But there’s something nasty on the top floor, revealing that those ‘zombies’ are the result of a bizarre Catholic conspiracy involving a viral synthesis of demonic possession. A documentary crew are stuck in a locked-down apartment building as a zombie outbreak kicks off.
The Spanish REC has a simple set-up but a complex mythology. Many imitators followed (including ill-advised official sequels) but nothing ever quite matched it. Amusingly, since there was no music in the film, the soundtrack album was found footage too: supposed to be the mix tape found in Josh’s car. Narratively, there was no on-screen editorialising either: unusually Blair Witch wasn’t presented as a documentary per se, but as cobbled-together raw material with no contextualising or narration. On the IMDb, the cast were listed as missing presumed dead. There was a shonky website pretending it was all real. A large part of that was the mystery around it: there was nothing in the way of filmmaker publicity, and the film had no beginning or end credits. It certainly isn’t true to say there’d never been anything like it (kids with a camera hit the woods looking for the fabled Blair Witch it goes wrong), and yet it caught the cultural imagination and became a phenomenon in ways that nobody could have predicted: viral before viral was a thing. It’s hard to remember now quite the extent to which The Blair Witch Project blew everyone’s minds on first release. (NB: Just to get it out of the way, found footage and faux documentary aren’t quite the same thing, but the former term has become something of a catch-all that encompasses the latter, so we’re allowing both here.) The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1972) But increasingly, found footage loves social media. Film social media hates found footage almost as much as it hates remakes (although to be fair, film social media pretty much hates everything). The recently released DASHCAM, Rob Savage's follow-up to Host, is (supposedly) a Periscope livestream.
Phones mark the next seismic shift, and then it's swiftly onto social media instant-messaging apps and video conferencing software.
In the ‘70s and ‘80s found footage had to have been filmed by a documentary crew, because who else would have the gear? With the advent of the camcorder that was no longer the case, and found footage movies document the the rise of videotape cameras, which then become digital, then smaller, then wearable. That body of work also provides a fascinating history of the evolution of accessible equipment. But there are also any number of examples where filmmakers working smartly within the format’s limitations came up with great results. Found footage has a bad reputation, and it’s true that much of what's emerged from the subgenre over the last quarter century or so has been cynically throwaway and ill thought-through.
Both were made by independent filmmakers working on miniscule budgets, but the off-the-scale box office made found footage look to studios like a no-risk opportunity to churn out content with very little outlay. The enormous success of both The Blair Witch Project and, later, Paranormal Activity was a double-edged sword for the found footage horror film.
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