Studio: Shudder
Director: Sarah Appleton, Phillip Escott
Writer: Sarah Appleton, Phillip Escott
Producer: Sarah Appleton, Phillip Escott
Stars: Ruggero Deodato, Eduardo Sanchez, Lance Weiler, Stefan Avalos, Dean Alioto, Andre Ovredal, Oren Peli
Review Score:
Summary:
Authors, creatives, and directors who jumpstarted the subgenre discuss the origins, impact, and ongoing legacy of “found footage” horror films.
Review:
Despite the subgenre’s less-than-stellar track record for plopping out exponentially higher numbers of slapdash trash than worthwhile hits, I’ll watch almost any “found footage” flick I can get my eyes on. I don’t know if you can technically call me a “fan,” since I usually end up panning them far more often than I praise them. Be that as it may, I’m still fascinated by the format due to its ability to frame fear in unique ways that traditional techniques can’t capture.
How do you feel about “found footage?” Varied opinions might make it the most divisive subsection in horror. Regardless of where you stand, you’re likely to find a fair deal of value in “The Found Footage Phenomenon,” a documentary chronicling the first-person format’s evolution as a trend with cyclical rises and declines, yet whose constant presence confirms it’ll remain a mainstay in horror for decades yet to come. I certainly did. I’m not sure if this is a boast or a shameful self-putdown, but I’d bet I’ve seen more “found footage” films than 99% of all other horror fans. I smugly thought “The Found Footage Phenomenon” would thus earn a lot of “yeah, yeah, yeah” from me, except I found myself repeatedly impressed with dots it connected that had never occurred to me before.
“The Found Footage Phenomenon” has a basic beginning. So basic in fact that I worried the movie might be too 101 in its initial approach. For the film’s first part, assembled interviewees answer the question “What is found footage?” as they collectively contribute to a definition that describes the format in terms a four-year-old can understand. Meanwhile, the impatient among us silently urge, “Get on with it.”
But as the documentary spins up to speed, it sheds that dust of dryness and starts digging deeper. Doing more than time tunneling through a perfunctory history of “found footage,” the film thoughtfully examines the larger social conditions under which those movies were made, technological trends that influenced their creation, and the chain-reaction impact they had on audience psychology as well as cinema as a whole.
“Exhaustive” is an arguable descriptor, although the only way “The Found Footage Phenomenon” could be any more comprehensive would be to be longer. I can’t picture how any more could be packed into the current runtime of 105 minutes. Some side topics are omitted or rushed through in Road Runner blurs, but almost every minute makes the most of its time and every sound bite feels essential to the overall picture being painted.
“The Found Footage Phenomenon” features an even 30 talking heads who represent pretty much every milestone movie you can think of in “found footage.” Ruggero Deodato discusses “Cannibal Holocaust” (review here). Dean Alioto talks about “Alien Abduction: The McPherson Tape.” Eduardo Sanchez offers thoughts on “The Blair Witch Project” of course (review here), but “Blair Witch” doesn’t dominate the discourse like you might fear it would. No individual film does. From “Ghostwatch” and “The Last Broadcast” to “Afflicted” (review here) and “Megan Is Missing” (review here), every film that can be considered critical to the format’s development gets its due. If you were a complete neophyte to “found footage” and chose to spend a weekend just watching the movies referenced in this documentary, you would start Monday morning as an incredibly informed authority on the subject. Well, except for “Char Man” (review here). No idea why anyone felt the need to include that one unless its director was owed a favor or something.
It wasn’t until a quick clip of “Grave Encounters” (review here) appeared near the end that I realized the film doesn’t cover “haunted asylum explorations,” which has to be the most populous sub-subgenre of “found footage” horror. There also isn’t all that much detail on how the boom led to a big bust as cheap knockoffs flooded the market with first-person rubbish in the 2000s and 2010s. But that’s probably because “The Found Footage Phenomenon” concentrates on celebrating the subgenre’s successes rather than dwelling on its deficiencies.
Multiple interviewees, especially Lance Weiler, have such incredible insights on how “found footage” functions that it’s shocking many of them haven’t made more movies, or in some cases, another movie since their “found footage” hit. Often in horror documentaries, I only want to hear from these people who actually fought in the foxholes while everyone else feels like a cursory add-on to puff-up an academic veneer. These docs usually fill those spaces with a blogger friend of the filmmaker’s or a self-published author, typically a guy wearing a black Fright-Rags shirt. For its scholarly side of things, “The Found Footage Phenomenon” presents a handful of highly knowledgeable women who offer genuinely useful and entertaining information. Author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas ties numerous threads together with precise turns of phrase that pinpoint what makes “found footage” effective, be it how the familiarity of home video delivers a false sense of safety or how the format connects us to relatable domestic spaces and experiences. To come away with a fresh appreciation for a format I tend to flippantly disregard, even disrespect, is not something I expected, and major credit goes to Heller-Nicholas in particular for opening my mind to new ideas.
As for nitpicks, scattered interviews suffer from subpar audio due to misplaced microphones capturing tinny acoustics. Some clips also aren’t meaty or meaningful, perhaps having been pulled from trailers under “fair use” terms to avoid pricy royalties when more relevant footage would have been warranted.
Visually though, “The Found Footage Phenomenon” looks great, which isn’t always the case for horror docs on tight budgets. Directors Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott really put in incredible effort to access a wide variety of notable names in the subgenre and all of them are interviewed in unique backgrounds ranging from theaters and personal studios to knickknack-adorned homes and brick-walled warehouses. I have no idea how the specifics worked, e.g. whether the filmmakers conducted interviews via Zoom and outsourced camera work to local operators. (Credits indicate multiple people did the recording since talking heads were taken from all over the world.) The point is, some seriously sweaty work went into putting this package together. Combine that effort with the subject’s scope and “The Found Footage Phenomenon” easily becomes well worth a horror fan’s time and attention, which is something that can’t be said of many of the movies in the subgenre it so thoroughly covers.
Review Score: 85
How someone who sees this in a theater or without a notepad can keep everyone and their relationships straight, I have no idea.