It’s a real popular concept, the found-footage
film. Especially in the horror genre. It all started with “The Blair Witch Project”,
which was marketed as being an actual found-footage film, based on real
footage. It of course wasn’t, but when you believed it, it was a pretty
terrifying film. And the realism element of the held-hand camera adds to the scary
effect. And since then we’ve had a great deal of found-footage films. A lot of
bad one, but also some really good ones. I picked out five films that you might
not have seen, that I think are either underrated or overlooked. Here are five found-footage
movies you should definitely watch.
A fun mockumentary about three students who go into the woods to make a documentary about bear poacher Hans. But then it turns out that Hans doesn’t hunt bears at all, but trolls, which he turns into stone with a special UV-gun as soon as they get too close to inhabited areas. In short: a Norwegian folklore variation on the horror classic “The Blair Witch Project”, with very dry humor and surprisingly successful special effects (despite the limited budget).
Reporter Angela Vidal makes a television report about the fire brigade in Barcelona. Little happens, until the team has to move out to an apartment building, where a woman seems to be in distress. Angela and her cameraman chase the firefighters with the camera. And then the screaming starts. Exciting and pretty bloody Spanish horror movie, especially effective because the evens are shown without interruption, in real time. A lot of the acting was improvised. It had an American remake (Quarantine, 2008) and several follow-up films.
A boring fishing village is suddenly attacked by a mysterious outbreak: boils, swellings and internal bleeding, resulting in death, affect just about everyone who comes into contact with water from the Chesapeake Bay. Director Barry Levinson once researched pollution of that same bay for a documentary, but instead turned it into a docu-style horror movie.
A crime thriller with a twist. When his sixteen-year-old daughter disappears, single father David starts an intensive search on her laptop. What follows is a cinematic succession of images from Facebook movies, surveillance cameras, Facetime conversations, etcetera. The intention is clear: our whole life is digitally recorded and can be followed on the internet. The concept of this film is what makes it so unique and original, since the story itself isn’t at all. It’s an intense thriller.
A young couple ventures into the woods to capture footage of bigfoot. “Willow Creek” is not very different from “The Blair Witch Project”. Instead of making a documentary about a witch, the couple in this film wants to find Bigfoot. Jim and Kelly go to the forest where the original Bigfoot legend comes from. On their way they interview people about this legend. Then they go off into the woods and camp out. That’s when it gets scary. It takes some time to get into, but when we’re about 45 minutes in, the movies gets haunting. Especially the long scene where the two are in a tent at night and hear sounds coming from the woods. And they get scarier and scarier. A very entertaining found-footage film
