unfound
I tweeted: "Judging every movie that wants to be the Blair Witch Project but doesn't understand why the Blair Witch Project was the Blair Witch Project."
digitalemur responded: "Was it primarily that BWP did it first, or are they failing for other reasons?"
I tweeted back: "10% and 90%, respectively. LJ post forthcoming."
This is that post.
WARNING: This post is lengthy and incoherent, and I should probably work it into something more useful someday, but right now it's just a bunch of babble: disorganized, semi-nonsensical, uncited, and nearly 5000 words long. What the actual hell is wrong with me? Ah, where do I start.
The 10%
I hate to say 'you had to be there', but for the Blair Witch Project, I really do think you had to have been there: not just seeing it before seeing all its imitators, but seeing it in honest-to-goodness 1999. Before the IMDb [edit: WAS THE BEAUTIFUL AND POPULAR SITE IT IS NOW curse my faulty memory]. Before Google. Before Snopes was a household name. Before pretty much every horror movie site that wasn't on Geocities or a newsgroup.
I remember being my father's house, late at night, long after everyone else had gone to bed, on the house's one computer, with all the lights off, looking at a website that purported to be made by an investigative team that recovered these lost filmmakers' tapes. There in the dark, it was terrifying -- was it real? It seemed so real. Of course it couldn't be real ... but was it?
And then everybody was talking about it -- and actually talking, sharing ill-sourced bits of overheard information. Citations were needed everywhere and yet not a single one was forthcoming. All sentences about the movie started 'I heard...' and proceeded to veer off in wild directions. Even going to see the movie didn't clear up anything about the veracity of its origins; its credits were minimal -- definitely not the kind of lengthy end roll fans of regular studio films were used to seeing -- and you only saw those if you didn't make a break for the lighted exit the second the house lights rose.
These days you could not do that. In the age of the Internet, the whole thing's being a film project would have been all over the place: the actors' Facebook pages, their acting histories, chatter from production crews, etc. One tweet from one of their friends would blow the whole thing wide open, to say nothing of the easy ability to search online through local records wherever it was supposed to have taken place. And if all that failed, Snopes. Basically, there is no possible way to front that kind of deception-by-half-truths anymore.
(Also, you can no longer get away with straight-up traumatizing your actors. Bad form.)
So no. Ten pecent of not being the Blair Witch Project is that you are not introducing a film to a world where the relationship between the internet and credibility had not been fully sussed out. You cannot recreate the culture into which it emerged. Sorry.
The 90%
But put aside the hype and context, because if modern films can't re-create those, what can they do?
When I went to see the Blair Witch Project, I walked into a dark theater, sat down, and was rivited to the screen as three genuinely terrified people made decisions based on things that were literally sharing the same tangible space they were. It was just the three of them, with video cameras! Those cameras let you see the whole world around them, and there definitely was not a film crew there. There were no men in rubber suits, no bluescreened ghosts, no CGI monsters. It was just three people in the woods coping with increasingly bad conditions, reacting to things that I found a) incredibly real (if not necessarily realistic) and b) incredibly terrifying. I've been camping before! I could absolutely picture coming around a bend to find a bunch of figures suspended from trees, or being in a tent and hearing inexplicable noises outside! That required zero suspension of disbelief on my part. It was nauseating and disorienting, and I was so scared I couldn't move.
It also completely lacked any conventional narrative flow, and I did not care, because I was along for the ride. I learned about the three filmmakers, and they all seemed real to me in a way horror movies often don't telegraph -- they were being dumb, sure, but they weren't comically awful in the way you get when films telegraph the people you're about to enjoy seeing brutally murdered. It was an experience, start to finish, and though the end was abrupt and in many ways ambiguous, it also bookended the film by fulfilling the promise set up by the opening: the witch'll getcha.
Finally, what it did well was to land in the sweet spot between over-exposition and total befuddlement. The documentary-research start to the film sets up this idea of the Blair Witch, including teaching you the basics that you'll need to know to interpret what you see later. But once they're in the woods, there's really no more information learned that isn't just confirming what was available previously. By the end, the ambiguous nature of the Witch heightens the mystery by universalizing it -- isn't that her in the dark behind you?! -- instead of coming across like the filmmakers' idea train just ran out of coal. No, obviously they have a whole mythology and understand it enough for internal consistancy, but why would you want to hear about the details when you could be peeing yourself in terror?
