Two of the films which open this week – Apollo 18 and Paranormal Activity 3 – play on the concept of found footage.
That’s a film-making term which describes a method of compiling films entirely or partly from footage presented as left behind by missing or dead protagonists.
While the style goes back a while, it was The Blair Witch Project in 1999 which brought the genre to mainstream attention.
That 1999 horror film pieced together “found amateur footage” by three student filmmakers who disappeared while hiking into the Black Hills in Maryland.
The Blair Witch Project is considered by many to be the first widely released film marketed online in a campaign that made out that the footage was real.
There were several other films post BWP, but the next most successful commercial was Paranormal Activity in 2007.
Retroscripted, like BWP, Paranormal Activity was one of the first films released by a major commercial production house to virally market a film and to use social media networking to spread the message. They made money hand over fist.
The following year, Cloverfield was released, amid a very controlled release of information, despite serious online speculation.
Also presented as found footage, the film received more good reviews than bad, and was one of the blockbusters of the year at the box office.
Now we’ve got Apollo 18 – presented as found footage, though it uses actors – and Paranormal Activity 3 to defy the law of diminishing returns.
Mostly, found-footage films seem to be about scaring you silly, and the less background you get, the better because they work as long as you can suspend disbelief and treat them as real.
The success of Paranormal Activity has opened the sluice gates and there are several found footage films on the horizon, all predicated on the premise that if you’re going to fall for the hype, then we’d like your money, thank you very much.
Fair warning – spoiler alert: Jason Blum, producer of Paranormal Activity, is involved in no less than three. There’s eco-terror flick The Bay and Area 51, written and directed by Oren Peli, who was the director of the first Paranormal Activity.
Area 51 offers found footage supposedly filmed by a group of journalists who finally get to visit the mythic place in Nevada. It’s still in the works; there are rumours of rewrites and even more filming.
Peli is also involved in Amityville Horror: The Lost Tapes. This one’s apparently about an ambitious TV news intern who leads a team into an investigation of the bizarre events that will become known as the Amityville Horror.
MTV is getting in on the act, with Chronicle (starring Michael B Jordan of The Wire and Parenthood fame) which follows three high school students who make an incredible discovery.
James Wan (Insidious) is writing and producing The House of Horror, a horror thriller centred on a gruesome crime scene, shot with a blend of found footage, interrogation videos, news camera footage and classic cinematography in the aftermath of a massacre.
Or try Tape 407 on for size – survivors of a plane crash find themselves pursued by predators. It’s out on the international film festival circuit.
While those are all still works in progress, you may be able to find The Troll Hunter on DVD. Released last year, but not on the local circuit, The Troll Hunter was shot in cinema vérité style. A group of Norwegian film students start to follow a mysterious hunter and learn that he is a troll hunter who is working for the Norwegian government.