers
from Melbourne.

Police divers into
the water around 10:00.

It adds a kind of atmosphere
to the movies

that the best found footage
really capitalize on.

It almost feels like
going into the bedroom

of somebody who's died
and you're seeing something

that wasn't meant to be seen,

especially if it's
home movie footage.

And I think that it's
a different kind of horror.

One of the things
that fascinated me,

talking to Joel about what we
could do with his story was,

you know, the idea that when
you can convince an audience

that what they're watching is
true because of the form

that it's in... it's
a documentary so it's true...

And the idea that a picture
is a thousand words,

the pictures are truth.

I think people have always known
that images can be manipulated,

but on face value,
if they don't think

it's a narrative construction,
they're going to believe

what they see.

That kind of authentic
found footage movies

that are in the home video
style, they work best

probably the first couple of
times when you have that

visceral reaction,
the idea that you're seeing

an artifact from somebody
who's no longer here.

Maybe that's a difference
between the more constructed

form and the more unedited form.

What makes these films
so special, though,

and I think really powerful,
is how they straddle something

that I feel is very crucial
to found footage specifically,

but also perhaps horror
mockumentary more generally,

which is a tension between
the supernatural and the real,

which ties into the game
of found footage horror,

which is it real or isn't it?

Paco Plaza and I started to
talk about "Rec",

it was doing a conversation,
because we wanted to find a way

to increase horror
in horror movies,

to make the audience
more involved in the story

and in the horror experience.

And then we decided that
TV language of some kind

of TV shows like "Cops"
were very, very interesting.

We wanted to use this kind of
language more than

the found footage language
because they're actually Rec.

It's not about some tapes found
and then edited to be shown

to the audience.

"Rec" is more like
a live TV show.

The idea was to put
the eye of the audience

inside the lens of the camera

and let the audience be part
of the story.

"Rec" was definitely a film
that I watched

when preparing
for a part in "143",

because a lot of people
tend to think of found footage

as giving the camera
to the actors

and just letting stuff happen.

Whereas "Rec" was
very carefully constructed,

very carefully choreographed.

The actors weren't
operating the camera.

There was a real cameraman.
The DP was operating the camera.

And they would rehearse for
hours until they finally

would get the shot.

I think the found footage genre
is something

that can be very interesting.

It's like a challenge
to find new ways

of story telling using this
new concept of the genre.

One of the most important
things to me about

found footage horror
is the kind of democracy.

There's an economic democracy
in the sense

that anybody can make them.

You can make a found footage
film on your phone.

You don't need to be working
at a big Hollywood studio.

You don't need to have
a blockbuster budget

to do these things.

And in fact, you can have big
blockbuster Hollywood movies

trying to look
like amateur films.

So what that does is it opens up
the possibility

and the potential
and the opportunity for people

to make films who normally are
excluded from making films.

"Paranormal" really hit
in a huge way where you're like,

"It's back," because
a generation has gone by since.

"Blair Witch"
and "Last Broadcast"

and these other movies coming
out that was unaware of this.

Many, many, many people
who saw "Paranormal Activity"

didn't remember
"The Blair Witch",

never seen it.

It had fallen out of
the cultural consciousness

for a lot of people,
particularly younger people.

So "Paranormal Activity"
got a second bite at that apple.

The concept is a couple
that's filming themselves.

So you're watching the footage
that they would

have been filming.

So it kind of made
a lot of sense.

"Paranormal Activity"
came along and kind of

replicated, as much as possible,

"The Blair Witch"
kind of phenomenon.

Probably my most direct
inspiration would have been.

"The Blair Witch Project."

Another one worth mentioning
is "Ghost watch."

I didn't have any background
in film,

and I wouldn't have known
how to operate the film camera,

and it just would have been
too complex.

But with the introduction
of a high quality,

high definition video cameras,
I thought to myself,

"Well, I guess I can do it all.
I can buy a video camera,

transfer the footage
to a computer,

edit everything together."

And, you know, that's something
that I would feel

pretty comfortable doing.

And Blumhouse, you know,
was really clever in the way

that they marketed the movie
and got the movie out there.

