The Blair Witch Project didn’t invent the genre, but it did give it a name.
“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary.” Okay, not really. The students were actors: Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard. They didn’t disappear. And they were actually shooting a mockumentary — a low-budget, unscripted horror movie merely designed to look like nonfiction. All the same, that opening disclaimer went a long way toward selling the frightening illusion of The Blair Witch Project, the indie phenomenon that hit theaters 25 years ago today. So, too, did a historic, influential viral marketing campaign (the first true case of a movie sold on the internet) that stoked speculation via a website with fake police reports and the dissemination of missing-persons posters.
There were those who really believed that Blair Witch was real, both at its Sundance premiere, and afterward. There were also those who despised the film on sight, who felt hoodwinked by the buzz that had built around its seasick camerawork and unwashed stars shouting at each other and dripping snot on the lens. Nonetheless, it became one of the biggest successes in the history of indie film: an outsider-art sensation that grossed a remarkable $250 million at the global box office, or roughly 4,000 times what it cost.
The Blair Witch Project wasn’t the first entry in a genre that would come to be known as found-footage horror — that is, horror movies shot to resemble home movies or raw documentary footage. But in its enormous box-office success, the divisive sensation helped popularize its own format enough that a name for it became necessary. What seemed novel in 1999 would become commonplace, even cliché, over the two and a half decades that followed. We’ve seen countless variations on the story of some unlucky dolts who trudge off into the darkness, camera in hand, never to be seen again.
There are a lot of bad found-footage horror movies. The worst can turn a whole auditorium into hecklers, united in their disdain. Sometimes, the genre becomes an excuse for amateurish or unimaginative filmmaking. And too often it depends on an enormous suspension of disbelief. If you’re asking why the characters are still filming while being chased by a monster or malevolent spirit, you’re probably not being immersed in the illusion of veracity.
But for every atrocious folly like The Devil Inside, there’s a novel, scary, or entertaining variation on the Blair Witch way. The 25 cited below don’t all adhere to the most literal definition of found footage. While some definitely take the phony form of discarded tapes or reels discovered by an unknown party and cued up for our edification, others have been cut to create the impression of fully edited documentaries or lost live-TV broadcasts. And we’ve also included so-called screenlife features — that is, movies that resemble screen recordings of laptops, cell phones, and other devices. What all the selections have in common is a “nonfiction” framing device. They want to look real. Or at least real enough to make the kind of splash that The Blair Witch Project did back in the dog days of ’99.
Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
The very first found-footage horror movie is still the most notorious of them all. It also only half commits to the gimmick it’s pioneering: Italian director Ruggero Deodato stages his framing story — the search for a missing film crew — like a conventional movie before cutting to the shocking videographic evidence the lost filmmakers left behind in the Amazon. Still, the grisly illusion of those scenes was convincing enough to provoke a real-life police investigation, with Deodato eventually forced to prove that he hadn’t killed his actors; he only sent them into hiding to fuel such speculation. Decades later, no one confuses Cannibal Holocaust for an actual snuff film, though the copious animal killing presented alongside all the simulated rape and murder is all too real. Whether the gratuitous sadism and cultural insensitivity is justified by Deodato’s hectoring message (it’s really about ethics in cinematic journalism, you see), there’s no denying the awful, grueling power of the violence. This is the rare barf-bag anti-classic that lives up (or down?) to its reputation.
Late Night With the Devil (2023)
The most recent film on this list flashes back to the same era of media sensationalism savaged by the earliest. Presenting itself as the final, uncensored broadcast of a ’70s talk show that unwisely trifled with the forces of darkness live on the air, Late Night With the Devil has good fun with the hoary conventions of witching-hour programming: the hacky monologues, the studio-audience stunts, the contentious crossfire between guests. And David Dastmalchian brings a perfectly haunted showbiz poise to his role as a boyish Carson wannabe fucking around and finding out for the ratings. Pity that sibling directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes break from their nifty (if waveringly persuasive) TV Land format after the inevitable supernatural fireworks. The ending is nearly as disappointing as the decision to use AI to create some of the artwork for the show within the movie.
