The Found Footage genre has had some pretty high highs, like with the Blair Witch, and some pretty low lows, like with V/H/S Viral. But you know… I can appreciate a bad Found Footage movie.
In fact, some of the most fun I’ve had watching movies was watching bad Found Footage movies. There’s a certain charm to a filmmaker trying to get a film made on a tiny budget, and failing in nearly every way. But in my experience, films like that will succeed spectacularly in just one way. In my video, I talk about some of those successes… As well as a failure or two.
Side Note: It was absolute hell to get this uploaded. I knew Content ID would be a problem when I actually made a video about film, but I didn’t realize it’d be this bad. I spent like 7 hours yesterday uploading, getting my video flagged, re-editing that flagged part, rendering, uploading, getting my video flagged… I think you get the picture. I’m going to think twice before I make a video on film again, because this was rough.
Transcript:
Everyone has a guilty pleasure when it comes to media. Some people watch the Jersey Shore, others spend hundreds of dollars on Gacha mobile games, and I… I like found footage movies.
Yeah, I love The Blair Witch and Cloverfield. And a lot of people are with me. But I go beyond that. I scrape the bottom of the barrel for this shit. I’ll watch any film that promises a vomit-inducing monster chase at the end.
It’s just who I am, I can’t help it.
Of course, I prefer a great found-footage movie like Noroi: The Curse or REC, but man, there’s only so many “good” found footage movies. Once all those are exhausted, it’s time to head to the metaphorical $3 DVD bin and pull out some, uhhh… Let’s say, “less-than-great” films.
In my video here, I hope to showcase some the not-as-well-received found-footage movies that I’ve come across in my years of subjecting myself to this genre.
Before I get into this, I guess I should throw up a disclaimer. I’m preemptively dunking on these movies, but don’t get the wrong idea, I do enjoy the movies I’m about to go over. I can just recognize that they may lack in areas that I might value more if I was in a more critical mindset.
I generally don’t go into movies blind, I like to do a bit of research before dedicating an hour to two of my time to a movie that could potentially be straight-up irredeemable and a waste of my time. If I see a 7.0 or above on IMDb, I know this is a movie I should probably give a fair amount of attention to. If it has around a 5.0-7.0, it’s something I’ll not dedicate as much mental energy to, and once we get below 5.0, I’m just there for cool monster scenes.
I guess that’s kinda my main question when picking a found footage movie. Does it have a cool monster?
I’m a sucker for cool creature design and special effects. I like seeing what weird concepts a filmmaker’s mind can come up with to wring out certain emotions. Are they going for purely scares, like with Freddy Kruger? Or are they trying to evoke feelings of disgust and discomfort, like in Society? Or do they just go for the purely bizarre like in The Thing?
All of that is to say, I just turn my mind off when watching a lot of found-footage movies. I’ll give most of the benefit of the doubt for the first 20 minutes or so, but if the characters don’t hook me or the plot’s boring, I’ll slowly lose interest. At least until a cool monster appears.
So I think it’s time to finally talk about some movies. I hope I’m not starting with a show-stopper here, but I wanna talk about my favorite found footage movie… or should I say series.
I’m talking about the V/H/S series.
V/H/S, V/H/S 2, and V/H/S Viral are anthologies, they’re a collection of short films. They each have a framing story of a character finding VHS tapes, and each tape is one of the short films.
It might be cheating to say a collection of 15 or so short films is my favorite, but who cares, this is my channel. If you got a problem with it, write a 500 word essay in the comments about why I’m an idiot.
I guess the problem with talking about the V/H/S series in a video about bad found-footage movies, is that they aren’t all bad. Some of them I’d genuinely consider good or even amazing. I’ll save my talk about those for another day.
For now, let’s talk about the black sheep of the series, V/H/S Viral.
It’s definitely the least-liked of the series by a lot of people, me included. I remember being so excited to see it when it was coming out. I had recently just watched V/H/S 1 and 2, and because of the couple actual good short films in them, I had somewhat high hopes.
I was overwhelmingly disappointed. I distinctly remember hating the framing narrative. Of course with the title, it kinda stepped past the connection to VHS tapes that the first two had. I don’t even remember how the films are presented in-universe. The first two had characters sitting in a room full of VHS tapes, and they watched them.