I filmed "Paranormal Activity"
kind of totally in secret.

I didn't tell anyone that wasn't
directly involved

in the film making,
which wasn't a lot of people,

that I'm making a movie.

So no one at my day job
knew about it.

And what happened was that
after the movie premiered

at Scream Fest and I became
confident that something

is going to happen,
and shortly after that,

we had a deal with Dream Works,

I started like really not caring
about my day job.

I was just staying there
to collect a paycheck.

That's when Adam Goodman
got promoted

to president of Paramount,
and they were setting up

test screenings and trying
to get everything going.

So I knew I had to go up to L.A.

all the time to be there
for the test screenings,

and they wouldn't give me
the time off,

and I would go anyway
until they fired me.

But at that point, we already
had like the release,

you know, moving forward,
so I wasn't too worried.

So we had
really great screenings.

The first one would have been
at Scream Fest,

and we had a fantastic
response from the audience,

and then we got great reviews

and people would come right
after the movie and tell me,

"This is going to be
the next 'Blair Witch'."

And a week later, when we
came back for the awards show,

people were telling me that they
saw the movie a week ago

and they were
still having nightmares.

Just the whole idea
of that bedroom

and that voyeuristic feel
of being a fly on the wall

while waiting
for something to happen

and the feeling of dread

that that movie generates
works really well.

I would have been very happy
if the movie just got released

and did all right.

That would have been enough
for me to be like,

"I can't believe it.

I made a movie,
and it's actually on the screens

and people are watching it."

The fact that it ended up
doing as well as it did

was kind of, you know,
mind blowing for all of us.

It was very surreal.

Like, well, we made this little
movie in my house with no crew,

and now it's like
this big thing.

So very humbling and very cool.

"Cloverfield", firstly,
was a much larger budget film

that was relying on CGI,

and there wasn't really that
element of possible truthness

to it because nobody
would think,

"Oh, there really was a monster

walking around New York
and kicking buildings

and someone happened
to get the footage of it."

So it was presented
in a very cool way,

but it wasn't really kind of
hitting the same nerve.

It was just kind of like more
of a fun spectacle to watch.

It's actually
a big budget movie,

which a lot of people
like sort of had a problem with

because they think that
found footage has to be done

on the cheap,
but I just thought.

"Cloverfield"
was a very compelling story.

The fact that it did well,
I did think kind of give me

a little bit extra confidence
that, yeah,

maybe the world is ready
for another found footage movie.

I thought it was really cool to
to tell a very sort of small

romantic film within
the context of a city

being besieged by Godzilla.

This isn't happening.

Exorcisms or possessions

or sightings of the Yeti
or the Loch Ness Monster,

there's always stuff
that you hear about, you know,

like an urban legend,
or you read about,

but you've never actually seen.

One is visual prove
that a girl was possessed

and levitated, but no one can
really see it.

Whereas with found footage,

the idea is that
it's an accident.

Someone was filming
something else,

and they just happened
to have a camera.

And something extraordinary
happened before their eyes.

So they were just lucky enough

to be able to catch it
on camera.

Caitlin!

The script of "Apartment 143"
is a straight narrative.

It's like a regular film,

and the challenge is to tell it
in a very unconventional way.

The point was,
here's this ghost story.

But instead of having
omniscient camera,

instead of just doing it
traditionally,

every single camera
and every single shot

that appears in the film
has to be justified,

and it has to be filmed

by one of the characters
within the movie.

To me, that narrative challenge
was very appealing.

You know, you still have
to convey scares

and you have to create tension,
but you can do it in normal ways

because there was
no omniscient camera.

So if you needed like
a push in on a character

to create tension,
you couldn't do it.

So you would have to create
a situation

where another character
was filming that character

and there would be something
in the background,

and they would have
to get closer.

And in doing that, you would
generate the tension, right?

Or if suddenly you wanted
to cut to a wide shot,

well, you know, you wouldn't
have a traditional wide shot.

You would have to justify that
someone had set up a camera,

security camera somewhere,

and then you would cut
to the wide shot.

But the idea was to
convey scares

as effectively as in a normal
movie, but using an alternative.

