Feeling Seen: On the possibilities of found footage horror

Recent entries to the subgenre of found footage horror attest to its appeal to queer filmmakers and audiences alike.

Sometimes, I wish there had been a tiny camera attached to the side of my head. If there was then I wouldn’t need to struggle with the fickle nature of memory, I could simply just scrub through all the footage, speeding through the parts that don’t matter and slowing down to one frame per second for the important sections. I could even solve the linear nature of time. I could move back and forth between then and now as much as I pleased. But of course, the nature of recorded footage is that it isn’t an objective viewpoint. 

What makes the nature of the found footage horror form appealing to filmmakers is that it means they can get away with shooting around the things that a normal horror film would show. The Blair Witch herself never appears in The Blair Witch Project (partly by accident, true, but if their plan to show her had gone through the film might very well have lost its uncanny impact). In Adam Wingard’s Blair Witch from 2016, we do see the Blair Witch, and the film ends up feeling comparatively limp. In that film, the characters lost in the wood have high definition cameras and drone coverage. That could be viewed as the end point of a certain trend for the genre, the post-Paranormal Activity boom of studio found footage horror films that generally used the format because it made money, rather than as a limiting experiment.