Dashcam (2021)
And the award for World’s Most Obnoxious Scream Queen goes to Annie Hardy, the real-life musician playing a lightly fictionalized version of herself in this abrasive iPhone horror flick. Fortunately, writer-director Rob Savage — who made another pandemic-era entry further down on our list — seems to recognize how repellant many will find a MAGA conspiracy theorist with an affinity for the R-word and a disdain for masks. You could say the fun of Dashcam lies in watching an edgelord get put through the karmic/demonic wringer. The film’s other stroke of snarky genius is the livestream comments perpetually populating on the side of the screen, offering a kind of Twitch-troll running commentary on the increasingly frantic action. What could be a more fitting fate for an anti-vaxxer than a bunch of keyboard warriors saying her bloody brush with death “looks fake”?
V/H/S/94 (2021)
A dozen years after a group of indie filmmakers came together for an anthology of found-footage horror shorts, V/H/S has grown into a robust franchise, with a new omnibus arriving every Halloween to break records on Shudder. The 1994-themed entry, featuring segments directed by the likes of Chloe Okuno (Watcher), Timo Tjahjanto (The Night Comes for Us), and more is among the most satisfying and consistent of the series. Just look at the practical creature effects and spot-on TV-news aesthetic of Storm Drain, the locked-camera suspense of The Empty Wake, and the righteously annihilated neo-Nazis of Terror. The best of the bunch, though, pits an unlucky mad-science experiment against the SWAT team supposedly there to rescue her — a miniature masterwork of sci-fi mayhem that’s like the most tragic first-person shooter you’ll ever watch someone else play. Keep ’em coming!
Trollhunter (2010)
Before he brought a beloved kid-lit short-story collection to the screen and put Dracula on a boat, filmmaker André Øvredal explored the folklore of his native Norway in one of the quirkiest found-footage horror movies. Trollhunter, which follows a group of university documentarians who discover that the mythic creatures of their childhood storybooks aren’t myths at all, is never particularly scary. It’s aiming instead for a very dryly comic strain of mockumentary, scoring minor excitement and amusement from the poker-faced professionalism of the title figure (played by Norwegian comedian and TV personality Otto Jespersen). What the film really has going for it is some spectacular, frugally achieved visual effects; mindful of scale and distance, Øvredal sells the illusion of these ancient creatures, looming Godzilla-large through the lens of a camcorder.
Grave Encounters (2011)
Anyone who’s ever watched Ghost Adventures and pleaded for something actually spooky to happen will get a kick out of Grave Encounters, in which a Zak Bagans type gets more than he bargained for after his team of TV paranormal investigators set up shop inside an abandoned insane asylum. Beyond the note-perfect spoof of ghost-hunter programming, filmmaking duo the Vicious Brothers score some pretty good scares from their night-vision imagery, peekaboo appearances by a phantom with hideously distended features, and the maddening way that the halls of this atmospheric hospital keep emptying back into themselves. It’s the best of its subgenre within the subgenre — that is, films about dumb schmucks who regret their decision to spend a night within a haunted building of some sort, filming the hair-raising ordeal that follows.
Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)
While plenty of found-footage thrillers come to the conclusion that hiding behind a camera won’t save you, the sequel to Unfriended goes further by positing that the technology itself is the danger. Like its predecessor, the film unfolds entirely via the interface of devices — in this case, the phone and laptop of a 20-something dude whose virtual game night is hijacked by snuff-film-trading cyberterrorists. Dark Web doesn’t radically evolve the “screenlife” technique the original film popularized, but it does mine it for new thrills, inventively deriving suspense from, say, the message notifications that ominously drop down from the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The film’s most meaningful deviation is the switch from the supernatural forces of Unfriended to a cruel, anonymous human threat, wreaking havoc with a keystroke. In that way, the second film taps into a very 21st-century paranoia: that our screens are really open windows, allowing the bad guys to climb inside.
The Outwaters (2022)
Part of the challenge of making a found-footage movie is believably capturing the mundanity of home videos— the ordinary stuff that happens before the ghosts or aliens or whatever show up — without boring the audience to tears. Multihyphenate filmmaker Robbie Banfitch definitely flirts with tedium in the protracted first half of The Outwaters, which is all too believable as the footage of some L.A. musicians just kind of dicking around with a camera during a trip to the Mojave. But all that realistically aimless setup is worth the payoff, because once the screaming starts, the movie transforms into an arrestingly abstract nightmare, psychedelically splintering time and space and reality around the characters. Banfitch, who wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in the film, comes close to doing for the desert what Blair Witch did for the woods. He also offers the rare found-footage movie that’s visually inventive, even ravishing, regardless if you can always tell what you’re looking at.