What this also does, however -- and this is important -- is keep the mystery from becoming a puzzle. There's no sense that if they can just discover the right combination of words or spells, or dig up the right body, or destroy the right doll, or whatever, they can stop what's coming for them. No, they are straight-up fucked, up against a power they're no match for, and the best chance they've got is getting out completely. So ... good luck with that.
drmoonpants brings up a good point here: Most modern found-footage films aren't even trying to be the Blair Witch Project -- they're trying to be Paranormal Activity, which was trying to be the Blair Witch Project, except with an actual budget. For those who haven't seen it, Paranormal Activity tells the story of a young couple, where the woman is haunted so the man sets up cameras all over the house trying to catch the haunting, which escalates and eventually gets them both. So it goes.
Because it all takes place in a suburban house over several days, Paranormal Activity has to respect that it's not completely removed from civilization, and therefore introduces two elements the Blair Witch Project did not let its characters have access to: during-haunt research and spiritual specialists. This flips the model the Blair Witch Project used so well, of teaching you what to fear and then showing you what to fear. Paranormal Activity's model is much more investigative, starting with the weird goings-on, hoping the weirdnesses are scary on their own, and only then trying to give them meaning.
This is far more of your classic ghost-story narrative, where terrible things happen and then the reason (and sometimes the cure) is discovered. The problem is, I think more traditional haunt stories are ill-suited to found-footage. For starters, it means that the pre-exposition hauntings have to be so generic that they can be scary without specific context, which means everything starts with standard poltergeist mischief. A conventionally filmed ghost story can make better meaning of this because when the director has the camera, the camera can go wherever it wants (plus, I still challenge you to find an effective ghost-story movie that doesn't use, even subtly, the model of teaching you first, then applying later what you've been taught). The necessarily limited/fixed camera of found-footage means that either the character filming has to know that something is strange enough to merit attention, or the motion has to be unnatural enough to be clear when viewed from a static vantage point. When the characters (and the audience) don't know enough yet, the options for making scares are limited.
In dealing with the problem of how to induce terror from as-yet-meaningless events, Paranormal Activity did the genre a terrible disservice: It introduced The Hum. In conventional movies, the musical score is how you amp up anxiety, but how do you do it in a found-footage film? The Hum. The like static of the Silent Hill radio, The Hum lets you know it's time to get anxious. Used effectively, it makes the viewer tense enough that otherwise-unremarkable sudden movement is startling! Used most of the time, it telegraphs SPOOKY THING GONNA HAPPEN NOW in a way that not only can be hilariously counterproductive, but lets the filmmakers be lazy about building effective atmosphere elsewhere. The Hum is reflective of a kind of found-footage thinking that privileges jump scares over dread (which I will talk more about in a bit). I hate that.
If you point the initial question at Paranormal Activity, I would flip the percentages: 90% of its success is from its being first, 10% is things it did uniquely right. So it's no wonder the imitators are sucking more as they further fail to learn the lessons it failed to learn, because they're at a 90% disadvantage from the word 'go'.
But you also can't just set up a bunch of cameras in a house and then stay put, because everyone at this point will just say you want to be Paranormal Activity. So a weird sort of inheritance sometimes happens: A lot of found-footage movies take the lessons of Paranormal Activity and carry them back out into Blair-Witch-style explorations of unfamiliar territory. The fact that these movies are opposites in terms of structure should let you know exactly how well that works.
The lesson that seems be learned most from the Blair Witch Project is that if you shake the camera and go AAAAAAUGH a lot, it's scary. The lesson that seems to be learned from Paranormal Activity is that if you take a straight standard horror narrative and shoot it on amateur equipment, it's scary. The lesson that seems to be learned from both of those is that if you let the camera linger on a scared woman as she's suffering, it's scary. While I can understand the thought proceeses that might have connected these dots, they're also wrong.