We started pre-production
for "Apartment 143" in May 2010.

At that point, only the first
"Paranormal Activity"

was in theaters.

By the time that
we finished shooting,

"Paranormal Activity 2",
which was the first one

to introduce security cameras
and stuff

hadn't come out, right?

So I feel that we did pioneer
a lot of visual techniques,

and we did use a lot
of really original stuff.

However, the film took two years
to be released.

So by the time
the movie was released,

a lot of films had come out

since that were using stuff
that we had been using.

So it looked like
we were copying those films.

It looked like we were
ripping off those films.

You know, I'd go see
"The Last Exorcism",

and I'd see that they were
doing stuff that we were doing.

And I'm like, "Oh, shoot,"
you know, like, "Okay."

And they've already come out,
you know?

And then I'd go see
"Paranormal Activity 2",

and there were like
security cameras

and they were using all of our,
you know, narrative resources.

And I was like,
"Oh, man, they did it, too."

So I felt that by
like not be released,

like the longer it took
for our film to be released,

the less impactful
it was going to be.

We had distribution
from the get go,

but the post-production process
was very long

and also the distributors felt
that maybe it was better

for the film to come out
when there were more

found footage films around
to sort of catch

the found footage wave
and come out on top,

you know, because there'd be
a higher demand for those

kind of films, which in a way,
was the right decision because

the film was quite successful,
but at the same time,

we were destroyed by critics
and by a lot of bloggers

because they said that we were
ripping off all these films,

that we were actually
not ripping off.

So I think it's really tricky
to do high quality,

high budget found footage
because there's always

the temptation of making things
look and sound too good

and then things just end up
not feeling authentic.

I don't think that
"What We Do In the Shadows"

was a huge budget, but still it
wasn't a micro-budget,

and they managed to make it
look nice and good

and still feel very authentic
just because they had the story.

There's a professional film crew
that's filming it.

So there are always ways
you can get around it.

But I think it's very important
for everyone to think

if this was happening for real,
whether it's for a documentary

or found footage, if this was
happening for real,

is this how it would look like?

And if the answer is no,
then you know

you're doing something wrong.

There are movies that have,
you know, cost $200 million

to make and people go
and watch them,

and they're like, "Eh,
this is not very good."

Right? And so the amount of
money or how good a movie looks

is not a is not really
what determines

whether or not an audience
connects with it.

Troll!

On "Troll hunter", to make sure
that everything felt real,

we had to almost not story board
it, not plan it much.

We had to talk to the VFX...

We always had a VFX supervisor
on set, but we had to agree

in advance about rules for what
we can do and what we cannot do

on a relatively low budget.

As a director,
doing a found footage film,

one of the big learning
experiences for me

was the fact
that I had to step back.

I'm used to, in my regular
story telling methods,

to be the one who controls
where the camera goes,

who gets the actors
to move around

where I want actor to stand
over there on that line,

turn around on, da, da, da,
all this direction stuff

that this part of my job.

And on a found footage film
or a documentary style film,

you kind of have
to go away and say,

"Well, the actors have to be
very improvisational

because it has to feel
like it's all coincidental,

what's happening.

Okay, we know the script.
It's there.

Now you kind of have to say
the same things,

but do not use the words
in the script.

That's a really tricky thing
for an actor to hear

just before going on a shoot.

There was some difficulties
making "Rec"

because we are talking
about very long shots,

pretending to be real,

and sometimes
with strong mechanical

and special effects involved.

And it was very, very difficult
and complex,

demanding a lot of work
and a lot of preparation.

But at the same time,
pretending it was natural

and it was like improvising.

- Aah!
- Shoot!

Kill it! Kill it!

Doing practical special effects
as we did it

in a found footage movie
is very complex.

And frankly, I underestimated it

because you are
doing extremely long takes,

like 8-minute, 9-minute takes.

And so everything you have to
carefully place before you shoot

really everything, almost like
a small theater show,

and then you roll the camera.

And so it's already
looking back at a take

takes another 8, 10 minutes.

And so you can only do three
takes per day for one shot.

And that's really,
really a big challenge also

because found footage movies

are mostly
very low budget films.

