The Failure of Found Footage Films

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Popularized by the film The Blair Witch Project in 1999, the found footage genre is a sub-genre under the umbrella that is horror which is characterized by the fact that the film is meant to be regarded as though it is a documentation of true events, rather than a piece of art which can exist in its own universe. This small detail alone makes it clear that these found footage films are intended to survive based entirely on the novelty of this rather simple idea. Allow me to present my (not so) humble opinion: found footage films are horrible.

For the most part, found footage is used as a lazy form of story telling. It allows a filmmaker to pay no attention to lighting, cinematography, or even sound design. Instead, for the most part, everything is excused based on the fact that the camera is being carried around by someone who probably isn't used to carrying one, leaving the footage so shaky it's sometimes hard to watch. This of course, leaves little room to smaller details which can be beautifully depicted in other films, such as slow steady shots, any resemblance of a scene following the rule of thirds, or a scene which is significantly lit so that the audience can clearly tell what they're looking at. Naturally, any intense scenes are so blurred from characters running that the audience will never have any hope of seeing what's happening.

Found footage films are also problematic in the fact that their name reveals a significant plot point: the characters you see are probably going to die. After all, for the footage to be "found" must imply that those responsible for it were lost, so it's likely that the audience is buckling in for a pretend snuff film.

Many directors, it seems, often use found footage as an excuse to hide their amateur filmmaking skills. For the most part, editors will simply have to cut the footage and put it in the correct order, though some do opt to add sound effects and music in post production. in one particularly horrible found footage film titled Megan is Missing (one which some people believe to be real despite the fact that you can clearly hear director, Michael Goi, call out "action" in one scene) music was placed over scenes of a party. However, due to a lack of competence and attention to detail from the editor (who was also Michael Goi), the music does not cut with each scene, it instead flows seamlessly over the footage and provides clear proof that it was edited in.

Mistakes such as these are common in all found footage films, and even in the case of a surprisingly decent found footage film such as Chronicle, the film still falls victim to the limitations of its selected medium as well as a very shaky camera in many sequences (however, if you want to see a good film in the found footage sub-genre, this is likely your only option).

While found footage films are not inherently bad, they certainly have many factors which make most of them destined for failure. Bearing that in mind, I sincerely hope that future found footage films will catch me off guard with their competent filmmaking, or that this terrible sub-genre ceases to exist altogether.