Here is my best impression of the terrible, terrible formula too many modern Blair-Witch-wannabe found-footage movies use:
00:00-20:00: happy establishing shots, introducing the characters and their cameras, regular life, lots of laughs, some guns on mantlepieces
20:00-30:00: the Bad Decision that leads to the inevitable doom
30:00-45:00: wandering around the sets, examining props, shaking the camera, a comic fake-out jump scare, getting separated
45:00-50:00: person #1 dies, at which point everyone realizes that shit has gotten terribly real
50:00-60:00: running around, shaking the camera, shaking the camera more, keep shaking it, that's right
60:00-70:00: some important Reasons are found about the haunting; party is reduced to 1-2 members; cameras linger on panicky (female) characters
70:00-85:00: running around, shaking the camera, seeing the ghost, shaking the camera
85:00-90:00: ironic deaths of (almost) everyone involved, jump scare with promise of sequel and future franchise, roll credits with indie song
...But as I look back on this list, despite my occasional snark, I see nothing inherently wrong with any of these things individual elements. Most of them are things found in found-footage horror we like! In fact, the whole plot together is actually pretty solid. So why, on our great big horror spreadsheet, do found-footage films make up such a significant number of two- and one-star movies? (Keep in mind, too, that for us, two stars is as bad as you can get just by sucking; one star means you went out of your way be so bad and/or incoherent you made us mad.)
I think a large part of it has to do with the assumption that the format will cover a multitude of sins. I object to how these movies seem to think on-the-scene camera work itself is sufficient for creating fear, so that lets them off the hook with regards to making that fear make any kind of visual or narrative sense. No time to explain! Run! Run some more! Now run this way!
It's not that a horror movie has to make sense at all times. Most of the hauntings in the Blair Witch Project don't make sense! And by that I mean there's no often direct explanation of 'this is why the scary witch put this scary thing here, and this is what she meant by it!' But you know already that a) there is a scary witch, b) there are certain things the scary witch is connected with, and c) this thing you are seeing is one of those things. That is internal logic sufficient to commence audience freaking out.
Obviously, another major objection I have is to shaking the camera, but incoherent visuals are a big problem in found-footage horror. While there is a certain devotion to realism in acknowledging that panicky people pursued by ghosts are not the best cinematographers, there is only so much [blurry wall, blurry door, maybe a foot, blurry wall again] I can handle before I check out. With no visual interest, there's no reason for me to keep looking at the screen. Worse, I can usually tell that it's a cheap ploy to keep me from noticing two pieces of footage have been stitched together. (It's not usually a very effective one, either.)
So much of this, though, ties back to this idea that the format will tie everything together, that the audience doesn't need to know what's going on so long as the cameras are focused on people screaming and suffering, consecutively and concurrently. That's a terrible idea. It not only has an incredibly limited (and limiting) shelf life, it reveals some really uncomfortable thought processes.
In fact, there's often so much first-person lingering on the suffering of humans that it often negates one of the things I like best about found-footage stuff, which is that it's basically without exception supernatural. While I never know what to expect when I pick up a found-footage movie, I can basically rest assured that any human-on-human violence in it will be because ghosts are making the humans be violent toward one another. (A general rule in this household is that we don't like watching horror if the story is conceivably something we could have picked up the newspaper and read about that morning.) So maybe there's no humans in this movie enjoying doing violence, but the camera is enjoying seeing violence. I'm not comfortable with that at all.
There's a line I have -- heck, one that probably everyone has -- between 'eek, I don't want to see that!' and '...no, seriously, I don't want to see that.' That's the difference between shouting DON'T GO UPSTAIRS! while you know exactly where that character is going and how entertaining it's going to be when they get there, and just really wanting to turn off the movie now, thanks.
This is the part where I talk about dread.
To do that, I want to hop over to talk about video games. drmoonpants often says that the threat of player-character death in a video game can't really be scary, because you yourself are in no danger of anything, except a lot of grumbling frustration as you try to remember where the hell you saved last. What's actually scary is that it's going to let you see or experience something that's going to make you leave the light on when you go to sleep tonight, and it's going to make you see or experience that thing to proceed.
The straight-up scariest horror game I have ever played is the first Fatal Frame game. I have lots of stories about it (maybe for a different post), but here's one thing I loved: the doors. Most of the time, when you're running around, you see your player character from distant (and often very unhelpful) fixed third-person angles, so you can see her whole body. When she goes to open a door, though, the camera cuts in close to a slow, several-second-long animation of her doing the opening, during which you cannot control her or stop her in any way. Just about the time you've gotten the hang of this, you enter a room and explore it, and when you're done you open the door to leave and HOLY SHIT STUPIDLY POWERFUL GHOST ON THE OTHER SIDE GRABBING YOU, and you're left stumbling and staggering and panicky and trying to get your fighting camera up, and it's quite a heart-pounding surprise.