The Bay (2012)
What, you had to wonder, was the Oscar-winning director of Rain Man doing behind the camera (make that cameras, a whole lot of them) of a gory horror movie set in a small town ravaged by a mysterious biological menace? While it may have been the ecological message that drew him to the project, Barry Levinson embraces the unconventional storytelling possibilities of The Bay, which is like Jaws meets Contagion as told through a collage of assembled cell-phone videos, news reports, and security-cam footage. The result is frighteningly plausible, both as a faux-documentary (for once, we’re not being asked to accept that a single person just keeps filming as all hell breaks loose) and as a portrait of the government’s response to an environmental crisis. Meanwhile, just try to keep your lunch down when Levinson reveals the source of the danger, which — like a lot of this unsettling film — is too close to a real thing for comfort.
Host (2020)
It isn’t often that a horror movie can be said to capture the exact circumstances of just about everyone watching it. That’s what Rob Savage managed to pull off with this brisk, quickly assembled pandemic chiller about a group of friends who blithely summon something evil during a Zoom session. Filmed entirely with webcams in the spring of 2020, and then released just a few weeks later, Host held a funhouse mirror up to the way its audience was living and communicating and socializing at the time, while subjecting its characters — all disembodied faces squashed into video chat boxes — to a deadly, intangible force that picks them off one by one. More than merely a screenshot of a very surreal, very frightening global moment, the movie also builds to a crescendo of well-executed jump scares that put the tight aspect ratio of Zoom windows to good use. All for $100,000 and across a mercifully, mercilessly trim 56 minutes.
The Visit (2015)
Following critically maligned mega-budget productions The Last Airbender and After Earth, M. Night Shyamalan reinvented himself as an indie filmmaker with this funny, breezily suspenseful story of two teenage siblings whose trip to meet their grandparents takes an ominous turn. While the found-footage format has allowed plenty of directors to essentially “play dumb” and leave their chops at the door, Shyamalan doesn’t settle for artlessness; one of the kids is an aspiring Spielberg, which allows this master of composition to remain attentive to framing. Naturally, he also pulls out a vintage twist, at once surprising and entirely logical. You could argue that it’s tasteless to treat dementia as an avenue for cheap thrills. What’s not up for debate is that The Visit is vastly superior to the other found-footage horror movie on the subject, The Taking of Deborah Logan.
The Last Exorcism (2010)
Great characters are not something you can usually expect from found footage. For one thing, don’t many of these movies stick the people we’re following behind the camera? One exception is Cotton Marcus, the charlatan at the center of The Last Exorcism. As played by a charismatic Patrick Fabian, Cotton is an Evangelical minister who’s lost his faith and has been performing phony exorcisms. The hook of the movie is that he’s agreed to come clean for a documentary … right as he arrives to bless a woman who turns out to actually be possessed. As a horror movie, The Last Exorcism offers the same old Regan MacNeil scare tactics. But as a character study, it’s quite involving. Better Call Saul fans will also get a kick out of seeing the future Howard Hamlin get in touch with his inner Slippin’ Jimmy.
Ghostwatch (1992)
On Halloween of 1992, the BBC aired a mockumentary about journalists investigating a purported case of paranormal activity. The 91-minute program starred famous British news personalities and was presented, deceptively, as a live broadcast. A lot of those watching from home thought that what they were seeing was entirely real — and were subsequently freaked out by the sudden supernatural events on which the film shockingly, abruptly ends. There’s no way to replicate that controversial, one-of-a-kind viewing experience today, but Ghostwatch remains one of the genre’s most impressively disciplined acts of subterfuge, rigorously committed to the look, feel, and dryly professional manner of a newsmagazine. Even the relative restraint of the ending — not exactly a gauntlet of terror — strengthens the illusion. It’s a stunt worth studying, just like the Orson Welles radio play that once fooled a different gullible nation.
Willow Creek (2013)
Lots of movies have ripped off the woodland pandemonium of The Blair Witch Project, but few have done so as skillfully and eccentrically as Willow Creek. Not surprisingly, Bobcat Goldthwait brings a lightly comic touch to the early scenes of a couple (Bryce Johnson and Alexie Gilmore) attempting to make a documentary about bigfoot lore — a premise that allows the comedian-turned-director to play with the hiccups and false starts of an amateur nonfiction production, as well to indulge his own interest in sasquatchalia. But Goldthwait also knows when to catch the laughs in our throat. The film’s centerpiece is a minutes-long shot of the couple frozen with fear in their tent as something massive and angry stomps around outside; it’s scarier than anything Patterson and Gimlin captured on camera.
Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)
Two words: fan cam. There’s a case to be made that the third film in the low-budget, highly lucrative Paranormal Activity series is the best of them all, and that has less to do with its story — a 1980s-set prequel that shows how the sibling heroines of the previous movies first provoked the angry spirits as little girls — than the way Catfish directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman play with the formal formula of the franchise. Their most ingenious innovation is the introduction of a camera affixed to an oscillating fan, panning back and forth across a room, torturing nervous viewers with what they can’t see offscreen and what they might see onscreen. And then comes the slam-bang, run-and-hide climax, which finally makes the insidious threat tangible. It would have made for an ideal ending to the Paranormal Activity saga, which would instead push past a trilogy and onto late-sequel irrelevance in the years after.
Cloverfield (2008)
Leave it to J.J. Abrams to supersize found footage for the multiplex. The Lost mastermind produced this ambitious New York City kaiju movie from director Matt Reeves and screenwriter Drew Goddard, which arrived in theaters on a wave of mystery and carefully cultivated hype. There’s no way Cloverfield could live up to its brilliantly withholding marketing campaign, but it was still exciting to see the filmmakers put a voyeuristic spin on Godzilla, letting a giant monster crash a home-video rom-com and shooting the city-leveling destruction from street level. What’s more, by squeezing a Manhattan apocalypse into a viewfinder, Cloverfield became a stealth, abstract reflection on the horror of 9/11, whether experienced firsthand or through chaotic civilian footage from that day.
Creep (2014)
Mark Duplass is probably few people’s idea of an intimidating screen presence, but the actor, filmmaker, and one-time The League star exudes a singular skin-crawling menace in this squirmy thriller. Writer-director Patrick Brice casts himself as Aaron, a videographer who travels to a remote cabin on freelance assignment. There, he’s greeted by a smiling stranger, Josef (Duplass), who claims to be terminally ill and looking to make a video diary for his unborn child. What follows is a compounding gauntlet of discomfort, as Josef increasingly breaches his guest’s boundaries while projecting a kind of calculated emotional openness — the language of a friendly, enlightened modern man — that creates a social obligation for Aaron to stay. Curdling the interpersonal cringiness of mumblecore into something more sinister, Creep warns of wolves in sheep’s clothing, their fangs expertly concealed behind therapy lingo.
Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015)
Then again, when it comes to giving viewers the willies, the creep from Creep has nothing on the central figure of Be My Cat: A Film for Anne, an instant addition to the all-time pantheon of chillingly believable human monsters. Adrian Țofei is unforgettable as a cheerfully unhinged Romanian filmmaker who sets out to convince his showbiz crush, Anne Hathaway, to make a movie with him. His pitch to the Hollywood star is an increasingly deranged documentary where he shows off his extreme commitment to his art, which takes the form of “transforming” the other young actresses he casts. That Țofei wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in Be My Cat creates the uncomfortable illusion of autobiography, to the point where he’s had a hard time convincing folks that he’s not the certifiable version of himself he plays here. Blurring those lines only enhanced the disturbing power of a movie that plays like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer for the age of parasocial fandom. At the same time, could you blame Hathaway if she stayed far, far away?
Paranormal Activity (2007)
The Blair Witch trend had all but petered out by the time Oren Peli made his own DIY variation on it — a haunted-house movie told through the nightly surveillance footage captured by an increasingly freaked-out couple in suburban California. Peli’s angle was to commit to a single, well, angle: the vantage of a stationary video camera placed in the corner of a bedroom to capture the nocturnal disturbances. Because the setup never changes, the audience quickly learns the layout of the space; the communal fun lies in spotting the first signs of something amiss within the frame, and in bracing for how the poltergeist action will escalate every time Peli cuts back to it. Shot for $15,000 and propelled by word-of-screaming-mouth, Paranormal Activity slowly became the most profitable movie ever made relative to cost. In the process, it extended the lifespan of found footage without quite passing its belief in the power of suggestion onto the next generation of ghost stories it inspired.