Doing long takes is definitely
a big thing in

in found footage
or documentary style films

because you need to prove that
you are actually documenting

a moment here and now
and it's not edited.

It's not... editing is always
like a fakery of story telling.

The genre itself became
a little bit of a trope.

The idea of found footage,
by definition,

requires being done
for no budget.

And when you start to see
high budget stuff

going on in your
supposedly found footage film,

I believe it falls apart.

I think the other problem
is that found footage movies,

you need to be able
to buy into them.

And the number of scenarios
where that seems plausible

gets fewer or fewer
as you go along.

To me, there's always been two
kinds of found footage movies.

There have been the ones
that are actually attempting

to convince you,
at least emotionally,

that this is a real document.

And then there are other ones
that just sort of use it

as a stylistic affectation.

You would never take
a 5-second clip

of some of these movies
and be like, "Oh, that's real."

Another thing that always
bumps me

when I'm watching bigger budget
found footage movies

is if you've got
recognizable actors in them,

it destroys the reality
of the movie.

And I think the audience
are asking a lot more

of how you construct reality
in a found footage movie.

The authenticity needs
to be more on point

than if you're making
a kind of glossy,

conventionally filmed movie.

Because you're some loser
who won't spread her legs.

You don't know
anything about me.

You don't know who I am.

I know exactly
who you are, Amy.

When you consider boundaries
of taste and whether or not

found footage, films,
whether they go too far,

I would say that
it's the boundary lies

in no different place than it
does for any other form of art.

The found footage genre itself
is, in a way,

boundary pushing by definition
because it's a very special

genre that not everybody

is going to be
comfortable watching.

But at a certain point,
you're going to

have to up the ante on that,
and you're going to be

pushing boundaries within
the genre itself.

So eventually you're going
to get to a point

where you might be alienating
certain broader audience masses.

3, 2, 1...

- Stop it!
- Stop it!

Let him go! Let him go.
Let him go.

You don't want me
to kill Tyler?

You want me to kill
a fucking girl?

No! Stop it.

- Fuckin' bitch...
- Fuck!

It is unsurprising
that there is controversy

about these films.
Because it challenges

or it transgresses the the idea
that found footage is a game.

Is this real, or isn't it,

is the thrill that we get
from found footage horror film.

And that strips away,
I think, completely

and falls to the ground in a way
that you can perhaps celebrate

as being
quite radical politically.

Or you can perhaps,
on the other hand,

look as just being exploitative.

Hi.

I like your dolls.

I said I like your dolls.

Stuff that would be
in a normal movie

is more questionable
in a found footage movie

because it makes people feel
more uncomfortable.

But the bottom line is,
is that this is not dealing

in the realm of fantasy.

We're watching very real things
that happen in the world,

and it makes it
a very distressing view,

regardless of how you feel
about the film.

I think horror has always
pushed the envelope.

There's always
dark corners of horror

where people want to explore
further and push it more.

I don't think that's distinct
to found footage.

And we have to have
our narrative and know

why we're telling something
because we don't want to spread

darkness into the world, right?

So you have a responsibility.

You don't want to make
something that's violent,

evil for no reason.

Tell a good story with good
characters that you care about.

If you can do those things,
then you can shock people

as much as you possibly want.

To say, "Okay,
has it gone too far,"

I think story telling,
when it works well, is a mirror

that we hold up to ourselves to
make us pause,

to make us think about the world
that we live within.

When it becomes gratuitous,
that's a whole different matter.

You know, it's like
it's subjective.

It's dependent upon what you're
into and what you want to see.

But I think when it's powerful

is when it's actually
saying something,

when it's actually trying
to make a statement,

it's making a comment

on what's going on in
and around our world.

Horror films are
definitely reflective

of what's going on in society.

But at the same time, you know,
if you're going to show me

somebody being tortured just
for the sake of being tortured,

you're going to hold on
something just to be sadistic

or just show something
for the sake of showing cruelty,

no matter what it is, whether
it's found footage or normal,

that's not my thing, you know?
I just don't like that.

That's the question filmmakers
have to ask themselves.

