Ever since The Blair Witch Project grossed close to $250 million on a shoestring budget of $60,000 in 1999, filmmakers in Hollywood and around the world have resorted to the narrative device of found footage over and over again. Blair Witch, the sequel to the horror classic, revisits the story in the original using the same gimmick that made its predecessor famous.
The concept of found footage has been around for several decades in experimental art and video, documentaries and films. It was co-opted and popularised by Hollywood with The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez and following the video diaries of three students who disappear while exploring the legend of a child murderer. The fictitious video diaries were shot to simulate an actual documentary, which increased the plot’s verisimilitude and made viewers believe that they were watching real events.
While filmmakers use found footage to lampoon the earnestness of documentary filmmakers, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray used found objects, or everyday items, and re-purposed them to question the fundamentals of art. A famous example is Duchamp’s exhibit Fountain (1917) – a porcelain urinal signed R.Mutt.
Documentary filmmakers frequently use archival footage to depict the past, but sometimes, the lines between reality and fiction gets blurred. Although not an example of found footage, Orson Welles’s part documentary and part fiction F For Fake (1973) uses archival BBC footage to lend credence to a false reality.
Documentary filmmakers also pick up footage shot by others and reconstruct events through editing. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) is made entirely from footage shot by Timothy Treadwell during his time spent observing grizzly bears up until he gets fatally attacked by one of them. Herzog provides his insights with a voiceover and draws conclusions about what kind of a man Treadwell was based on the footage.
Another forebearer of the found footage genre in popular cinema are the mondo films or shockumentaries that were popular in the 1970s and ’80s. These exploitation documentaries depict sexual acts, violence and gore, and exoticised portraits of foreign cultures.
The horror genre has made good use of found footage as a stylistic tool. Since a large part of the audience’s dread and fear is tied to how much they are willing to believe in the depravity being depicted, filmmakers have resorted to manufacturing found footage that has a grungy, raw quality and the ability to unsettle audiences long after the credits have rolled.
Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is often cited as one of the first fictional films to use found footage as a narrative technique. Inspired by news reports of the Red Brigades terrorist group in Italy, some of which director Ruggero Deodato believed to have been staged, Cannibal Holocaust is the story of a documentary crew that goes missing while shooting a film on cannibals in the Amazon jungle.
Audience and film certification boards across the world were perplexed by the film’s depiction of torture and violence, and they believed that some of the actors had actually been killed on camera. Deodato was arrested for obscenity and later charged with making a snuff film. Cannibal Holocaust went on to gross millions of dollars, but it continues to face censorship to this day.
Cannibal Holocaust was also one of the films that sparked the “video nasties” scare in Great Britain, where censors began to believe that cinematic violence was adversely affecting the population. Numerous horror films were banned as a result.
While Deodato was concerned with the violence portrayed in the media, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg explored the role played by the audience. What would happen to the person who finds such violent footage?
Characters in Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) discover a television channel that depicts torture and murder. The film explores the question of whether the violence that people are exposed to is physically changing them.
Scott Derickson’s Sinister (2012) also explores the effects of such a discovery. The film tells the story of a writer (Ethan Hawke) who has moved into a new house with his family to find inspiration for his next novel. The house was formerly the scene of gruesome crimes, a fact known only to Hawke’s character. He discovers a box that contains Super 8mm footage of past crimes shot by unseen perpetrators, and this footage builds the foundation for the entire movie.
Close to a decade after Cronenberg’s landmark film, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde made Man Bites Dog (1992), a black-and-white Belgian film about a documentary crew that is in the process of shooting a film on a contract killer. Against the tenets of documentary filmmaking, the crew begins to get involved with the subject, often aiding their protagonist in completing his crimes. The film confounds audience expectations by playing it as a comedy but because the violence feels so real and voyeuristic, the comic violence produces an altogether disquieting effect.
Peter Jackson’s mockumentary Forgotten Silver (1995) purports to tell the story of New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie who Jackson, the film’s presenter, claims is the greatest innovator in modern cinema. The filmmakers within the film make a (false) case for McKenzie’s greatness by showing scenes from “lost films” found in the filmmaker’s garden shed. So accurate was Jackson’s use of the techniques used by hagiographic documentaries about filmmakers – expert talking heads, old scenes from films analysed to have deeper meaning – that many TV viewers believed the story to be real until it was revealed to be a hoax. Another examples was The Last Broadcast by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler, which came a year before The Blair Witch Project and utilised a similar conceit of a documentary filmmaker out to investigate the real story behind grisly murders.
As technology has steadily permeated people’s lives, found footage films have slowly reflected the change. Characters in movies from the 2000s have used phone cameras or surveillance equipment to depict what was happening to them.
In Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), an allegory about the French colonisation of Algeria, a middle class couple is terrorised by anonymous mails containing surveillance footage of their homes. In Paranormal Activity (2007) and its many sequels, homes are put under surveillance because of unexplained events. Oren Peli, the director of the first film in the series, later made Area 51 (2015), a found footage science-fiction film. Diary of the Dead (2007), Cloverfield (2008) and Chronicle (2012) are a few other films to use characters within the world of the film who record unexplained events around them.
Found footage has also surfaced in Indian cinema. Each of the three films in Dibakar Bannerjee’s anthology film Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (2010) features the idea of found footage and surveillance. In the first episode, an honour killing is interspersed with scenes from an filmmaker’s attempt to remake the popular romance Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). The other two stories are commentaries on the increasing presence of cameras in our lives. The second episode, inspired by news stories of MMS scandals, is seen entirely from the point of view of CCTV cameras inside a supermarket. The final film is footage of a sting operation.
Pavan Kripalani’s Ragini MMS (2011), which was partly inspired by Paranormal Activity, also uses the found footage style to create a voyeuristic horror movie.
The original Blair Witch Project was a product of its times, made before internet use became as ubiquitous. Today, found footage cinema is muddled by fast cuts and jerky handheld camera with mostly unlikable protagonists. Very often, the films are poorly made and do not have an actual reason for using the device. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, a sequel, was released in 2000, but it showed that the neither the new director nor the studio behind the project understood what made the original film so successful.
In the more than three decades that the technique has been in existence, filmmakers seem to have completely exhausted its use. The upcoming direct sequel Blair Witch, directed by Adam Wingard, comes at a time when the genre reinvented by the 1999 original has become tired and gimmicky. Blair Witch will have to put found footage to new use if has to deliver on the promise of the trailer.