In this movie, the main kid is biking around a city chasing down people who kidnapped his girlfriend? But he also stops to watch multiple 15 minute videos featuring proof of parallel universes and actual magic???
I dunno, it’s stupid and I remember hating the film because of it.
After a recent re-watch, I was surprised to learn that the short films were actually kind of fun. In my mind, the idiocy of the framing narrative overshadowed the actual stories. But some of the hooks were kinda fun once I gave myself away to the movie.
“Yeah sure. American teenagers are fighting cultist skeletons in some drainage ditch in Mexico. This makes sense.”
I’m not gonna say this sequence is “good”. I was very careful to use the word “fun” earlier. The kids are stupidly annoying and progression of events makes no sense. But it’s fun.
Look at the skeletons here, it’s amazing. These practical skeletons were made with love and you can tell. Regardless of the writing quality in any movie, I’ll take some time to appreciate a good practical effect, and this is a good-ass practical effect.
One of the other short films, Parallel Monsters, has an absolutely amazing moment.
Allow me to set the scene.
So a man named Alfonso builds a portal to a parallel universe in his basement. Great hook, I’m in.
Once he looks through the portal he built, he sees… himself. The world through the portal is mirrored, but effectively the same. The basements look the same, they’re dressed the same, and they both have a wife named Marta.
After their initial disbelief, they decide to swap places with each other for 15 minutes or so. Seems harmless enough, what could go wrong?
Alfonso 1 enters the world of Alfonso 2 and he notices that their worlds aren’t exactly the same. Where a picture of his wedding day exists in his world, this photo is in it’s place in the Alfonso 2’s world.
He steps out of the basement and Marta 2 seems to put Alfonso 1 off. She’s acting a bit different to his Marta. He steps with her outside and there’s two men that she’s talking with, and we’re to believe that they’re going to uh… get intimate. After some chit-chat, they head inside, and the room immediately strikes him as bizarre. There’s what seems to be a ritual playing out on the TV and there’s a bag filled with something gross and icky in front of the couch.
The other men pick up on Alfonso 1’s hesitation and leave. As he and Marta 2 are sitting on the couch awkwardly, the sound of a horn coming from the sky breaks the silence. Alfonso 1 is obviously concerned, but Marta acts like it’s no big deal. Distressed, he heads outside to check it out. He points the camera to the sky and we get a pretty good look at what made the ominous sound earlier.
While filming it, the two men that left earlier confront Alfonso 1 and are angry that he’s filming them.
Interspersed throughout these events, we’re shown that Alfonso 2 finds his way to a sleeping Marta 1 and starts taking pictures of her.
After a brief altercation, Alfonso 1 attempts to run away, but the men cut him off, and they… look different. Alfonso 2 is shown doing the same thing in Marta 1’s bedroom.
Alfonso 1 runs into the forest and is shortly tackled by one of the men. I’ll just play the rest of the scene out, because you have to see it for yourself.
I’m really unsure if this is something I should show uncensored, because I have no fuckin idea how this is gonna play with the robots of this site.
You know what? I’m feeling generous, I’ll show you this scene as it is in the film, because you need to see it as the filmmakers intended. This is the moment this whole section of the video has been building up to. Prepare yourself.
(stammering)
How can I put into words what we just saw? There is nothing I could write here to properly showcase all the emotions I felt watching that scene. It’s both horrifying and hilarious. Incredibly awkward, yet striking.
For better or worse, it sticks with you. And that’s what I hope for in a good found-footage movie. I want a specific scene or moment I can think back to and say, “Wow. That is a truly unique idea.”
That’s where the genre truly shines, in presenting unique ideas that you would never see in a higher budget film. Imagine this scene being pitched for a film with a 30 million dollar budget. You’d get kicked out for even pretending like it was in the cards for that scene to be included.
But with films in the hundred-thousand to even a million dollar range, you see a lot more creativity.
Let’s take a look at another low-budget darling of mine, Grave Encounters 1 and 2.