The game never pulls that again. It straight-up does not matter. Every. single. door. that I opened for the rest of that game, I held my breath. Even doors I'd gone through before, I couldn't trust. It was just a constant knotted-up expectation, and it never unknotted because even though I knew I'd made it through a door okay once, it wasn't guaranteed to be safe the next time.
That's dread.
A lot of the reason I'm writing this is because we saw the Gallows on Sunday and it was terrible. It did, however, do one scene pretty right, and that is when one character is separated from the others and navigating the world via the night-vision setting on his smart phone (okay). He's winding around through the backstage of an auditorium, through various prop and costume storage, and he comes upon this small, half-hidden open door that leads somewhere completely dark. And he stops. And looks. And takes several deep breaths.
And you know he's going to go in there, because of course he is, but you don't want him to go in there, because that door and what's behind it might as well be wearing a sign that says Bad Things Here. He hesitates long enough, though, that he might be backing out ... but then he goes in anyway. And nothing happens! Okay, he sees something spooky through a hole in the ceiling, and then there's a sudden crashing noise from afar that makes him run out of the room and towards the source, but nothing happens in the room itself. I was still keyed-up every second he was in there because I knew that he was in a bad place, and any second he could turn the corner and see something I didn't want to see.
Jump scares don't work in the absence of dread, though, but creating actual dread takes work and thought and time. So instead you get The Hum, which is artificial dread. Speaking ill of the Gallows now, the first real 'haunt' in the movie is several seconds' worth of The Hum, followed by a locker door's slo-o-o-o-owly swinging open. It was hilarious! I can't recall having seen something so blatantly telegraphed. Had the movie actually developed a heavy, creepy atmosphere, that isolated, unnatural motion could have given me the heebiejeebies. As it was, it might as well have had an Utena blinky finger going. (All love to the blinky finger, but it has its place.)
That's not the Gallows' first jump scare, though. There's one earlier where a stationary camera is pointing at a room and filming ... well, nothing; the only way you know the film didn't freeze is that the picture captures a TV in one corner, and that TV is still going. Ooh, camera on a single empty frame, something interesting must be about to happen! And so it seemed, until the camera stayed there for a hilariously long time. The whole thing started at intriguing, worked up to tense as nothing happened, and then backslid into humorously awkward as nothing continued happening. About two seconds before it hit out-and-out boring, the film's main asshole-jokester-who-deserves-death popped up from the bottom and went BOO! to the camera, his camera. Ha ha. So exciting. I don't even know why he was doing it, and to be fair, I don't think the character knew either. It was just that we! need! jump! scares! And the first one is always a kooky one. So wacky!
Jump scares are a divisive thing; I know some people think they're great, while others will not watch horror movies at all because they don't like them. I am not here to debate the relative merits of jump scares in entertainment. What I am going to say, though, is that they're so easy to do that the people doing them can get real lazy about it. Without the appropriate atmosphere of dread, you have to telegraph a scare (see: The Hum). If you telegraph a scare, anyone who can read a text knows it's coming, and the scare is no longer effective. So the whole movie becomes like someone in a rubber mask saying 'I'm going to scare you now!' before shouting boo!, and then repeating that every five minutes for an hour.
The trend of ending on a jump scare, too, has become so ridiculous that it's completely lost its effect. There is exactly one context in which that's effective, and that's in a packed-tight movie theater where everyone's hopped up on extra-large cokes and has already spent the past hour screeching intermittently. The final jump! Everyone screams! And then everyone laughs together because they've all survived! And while that kind of communal experience can be awesome, it also means that under pretty much any other circumstances, those last few frames fall flat as an unsurprising fart.
A movie cannot put you in physical danger (emotional triggers are a whole 'nother discussion), just like you know there's nothing under the bed that's going to grab your ankles when you walk by. In the short term, a movie can startle you by showing you something under a bed that isn't yours. In the long term, it can make you un-know that nothing's lying in wait for you at home.