Rec (2007)
More than any other found-footage horror movie, Rec gets a suffocating urgency out of its shaky handheld camerawork. Directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, this franchise-launching outbreak thriller follows a reporter and her cameraman on an emergency call to a Barcelona apartment building; they soon find themselves barricaded inside with the firefighters as a rabies-like contagion turns the occupants into screeching ghouls. There’s a claustrophobia to the cinematography, the tight framing mirroring the treacherously narrow hallways and staircases of this tower of doom. And the filmmakers evoke combat photography during the scenes of frantic violence and escape. The subtitle-averse could do worse than the faithful American remake, Quarantine. But Rec is also proof that pounding dread is a universal language.
V/H/S/2 (2013)
Popular wisdom holds that the original V/H/S is the pinnacle of the series. But the sequel is better: an all-killer, no-filler midnight-movie anthology whose four vignettes unleash a funhouse’s worth of hostile apparitions, flesh-eating zombies, and invading extraterrestrials. While the most kinetic of the quartet finds Blair Witch co-director Eduardo Sánchez doing Night of the Living Dead through a mountain biker’s helmet camera, the true cream of the crop is Safe Haven, a blistering blast of occult horror from Gareth Evans, the Welsh action junkie behind The Raid. While too many found-footage movies overstay their welcome, Safe Haven proves how much intensity you can pack into just 30 minutes. It’s a lesson the best segments of this ongoing franchise keep teaching again and again.
Lake Mungo (2008)
There’s one really effective jump scare in Lake Mungo — a cellular premonition of death that arrives very late in the film to jolt the audience out of its seats. For the most part, however, this Aussie cult favorite is much more haunting than rattling. Adopting the stylistic hallmarks of a true-crime documentary, writer-director Joel Anderson unfurls something closer to mystery than horror as he chronicles the aftermath of a teenage girl’s drowning and the way the family’s sadness begins to take a supernatural shape. While so many contemporary horror movies purport to be about grief, here’s one that seems absolutely suffused with the feeling, and which gains an emotional wallop from the revelation that the ghosts are — in a rather unexpected way — a coping mechanism. This is the only film of its kind that evokes Twin Peaks more than anything else; its melancholy is worth a hundred shocks to the nervous system.
Man Bites Dog (1992)
“Close to the last word about the nature of violence on film” is how Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan described this Belgian mockumentary about a film crew chronicling, enabling, and eventually participating in the senseless rampage of a serial killer. More than 30 years after it became one of the first recipients of an NC-17 rating, Man Bites Dog remains a shocking (and sometimes shockingly funny) satire of ethically dubious nonfiction; by lampooning the vérité approach of Direct Cinema classics, the filmmakers cast the motives and methods of those observational milestones under suspicion. Still, what lingers more than the critique Turan cited is the movie’s deeply discomfiting sense of humor, expressed via star Benoît Poelvoorde’s performance as a haughty, peeved maniac and such absurdist plot turns as the scene where the documentarians run into a different killer accompanied by his own camera crew.
Unfriended (2014)
Simply put, one of the definitive films about life in the 21st century. That might seem like pretty highfalutin praise for a thriller in which obnoxious millennial teenagers are terrorized by the ghost of a classmate they cyberbullied into suicide. But in telling his tale of beyond-the-grave vengeance, director Levan Gabriadze stares into the void of compartmentalized cruelty the internet has become — a place where ordinary people log on to indulge their worst impulses under cover of online anonymity. Of course, the truly radical thing about Unfriended is not what it says but how: Never straying beyond the borders of a laptop screen, the film tells a whole story through search engines, web browsers, social-media sites, chat windows, and every other tool for engagement at our fingertips. It’s a cautionary tale of the internet age, written in the language of that age.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
What makes The Blair Witch Project special, what separates it from the countless handheld horrors that arrived in the wake of its wildfire success, is that it never really plays like a normal movie. Not structurally, not visually, certainly not in terms of the frazzled dialogue screamed by its unjustly uncompensated cast, who improvised a bickering meltdown in the woods while their directors played mind games with them during black of night. All the unusual circumstances of this micro-budget production combined to create something more jaggedly naturalistic than horror fans had ever encountered. The Blair Witch Project didn’t invent found-footage horror, but it perfected it by committing to the ramshackle verisimilitude of its premise. No wonder there were those who thought it was the real deal: It has the quality of a dark accident, of something cursed and abandoned and rediscovered out there in the secluded boonies.
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