Do you like surprises? I tend not to, but when Do Not Watch rolled through with no plot synopsis, no character listings, and no hints, I was curious to say the least. With a vague and vacant IMDb page that left this reviewer scrambling for the credits, this film – directed by Justin Janowitz and […]
For the first part of Keri’s article, please click here. ‘Keep Filming…’ It would be borderline impossible to write about the horror of the first two decades of this century without mentioning a phenomenon which, like ‘torture porn’ cinema, has been rather divisive. I’m talking about the found footage craze – and I think ‘craze’ […]
The gradual decline of the found footage horror movie is not entirely down to oversaturation. There are larger cultural reasons why the format doesn’t totally work anymore, the principle issue being that it’s just not as accurate reflection of our current video culture as it once was. The days of average joes lugging around camcorders, […]
Anyone who’s paid even fleeting attention to the face of horror this past decade, particularly in the low-to-no budget direct to DVD indie realm, will be well aware that found footage has been painful in its ubiquity, and for the most part even more painful in its predictability and ineptitude. Even at the bigger budget, […]
If I’ve learned one thing from all my years following contemporary horror cinema (listen to me, making it sound like a tour of duty), it’s that you should never write off any one subgenre or motif. Every time you’re certain that something’s been done to death, along comes a new movie which, against all odds, […]
Taken on their own, the terms ‘found footage’ and ‘home invasion’ have long been enough to send many a horror fan into shivers of despair, not so much because they suggest a truly hair-raising 90 minutes, but rather because they would seem to indicate a been-there, done-that, wasn’t-that-great-in-the-first-place routine which we’ve seen all too often […]
Has any two-word alliterative descriptor inspired so much abject despair in the past two decades as ‘found footage?’ (Don’t answer that, I’m sure there are plenty worse if I put my mind to it.) While the handheld, shakey-cam, first-person perspective mock-real approach has produced a good few gems – say, the REC movies, Cloverfield, Troll […]
The recent release of Blair Witch, to considerably lower box office and critical acclaim than anticipated, prompted my colleague Dustin Hall to question whether the film marked the last nail in the coffin of the found footage horror movie, remarking that it would be a “sad, but fitting place to end” the subgenre. This, I […]