I think my punchline is here, and it is this: The reason most found-footage horror movies fail is because they had no business being found-footage in the first place.
The Blair Witch Project would not have worked as a more traditional horror film. Same goes for Paranormal Activity. They are both stories that understand they are being told in a very particular way, and they go out of their way to make those stories match the medium.
So many of the failed found-footage films I'm thinking of are ones that would have failed even as traditional films, but that's because once you take away the found-footage gimmick, they've got basically nothing that isn't a couple jump scares punctuating a lot of running while screaming and shaking the camera. Others would have succeded if they'd lived out their lives as director's-eye movies, but wind up feeling like their potential plot and character development got put on the back burner in order to shoehorn in some running while screaming and shaking the camera.
I blame part (though not all) of this on the ubiquity of smart phones. In 1999, if you wanted to create a narrative around a bunch of people who filmed a horrifying event, those people had to have pretty specific reasons to have equipment that would let them record that much for that long, and to have that equipment with them in the first place. Now, you just need to have a bunch of Instagram-happy Millennials (and if you can work in a couple of digs against the narcissism of selfie culture, so much the better). What this means, though, is that because you basically can't separate horror-movie-aged-characters from film technology, some found-footage films no longer see a reason for creating a narrative specific to the way it's being told.
To try and justify their belonging to the genre, most of these found-footage movies involve framing devices that are just ridiculous. To pick on the Gallows again (because it's fresh in my mind), its frame starts with some text at the beginning about how this footage is property of such-and-such police department, evidence, official numbers, blah blah. Triple fail! One, no it's not, this is 2015 and we all know it's a movie. Two, we're expected to believe a local police department would just sit on some amateur and cop body-cam footage that shows, uh, actual ghosts? And three, that makes the first twenty happy-normal minutes of the movie weird, since there's no reason any of that footage of bullying nerds and checking lipstick would count as evidence. If you deleted those first fifteen seconds, nothing would change, which is the sign of a pretty unnecessary frame.
Tell you what, the Gallows would have been a lot more successful as a more traditionally told film. It still would have had a paper-thin reason for a haunting and strain credibility in a billion other ways, but it would have held together just fine, without all the extra 'why are they still filming? who cut this together?' suspensions of disbelief. The same things could have happened. Even the whole red-lit stairwell scene (which got shown in its entirety in the trailers, for some reason) could have been filmed almost exactly the same, without pretending someone had dropped a camera that miraculously framed the action perfectly. And also there wouldn't have been a lot of running while screaming and shaking the camera.
Please stop running while screaming and shaking the camera. Please.
Okay! There's a lot more to be talked about here -- experiential vs. narrative horror, the pornography of first-person suffering, the male gaze, spiritual specialists and (anti-)intellectualism, how to kill your cast ironically, what found-footage storytelling does to the concept of the Final Girl -- but I think I've babbled on way too long already, so I'm going to wind it up.
Who Does It Right?
It may shock you to find out that I still like found-footage as a genre! So many terrible, terrible things have been done with and to it, but when it works, it works so good. Here are some films I feel understood (at least in part) what The Blair Witch Project did right, then set out with that information to do something different.
Paranormal Activity: Yes, everything else I said above is true, plus it is shit on gender, and it makes heterosexuality look about as appealing as drinking grapefruit juice after brushing your teeth. But it really does the genre proud, as evidenced by how it ushered in a whole legion of imitators. It establishes a reason to have eight billion cameras running at all times, it relies heavily on practical effects, and it actually pulls off some serious scares (though now that I've warned you about The Hum, I may have ruined the whole thing for you, sorry).
Grave Encounters: Part of the brilliance here is that the whole thing is presented like a TV special, so the constant cuts and edits make sense in that context. It's just balls-to-the-wall scary. As the situation deteriorates, it does so not into panic, but into long stretches of quiet hopelessness. ...All of which makes the ending just plain goofy, but hey, by that point we were both so stomach-clenchingly scared that a stupid, overdramatic, and frankly nonsensical CGI-heavy ending was just what the horror doctor ordered.
