‘It feels like you’re watching real people in real situations…’
The Amazon-owned horror streaming service Shudder has long had a very impressive selection of horror documentaries on its slate covering everything from the black experience in horror to The Evil Dead fandom to the making of the Friday the 13th movies. The Found Footage Phenomenon is another Shudder original, this time taking on the history of one of horror’s most celebrated and derided subgenres…
Directors Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott speak with a variety of filmmakers behind found footage projects as diverse as Creep, The Blair Witch Project and Trollhunter. Unfortunately, 100 minutes simply isn’t enough time to fully explore a subgenre as diverse as found footage. The result is a film that offers only surface-level analysis but one that is fairly compelling nevertheless. As an introduction to the genre it works perfectly, and the attempts to tie the found footage phenomenon to real-life anxieties around surveillance and gruesome news footage are fascinating, but those already steeped in the tropes and traditions of horror history will find little here that feels fresh or revelatory.
The Found Footage Phemonmenon is a perfectly serviceable doc that does a great job of laying out the basic principles of what made the genre so successful in the first place. True horror nerds will pine for more, however.