The first film is essentially satirizing shows in the vein of Ghost Adventures. The film opens with a producer saying something like, “This is all real footage. There are no visual effects, it’s only edited down for time. We can’t explain any of this,” as found-footage movies like to do. The rest of the film is raw footage captured from the camera that was being used to shoot their in-universe ghost show (also called Grave Encounters). The host, Lance Preston, immediately evokes all kinds of hosts on shows like this. He’s intensely dramatic and knows how to film around real events to make it seem like something paranormal actually happened.
I don’t really wanna give a full summary of this movie, because there isn’t really a reason to. This film doesn’t have any particular “moment” like V/H/S Viral’s Parallel Monsters. It’s just kind of a vibe, y’know? This movie is definitely more than the sum of it’s parts. The acting is awful at points, writing is cliche, and some visual effects are laughable, but it’s still enjoyable.
Lemmie give a quick overview before I get into the next movie, because this will be important later.
This episode they’re shooting features them staying overnight at a supposedly “haunted” psychiatric hospital. It goes about as you would expect. Nothing happens at first, they’re grasping at straws like you’d see in a traditional ghost show. But as the night goes on, they start to capture actual unexplained things on camera, and towards the end, they’re chased by scary monsters. Everyone but Lance bites the dust. But we’re left wondering if Lance is the same as he was when he entered…
Grave Encounters 2. This is where that indie creativity comes in.
The first minute or two of the film features YouTubers reviewing Grave Encounters 1. A couple of people talk about how they liked the visual effects or whatever, but others harp on how awful it was. My first thought was that they’re actors reading a script, but I like the idea that they actually put real YouTubers genuinely talking about their thoughts on the film.
Hopefully my thoughts here have been interesting enough to get me into Grave Encounters 3. Vicious Brothers, hit me up.
Anyway, one of the “reviewers” featured in this segment turns out to be the main character of the film. His review is a little different though, he’s not talking about whether it was good or not, he’s talking about whether it was real or not. He’s adamant that the film Grave Encounters actually did happen. And after a bit of research, he confirms that everything that happened in the film was real.
Now that I’m writing this, I’m a bit confused on the implications of that. Was the Grave Encounters show “real” in-universe, and the film Grave Encounters was just the footage of the crew’s untimely demise? Or did the show only exist in the film Grave Encounters as a plot device?
It’s a bit confusing, I know, but it’s a question brought on by the fact that Lance Preston’s actor, Sean Rogerson, is brought into this film as a character. Like they acknowledge that Lance Preston was just a character, and he was played by Sean. He was the only one to survive from the first film, but nobody knows what happened to him. They even visit his mom’s house to learn what happened to him. It’s bizarre.
Alex, the movie reviewer we’re introduced to at the beginning, grabs a bunch of his friends and they start documenting their findings as they head to the psychiatric hospital from the first film. Just like the first film, nothing seems to be happening when they arrive, but it escalates into chaos pretty quickly. Amid the chaos, they meet another human being. Someone that looks like he’s been there for quite a while. Someone… familiar…
Yeah, they bump into Sean Rogerson. He’s been living in the hospital for nine years. Nine years avoiding all the spooky paranormal stuff, nine years crawling through the vents, nine years eating rats.
I’m down.
That’s a pretty cool premise if you ask me. Sean obviously isn’t who he was nine years ago, but he’s still able to help the new group out. He knows all the secrets of the prison he’s lived in since the first movie.
I’m gonna stop my explanation there, because Grave Encounters 2 is a genuinely fun movie. It’s not a good movie by a lot of metrics, but it’s fun.
Quote “bad” Found Footage movies really shine in that aspect. A movie can have a ton of bad qualities, but that doesn’t make the film itself bad. Good acting and writing helps for sure. It’s why Noroi and The Blair Witch are amazing films. They succeed in almost every category.
But a “bad” film can get away with a lot of bad aspects if they do one aspect really well.
None reflect this better than Willow Creek. I kinda feel bad talking about this movie after giving this whole speech about “bad” found footage movies, because this is probably on the verge of being a genuine good film. I only bring it up because it does one thing absolutely perfectly.
That is, building tension.
The first 3 quarters of the film is pretty much just boring vacation footage in a town near a famous bigfoot sighting. A man is filming a “documentary” about bigfoot and his girlfriend reluctantly comes along. She isn’t really a believer, but she doesn’t hold it against him.
