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[Static crackling]
-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.
-[Panting, screams]
-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.
[Snarling, screaming]
[Screeching]
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.
[Explosion, crackling]
-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.
-[Snarling]
-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! -[Screams]
-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! [Screams]
[Clicking]
-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.
[Panting]
-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 filmmaking 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 filmmaking 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!
-[Panting]
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 "Trollhunter",
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."
-[Screams]
-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 "Ghostwatch."
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 handheld 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?
-"Ghostwatch" 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. [Laughs]
-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 "Crimewatch."
These were serious programs about serious subjects,
and "Ghostwatch" 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 filmmaking.
-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 Timeand 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.
-BlairWitch.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.
-[Breathing heavily]
-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 "Ghostwatch"
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 sellable 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! -[Gunshot]
-There's others.
[Gunshot]
-Try the head, try the head!
-Yeah, shoot him in the head. Shoot him the head!
-[Growls] -[Gunshot]
-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 "Ghostwatch."
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 filmmaking, 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 DreamWorks,
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.
[Explosion, roaring]
"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.
-[Growling]
-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.
-[Growling]
-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.
[Screaming]
-Troll!
[Growling]
-On "Trollhunter", 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.
-[Roaring]
[Whirring]
-[Gasps]
-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.
-[Screaming]
[Gunshots]
-Aah! -Shoot!
[Gunshots]
-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 oversaturated by that point.
-[Whispering indistinctly]
-Mark.
Mark?!
[Indistinct mumbling]
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.
[Clap]
[Banging]
-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. -[Laughs]
-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 lockdown, 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 lockdown
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 lockdown.
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.
-[Growls]
-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.
♪♪