And I think that when filmmakers
get to be responsible,

they don't want to do this.

I don't know whether it's worse
than having horrible things

happen with a beautiful
aesthetic.

Somebody criticized
the shower scene in "Psycho",

saying that a murder scene
shouldn't look beautiful.

And I wonder, should
a murder scene always be ugly?

But there's also a tendency
to say, "Let's ratchet it up."

People aren't
maybe paying attention.

And the more we ratchet it up,
the more controversial

this will be, and the more
people will pay attention to it.

So it's a double edged sword.

So the powerful pieces
are the ones that can kind of

ride that line.

And they have something
that they're trying to say.

At the same time,
they're ratcheting it up

and they're challenging
the people who view it.

Yes, hate crime is messed up,

and there's a lot of
stuff about it.

But there was a reason
why I was making that.

It was a film version
of my fears,

my angst, my everything, right?

There was a message.
There was a meaning.

There was, you know,
I was trying to wake people up.

My whole life, I've dealt with
anti-Semitism, both, you know,

on a small level of like people
just making jokes all the time

and thinking it's okay to like,
you know,

like attempted violence,
all this different stuff

against me for being Jewish
or writing off,

"Oh, he just became successful
because he's Jewish.

What's a kike? You don't know
what the fuckin'...

It's dirty fucking Jew.

Fucking look like a kike to me.

The easiest way to get
into somebody's conscience

is through fear.

If somebody else made that movie
that wasn't Jewish,

the exact same movie,
didn't have those same fears,

I think that would be
going too far.

There's a kind of sense
that found footage

always has to be treated
as the bad child.

It always has to be put
in the naughty corner.

I don't see why found footage
films can't do what

mainstream horror is doing
and can't go as far as

mainstream horror films
are going.

Stories, when they work in
a way that's powerful

is when they're a reflection
of our times.

But they have something that
they're actually saying, right.

That's the key.

What is a horror movie
but something that sometimes

goes too far and it gets in
your mind and it scares you.

A movie like
"Megan Is Missing"

scares the crap out of people,
and so if you feel like

that movie's gone too far
and it made you uncomfortable,

that was the point
of that movie.

You know, that it's not real,

and that's kind of
your safety net.

But in the experience of it,

you do feel that it's real,
so the comfort of it

not being real
is really at the end of it,

when you shut the movie off.

The movie was made for adults.

The movie was not made
for children.

But children were the ones
who found it and embraced it

and talked about it online

and passed it around
to their friends.

And they're the ones who gave it
this life all of a sudden.

So thousands of them
wrote to me.

And it's interesting
because the girls

were very introspective
and analytical

about how the movie related
to their online habits.

The boys were just
all over the map.

The boys didn't know
how to process

how helpless the movie
made them feel.

And so they responded
by getting angry, you know,

and lashing out at me
and stalking me on,

you know, social media sites
and things like that.

But the girls wrote me
very thoughtful letters about,

"Okay, now I understand
what my parents have been

telling me for
the last two years.

I didn't understand it
until I saw "Megan Is Missing."

Good evening.
I'm Callie Daniels.

Megan Stewart, a beautiful,
popular 14-year-old girl,

vanished without a trace
after going out

with friends two days ago.

The footage clearly shows
that she encounters a man

who appears to lead her away.

It accomplishes what
the director set out to do.

So Michael really wanted
to make a contemporary.

"Stranger Danger" film that
would really speak

to young people about
the dangers of being online.

And he does that,
and what I find extraordinary

is that every couple of years,
we seem to have another spike

where a whole new generation
of teenagers discover.

"Megan Is Missing",
and they will hit social media.

So most recently, of course,
there's been TikTok

in meltdown,
just having meltdowns.

These young kids
are absolutely terrified.

And the message that Michael
wanted to communicate

with that film has worked.

There is a couple of still
photographs of Megan

when she's tortured by Josh,

you know, and those were
based on real photographs

that friend of mine who ran
a fetish website showed me,

called me one day and said,
"Can you take a look

at these couple of photographs
that somebody posted,

because something
doesn't feel right about it."

And I looked at it,
and it was clearly somebody

who was in real distress
and not in fake distress.