Like I said, a lot of it is “boring” on the face of it. The guy conducts a few interviews, but none of the people make any huge claims about a bigfoot sighting, despite his gentle persuasion to guide them in that direction.
So after 50 minutes of exploring the town and some interpersonal conflicts, we arrive at Willow Creek’s “moment”.
They’re camping in a forest near the town, and some ominous sounds wake them up in the middle of the night. This scene lasts like 15 minutes and is all one continuous take.
There might be a hidden cut somewhere, but it doesn’t really matter in the moment. Like, look at this. You’re just staring at these people for 15 minutes and they’re horrified as indescribable roars are heard in the distance and, not long later, footsteps right outside their tent. They just sit there, often in silence. A quarter to half of the time spent in this scene is just them looking around and listening.
I get put on edge pretty quickly when a horror film goes dead silent, because it almost always means a jump scare is coming. I guess I’m a pretty jumpy person in general. It feels weird saying this after writing that, but I love jump-scare bait. The pure silence just gets the heart pumping, thoughts like “Is there something in the woods? Were we just imagining stuff earlier?” change almost immediately when you faintly hear some ungodly screeching in the distance. “Oh god, we weren’t imagining stuff. There’s a squatch in them woods.”
I’m not really making a statement of quality, because I’m not sure if these two films are equal, but it’s reminiscent of The Blair Witch in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of not showing and letting you imagine what’s going on outside of the tent. Of course it’s a budget thing, but just like in The Blair Witch, it works. When you’re on a tiny budget, I’d rather you not flaunt a shitty costume or CG monster in broad daylight for a dozen scenes, as hilarious as it would be.
The two actors really pull off being terrified. If I were to speculate, I bet they did that thing they did in The Blair Witch where the filmmakers did unscripted stuff to scare the actors in the scene here. I can very easily imagine the director saying, “Okay, you guys sit in this tent and go through your lines. Inbetween, those just ad-lib winkyface.” I lied earlier, that wasn’t speculation, that was verbatim what the director said. That happened. Yes I have proof, no you can’t see it.
Stepping back, let’s look at the film as a whole. The critic’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a respectable 80%, while the audience score sits at 34. Why is it so low, after all the praise I just heaped on it?
I guess it comes down to the word “boring”. I used it multiple times when talking about it here. Even though I thought the tent scene was engaging and had me on the edge of my seat, I can’t deny it was 15 minutes of a static camera. If you didn’t find that enjoyable, then there’s probably not a whole lot you’d find to like in this movie.
I guess it’s just a matter of perspective though. I’m willing to give a lot of leeway to films in this genre. As I’ve said, as long as a found-footage film has an awesome “moment”, then I’m happy. Because that’s all we remember films by, right?
We don’t remember the hour-long build-up to an explosive climax in a film, we remember the climax itself. But that climax wouldn’t mean a whole lot without a meaningful build-up.
I described found-footage films as my “guilty pleasure” and now that I’ve had some time to really write out my thoughts, I don’t think that’s fair to the films I’ve discussed. They were genuinely enjoyable and that’s only because the filmmakers put in hard work to try and make something enjoyable in a genre that has a pretty bad name.
Of course there’s general problems that resonate throughout a lot of films in the genre, like bad acting or a boring plot, but a couple of bad aspects don’t make a film itself bad. As long as there’s some aspects enjoyable by someone out there, then it has value. In this genre, that value is shown through creative monster designs and interesting plot hooks.
And like… that’s all I can ask for in a found-footage movie. I don’t “need” good acting. I don’t “need” mind-blowing writing. I “need” to have a good time. And man, if I’m looking for a good time, I can’t go wrong with found footage.
Thanks for sticking around, whoever you are. This is my first time stepping my foot outside of gaming content on the channel, so if you’re one of my older fans, I hope you didn’t mind it too much. If you’re one of my newer fans, I hope you go and check out some of my other videos. They’re pretty good, and I say that in a completely non-biased manner.
Either way, I’m not completely pivoting to talking about movies, I’m just trying to broaden the scope of the types of media that I talk about. I don’t just play video games, so I’d like to talk about more than just video games. I hope you stick around with me for the ride.
Thanks for listening this long, and I’ll see you on the flip.