Editor’s Note: Nick Johnston is here at home remotely covering the 2021 Fantastic Fest. Click here for our continuing coverage, and click here for our complete archive of past Fantastic Fests.
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It might be difficult for younger readers to remember this, but there was a time when Found Footage movies were the apple of Hollywood’s eye, and it seemed like every single week that a brand new film full of herky-jerky visuals, bad improv, and some decent scares would thrill and delight audiences, or at least until they got too motion-sick to withstand the shaky-cam any longer. Equally forgotten is the massive backlash that came against the genre around 2010 to 2011, which was inevitable, given that its low-budget status and subsequent possible huge returns ensured that Hollywood (and a lot of small distributors) would saturate the market to try and meet the assumed “want” that they thought their audiences craved. Directors Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott, who have spent much of their careers documenting the behind-the-scenes legends of horror cinema for horror discs, make their case that the genre was, in fact, always pretty goddamn cool in their new film The Found Footage Phenomenon, but their self-imposed limits as to what the genre is, as well as their specific idea of it as a DIY phenomenon even through the Hollywoodization of it, prevents it from really having much of an impact.
Much like Kier-La Jannise’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (also playing at Fantastic Fest, and which Appleton served as a camera operator on), Found Footage is a pretty standard talking-heads-and-clips documentary, but unlike Woodlands, it’s not as exhaustive as you might expect nor as deep. There are notable omissions and hand-waves off of pretty big developments in the genre (Cloverfield, the V/H/S trilogy, most foreign takes on the material beyond Man Bites Dog and REC), and though I empathize with the need to keep this under three hours, it’s not particularly involving or engaging to exclude so many successful takes within the genre itself for the sake of maintaining the thesis that Found Footage is the ultimate in cheapo DIY horror filmmaking. This is a shame, because when the film focuses on something specific — say, for instance, the section on Dean Alioto’s The McPherson Tape, a no-budget 1993 alien abduction flick, shot entirely on VHS and made on the cheap, revived in the cultural mind after years and years of dormancy in the ’10s — it becomes fascinating. Alioto’s interview is among the best in the film (he’s witty and relatively sardonic about his contributions to the genre), but he disappears from it the minute his moment is up and beyond a brief consideration of Trollhunter director Andre Overdal’s subsequent career in traditional narrative fiction, we learn very little about the filmmakers that are being interviewed.
Perhaps Escott and Appleton might have made a better case for their argument had they’d focused a bit more on the effects the genre has had on popular culture at large, as The Found Footage Phenomenon suffers from the sort of genre myopia that inherently limits it to the specific small grouping of films that they’re considering (or had access to talking heads from for interviews). After all, the entire genre a mash-up between the mockumentary and the horror film, and there’s plenty of overlap between the two of them — every Halloween episode of a single-camera sitcom owes films like Blair Witch a massive debt, and in turn, the best aspects of the other, specifically a sense of humor, compliment found footage horror in a significant way. It’s equally kind of weird that the “Screen Life” genre, popularized by Unfriended and continued through Timur Bekmanatov’s exploration of the computer screen as a narrative form in subsequent films, is absent, barring a bit near the end about Rob Savage’s Host. That’s an especially weird choice, given that they’re oftentimes conjoined. It’s kind of a baffling choice, one that can’t be easily explained, perhaps because there’s an unwillingness to consider that the genre just might have moved on or morphed away from DIY filmmakers shooting on videotape in the woods. But this quandary might be answered by the fact that few of those filmmakers had any continued success in the form: either they were pigeonholed or relegated to development hell on all their planned projects or, in the luckiest situation, already successful and/or iconic, like George Romero.
Yet the most frustrating thing is that the filmmakers don’t seem to consider the backlashes to the genre to be anything more than just the ebb and flow of popular taste when it might be a little more than that. When Found Footage overwhelmed the whole genre for a few years, horror was at a specific type of low point: it was dour and often artless, and the kind of thrills that the directors like to highlight, when the audience buys into the mythos of the film much like they did when Orson Welles broadcast War of the Worlds over the airwaves in ’38, were rendered impotent by our growing knowledge of the form. One can talk about immersion and innovation as new consumer-grade technology hits the streets, but the most notable films to have been shot on smartphones have been traditional narratives, like Sean Baker’s Tangerine. One might have focused less on the genre as a whole expansive thing and instead honed in on the years when it was most vital: The ’90s and ’00s, where it was a legitimate cultural force instead of trying to make pained justifications for its continued relevance, especially if you’re not going to push into the adjacent genres, birthed from its former success, beyond idle mentions. Nor do they push any further and explore, perhaps, specifically online manifestations of the genre as well — YouTube is mentioned, but a whole host of internet hoaxes are missing from the film, perhaps the most specific and interesting formal development in the genre in the style and budget that they insist is so essential to its quality when contrasted with regular narratives. Besides, the title already implies its passe nature: Phenomena appear and fade, their ephemerality making them all the more alluring.