It was clearly a girl
who was underage.

And I advised him
to call the police

and turn them over
to the police.

And ultimately he did,
and they had found this girl,

I believe it was in
Pennsylvania, dead.

You know, so that experience...
And that happened

decades earlier...
Stayed with me when

I was writing
"Megan is Missing."

Would you like
to have friends, Amy?

Would you like to sleep
with something

besides your teddy bear?

I heard a nice term about it.

It's called
"Embrace the Imperfection."

It's like it's not perfect.

You always try
to do stuff perfect in cinema,

that the lighting
would be perfect

and the sound would be perfect,
but I think

the audience today know
how to embrace the imperfection.

I think audiences are now much
more familiar with with

the DIY self-filming aesthetic
because we see it everywhere.

I remember talking to some of
the sales agents back in 2013

who had gone to the markets
and spoke to the distributors

and had the catalog of films.

And if they had a film and it
was a found footage approach,

it really puts off distributors

because it was just
so over saturated by that point.

Mark.

Mark?!

Mark?

It's getting tighter.

"The Borderlands" did well
in spite of everything.

Essentially what you had there
was a film that

the executive producers had
already decided was a disaster.

And because we did
so much work on it

from the first version
to the second version

to sort of fix it,
when it premiered,

it really took them by surprise
that people liked it so much

because they'd already
written it off.

All horror has tropes
that it falls back on,

and found footage is
no different.

In "The Borderlands"
in particular,

we poke a lot of fun
at a lot of the traditional

found footage jump scares.

There's a moment in the film
where a tombstone

has something written on it,
and then when the camera

pans back, it's got something
completely different on it.

And literally all that is,

is I'm stood
right behind the actor,

and the second the camera
is off of me,

I twist the tombstone
around the other direction.

And then when they pan back,

it's a completely
different tombstone.

In films like "The Borderlands"
and "The Afflicted",

we have this really amplified
fetishism of the technology,

of media technology
where it's talked about a lot.

And it's really privileged
within the films themselves.

And I think that has the dual
effect of not just giving

the characters within the film
a false sense of security,

but perhaps encouraging us
as an audience

to also share
that faith in technology

and to share their belief that,
yes, we have tech,

we can record the truth
and things will be fine.

Having the supernatural
element in the movie,

the vampire actually being
the one wielding the camera

so the audience
could be immersed

in that character's perspective,

we thought that
could be different.

The premise of this movie
was that these two characters

are filmmakers, and they were
going to be shooting and editing

and cutting together a movie

with a very specific
aesthetic intent.

Now, originally, that intent
is to show their family

and friends back home
this amazing,

aspirational trip
they're going on.

But ultimately, this is
sort of Derek's final message

to everyone in his life.

And so he could cut that,
he could add music,

he could add montages,
he could add graphics,

anything within a filmmaker's
vocabulary to tell that story.

When we first came up with
the idea for "Creep", it was,

how can we make a movie where
we don't have a crew at all?

And out of that,
Mark and I got together,

just the two of us,
with a video camera.

We bought an ax at a hardware
store down the street.

We bought a werewolf mask
off of Amazon

and went up in the woods

and improvised this movie based
off of a five-page outline.

You have to have a good idea
to make a found footage film.

It's not forgiving.

It's not a forgiving medium,
but it is cheap.

You can just do it your with
iPhone if you want to.

But you better have a good idea.

Smart glass? Oh, my God.

- You like it?
- Dad!

I can't believe you.

Found footage was the perfect
formula for our film.

POV film, horror film,
very realistic,

in a number of places.

And also we wanted to shoot in

the real locations
of the Holy City.

We sneaked in as tourists,
and the crew was separated.

The sound man was in the back,
like a few meters away.

The actors are here, the D.O.P.
took like, watched the lighting

or where to stand.

It was very improvised,
and it was...

Because to get to
shooting permits

is really, really difficult
if you want to shoot

in the real places.

Of course, no one will close
the Holy Sepulcher

just for your film.

We are shooting the first ever
found footage horror movie...

in 3-D.