Lake Mungo: The one takes the found-footage bits, adds some found-audio bits, and puts them into a fake documentary that contextualizes everything that's going on. All the recordings presented are given with the reasons why they were recorded at the time, and they're interspersed with static images, news footage, and interviews. Thus, if you (like me) hate compulsive, excessive camera-shaking, this is definitely the way to go. It remains one of my all-time favorite horror movies, and it makes me cry in both sadness and terror whenever we watch it.
Europa Report: This time the footage comes from space! So it's not straight horror, it's science-fiction horror, which adds an entirely new dimension to things. And this one, more than any of these others except Lake Mungo, relies on the after-the-fact interpretation of the footage to make the footage itself make sense.
Rec: Two of the big problems with found footage: why the hell aren't they running away, and why the hell are they still filming? The folk with cameras in Rec are a news crew! They have a duty to document these weird goings-on, as they're trapped in an apartment building, under quarantine as something awful goes on inside and/or outside, it's sometimes hard to tell.
Unfriended: While there have been plenty of memorable Skype horror bits (the bone-chilling bit from the first V/H/S comes to mind), Unfriended commits for an entire full-length movie, shot in real time and presented as a single computer screen. Perhaps its best choice is to leave the cursor onscreen and to use it instead of any keyboard shortcuts; that not only directs the viewer's attention, it makes sure windows don't appear just to be swapping and disappearing with no reason. Minus its last ten dopey seconds, where it falls into the END WITH A JUMPSCARE! cliche, it's a solid, scary film.
digitalemur responded: "Was it primarily that BWP did it first, or are they failing for other reasons?"
I tweeted back: "10% and 90%, respectively. LJ post forthcoming."
This is that post.
WARNING: This post is lengthy and incoherent, and I should probably work it into something more useful someday, but right now it's just a bunch of babble: disorganized, semi-nonsensical, uncited, and nearly 5000 words long. What the actual hell is wrong with me? Ah, where do I start.
The 10%
I hate to say 'you had to be there', but for the Blair Witch Project, I really do think you had to have been there: not just seeing it before seeing all its imitators, but seeing it in honest-to-goodness 1999. Before the IMDb [edit: WAS THE BEAUTIFUL AND POPULAR SITE IT IS NOW curse my faulty memory]. Before Google. Before Snopes was a household name. Before pretty much every horror movie site that wasn't on Geocities or a newsgroup.
I remember being my father's house, late at night, long after everyone else had gone to bed, on the house's one computer, with all the lights off, looking at a website that purported to be made by an investigative team that recovered these lost filmmakers' tapes. There in the dark, it was terrifying -- was it real? It seemed so real. Of course it couldn't be real ... but was it?
And then everybody was talking about it -- and actually talking, sharing ill-sourced bits of overheard information. Citations were needed everywhere and yet not a single one was forthcoming. All sentences about the movie started 'I heard...' and proceeded to veer off in wild directions. Even going to see the movie didn't clear up anything about the veracity of its origins; its credits were minimal -- definitely not the kind of lengthy end roll fans of regular studio films were used to seeing -- and you only saw those if you didn't make a break for the lighted exit the second the house lights rose.
These days you could not do that. In the age of the Internet, the whole thing's being a film project would have been all over the place: the actors' Facebook pages, their acting histories, chatter from production crews, etc. One tweet from one of their friends would blow the whole thing wide open, to say nothing of the easy ability to search online through local records wherever it was supposed to have taken place. And if all that failed, Snopes. Basically, there is no possible way to front that kind of deception-by-half-truths anymore.
(Also, you can no longer get away with straight-up traumatizing your actors. Bad form.)
So no. Ten pecent of not being the Blair Witch Project is that you are not introducing a film to a world where the relationship between the internet and credibility had not been fully sussed out. You cannot recreate the culture into which it emerged. Sorry.
The 90%
But put aside the hype and context, because if modern films can't re-create those, what can they do?
When I went to see the Blair Witch Project, I walked into a dark theater, sat down, and was rivited to the screen as three genuinely terrified people made decisions based on things that were literally sharing the same tangible space they were. It was just the three of them, with video cameras! Those cameras let you see the whole world around them, and there definitely was not a film crew there. There were no men in rubber suits, no bluescreened ghosts, no CGI monsters. It was just three people in the woods coping with increasingly bad conditions, reacting to things that I found a) incredibly real (if not necessarily realistic) and b) incredibly terrifying. I've been camping before! I could absolutely picture coming around a bend to find a bunch of figures suspended from trees, or being in a tent and hearing inexplicable noises outside! That required zero suspension of disbelief on my part. It was nauseating and disorienting, and I was so scared I couldn't move.