So "Found Footage 3D" is
about a group of filmmakers

who go out to this cabin
in the woods of Central Texas

to shoot what they are billing
as the first 3-D

found footage horror movie.

And they end up
finding themselves

in the first 3-D found footage
horror movie.

Take two.

The evil entity in the movie
that they're making starts

showing up in their
behind the scenes footage.

This is the camera that we shot
the movie on,

one of one of three that
we shot the movie on.

It is a 3-D camcorder.

And, you know, in part,
the inspiration for the movie

was the existence
of this camcorder.

Ah.

- It's like, I can touch you.
- I feel like, you know...

We kind of tried to sort of
walk that line

between having this very sort of
stylistic sense, you know,

and the naturalistic acting
and, you know,

not putting too much dialogue
in the characters' mouths

so that they didn't feel like
they were saying lines.

And so that you could take
a scene from the movie

and feel like, "Okay,
I'm watching an actual

behind the scenes documentary
about a bunch of people

making a found footage movie."

Shit, you think
this it's just a coincidence

that it fucking happened?

Well, it wasn't a ghost,
if that's what you're saying.

I mean, I don't know, man.

Maybe the sound of her voice
triggered the wiring.

That I think is the thing
that found footage

does such a great job of doing,

is what if this thing happened
in the real world?

What if these things
that we normally relegate

to fiction were real?

And if it's done well, that's,

you know, the brilliance
of found footage.

And it creates experiences
by placing you there.

You know, you don't get the
feeling that there's a director

and a film crew
telling a horror story.

You get a feeling
that this is a person like you,

that it could have been
happened to you.

That's like stuck in a situation
that's fantastic

or that defies reality.

And they just happened to film
it by accident, you know?

Genres and the way films are
made and, you know,

they ride waves, you know,
they go up, they go down.

Found footage was never really
ever mainstream.

It had moments
where it kind of popped up

and became known by more people,
but it's always been a subgenre,

and that's what makes it
so powerful.

There were a lot
of possession movies,

and it started to feel gimmicky,
and I think the other thing is

that if the entire power
of found footage

is creating this illusion
of reality,

then the more times you're
exposed to that aesthetic,

the harder it is to continue
to suspend your disbelief.

And it just didn't have
the same power

it did the first time
you saw "Blair Witch."

I want to make movies, Heather.

Isn't that what
we're here to do.

When I was first pulled into
Hollywood by producers

and my agents, and in 2010,
'11, '12, I did receive

a lot of found footage projects
from various producers,

and I didn't want to do another
found footage movie at the time

because I'd done one
and it was a successful one.

And in addition, I wanted
to prove something different.

So I deliberately went
the exact opposite route

with "The Autopsy of Jane Doe",
which is extremely controlled,

simply to prove that I wasn't
a found footage director.

What success with a work?

Is success box office success?

Is it intended
to be like mass uptake?

I don't know if found footage
will ever be mass uptake.

If you look at where
the industry is headed,

it's more and more
tentpole movies.

What constitutes
a tentpole movie?

Special effects,
name talent, right?

Those are two things
that are totally anti,

you know, what film footage is.

When a particularly talented
filmmaker finds a way to use

that genre to make
an especially powerful movie,

it'll come back up again.

Oh, Radina's coughing.

- She's coughing.
- I'm fine, guys.

People are not allowed
to cough anymore.

- This is ridiculous.
- No, you have to hide

a cough with a fart now
instead of the other way around.

The interesting thing
about found footage

is it's kind of like the monster
in a monster movie.

You knock it down,
you think it's dead,

but it gets back up again.

You know, I don't think
we could have

made "Host" at any other
point in history.

And we're all going
through something so weird,

being locked down.

Everyone was kind of sharing
the same reality

for the first time in forever.

You know, Zoom is not one of
those things that many of us

really knew about pre-pandemic,

but then immediately afterward,
we're all on it,

constantly talking to families,
doing our jobs.

And even though we were
calling on movies

like "Unfriended" and, you know,
other kind of, I don't know,

"screen life movies"
that had come before,

movies that we love,
we felt like there was some way

of building on that by kind of
introducing the specificity

of lock down, what everyone was
going through collectively.

It's one of those things
where you watch a movie,

and you're like, you kick
yourself for not having

had that idea or done that.

And the speed with which
they were able to do that,

where we all sort of
went into lock down

and we went into this
incredibly new world

for all of us,
in this unsettling sort of way.

And they said, "You know what,
we're going to embrace that.

We're going to go ahead, and
we're going to make this movie."

Yeah, if you find the right
story and it's done right,

you can have, you know,
you can still have

a lot of great success and make
a pretty damn good movie.

You know, one of the things
that was really gratifying

about the release of "Host"

is the fact that people
were watching it in lock down.

They're watching it
on their laptops.

You know, some people were
watching it with Zoom open

in the background, you know,
watching it with their friends.

There's a level of involvement
that they had in the movie

that I think would be hard
under normal circumstances.

You know, I know a lot of people
have said that

when the pop up windows
come up in the movie,

they move their mouse
to try and click it away.

In our current cultural moment,

we have so many
different platforms

and so many different media
artifacts to kind of draw from.

It's just going to continue
to kind of put its fingers out

and grab on to dead media

and grab on to
new media coming out.

For upcoming filmmakers,
it becomes less about,

can you make a movie?

It becomes more about,
what's the story you're telling?

The tools we have
have expanded.

You can now use cameras
that are just cut-in cameras

that are not necessarily
the filmmaker's camera,

but it's the video camera
over there

or it's a surveillance camera
over there.

And it will naturally flow
for the audience

because they've gotten used
to that language.

The success of "Host"
and "Unfriended" and things like

that mean that's definitely
a strand that's going to

continue on.

We're going to get more
social media horror.

And I think really we need
to wait to see what the next

big thing is going to be,
what the next new media

is going to be,
or the next new platform

that people communicate through
is going to be

to kind of see where
found footage is going to

dip its fingers into next.

When any new media comes out,

any new ability
to record things comes out,

the instant that people begin
to manipulate those recordings,

we begin to see the veracity of
those imprints come into doubt.

So it used to be that, you know,
a videotape recording in

a court of law was absolutely,
bottom line truth.

Nothing could decry it.

And now you can't trust
those things

because just with something
as simple as an app on my phone,

I can put a brand-new face
on somebody

that's actually
terrifyingly realistic.

I mean, the thing that I love
about found footage movies

when they're done well,
is that sense of immersiveness,

is that sense of these are real
people that you're watching.

It's best when it's making
a comment on something,

the found footage genre
because of the ease

and the accessibility
and the lack of resources

to make the films,
you have a lot of bad

found footage films, you know.

But it's also a genre
that allows you to learn

and to experiment, you know,
and over time, become, you know,

hopefully a better story teller
because of it.

If you're an audience coming
to watch a found footage movie,

for the most part, you're aware
that you're going to be

watching something that is
presenting itself

as real footage to you.

So I think there is
a buy-in of engagement

that is required
from an audience

to make that
a pleasurable experience.

And I think if you're
the type of viewer

who watches a film
nitpicking every little moment

that you can for whether or not
this is something

that would actually be happening
or not or, you know,

I think judging characters
and their decisions being made,

I think, like for the most part,
it's going to be tough for you

to have a good time
watching that movie.

I think there'll always be

a desire for more
found footage movies.

An audience won't be satisfied
if they feel like

you're just retreading
old ground.

I think you've got to find ways
to push the medium forward.

Found footage now is
an absolutely legitimate genre

because the grammar of cinema
has changed so dramatically.

It's kind of leveled
the playing field.

You don't need a lot of money.

You don't need any stars
in your cast.

You don't even need to show
the monster or show

what's pursuing people.

It's just a great leveler.

At the end of the day,
you have to tell a good story.

You have to have characters
that you care about.

You have to put them in
situations that you care about.

And you have to have some reason
to want to continue to watch.

With a documentary film,
I mean, ultimately,

it's what the filmmaker
perceives as the truth.

I mean, don't you think...

That's what you're
trying to do, right?

It's just a bit of an abrupt
ending, no? I mean...

It's... it's that's
the nature of the genre.