It also completely lacked any conventional narrative flow, and I did not care, because I was along for the ride. I learned about the three filmmakers, and they all seemed real to me in a way horror movies often don't telegraph -- they were being dumb, sure, but they weren't comically awful in the way you get when films telegraph the people you're about to enjoy seeing brutally murdered. It was an experience, start to finish, and though the end was abrupt and in many ways ambiguous, it also bookended the film by fulfilling the promise set up by the opening: the witch'll getcha.
Finally, what it did well was to land in the sweet spot between over-exposition and total befuddlement. The documentary-research start to the film sets up this idea of the Blair Witch, including teaching you the basics that you'll need to know to interpret what you see later. But once they're in the woods, there's really no more information learned that isn't just confirming what was available previously. By the end, the ambiguous nature of the Witch heightens the mystery by universalizing it -- isn't that her in the dark behind you?! -- instead of coming across like the filmmakers' idea train just ran out of coal. No, obviously they have a whole mythology and understand it enough for internal consistancy, but why would you want to hear about the details when you could be peeing yourself in terror?
What this also does, however -- and this is important -- is keep the mystery from becoming a puzzle. There's no sense that if they can just discover the right combination of words or spells, or dig up the right body, or destroy the right doll, or whatever, they can stop what's coming for them. No, they are straight-up fucked, up against a power they're no match for, and the best chance they've got is getting out completely. So ... good luck with that.
drmoonpants brings up a good point here: Most modern found-footage films aren't even trying to be the Blair Witch Project -- they're trying to be Paranormal Activity, which was trying to be the Blair Witch Project, except with an actual budget. For those who haven't seen it, Paranormal Activity tells the story of a young couple, where the woman is haunted so the man sets up cameras all over the house trying to catch the haunting, which escalates and eventually gets them both. So it goes.
Because it all takes place in a suburban house over several days, Paranormal Activity has to respect that it's not completely removed from civilization, and therefore introduces two elements the Blair Witch Project did not let its characters have access to: during-haunt research and spiritual specialists. This flips the model the Blair Witch Project used so well, of teaching you what to fear and then showing you what to fear. Paranormal Activity's model is much more investigative, starting with the weird goings-on, hoping the weirdnesses are scary on their own, and only then trying to give them meaning.
This is far more of your classic ghost-story narrative, where terrible things happen and then the reason (and sometimes the cure) is discovered. The problem is, I think more traditional haunt stories are ill-suited to found-footage. For starters, it means that the pre-exposition hauntings have to be so generic that they can be scary without specific context, which means everything starts with standard poltergeist mischief. A conventionally filmed ghost story can make better meaning of this because when the director has the camera, the camera can go wherever it wants (plus, I still challenge you to find an effective ghost-story movie that doesn't use, even subtly, the model of teaching you first, then applying later what you've been taught). The necessarily limited/fixed camera of found-footage means that either the character filming has to know that something is strange enough to merit attention, or the motion has to be unnatural enough to be clear when viewed from a static vantage point. When the characters (and the audience) don't know enough yet, the options for making scares are limited.
In dealing with the problem of how to induce terror from as-yet-meaningless events, Paranormal Activity did the genre a terrible disservice: It introduced The Hum. In conventional movies, the musical score is how you amp up anxiety, but how do you do it in a found-footage film? The Hum. The like static of the Silent Hill radio, The Hum lets you know it's time to get anxious. Used effectively, it makes the viewer tense enough that otherwise-unremarkable sudden movement is startling! Used most of the time, it telegraphs SPOOKY THING GONNA HAPPEN NOW in a way that not only can be hilariously counterproductive, but lets the filmmakers be lazy about building effective atmosphere elsewhere. The Hum is reflective of a kind of found-footage thinking that privileges jump scares over dread (which I will talk more about in a bit). I hate that.
If you point the initial question at Paranormal Activity, I would flip the percentages: 90% of its success is from its being first, 10% is things it did uniquely right. So it's no wonder the imitators are sucking more as they further fail to learn the lessons it failed to learn, because they're at a 90% disadvantage from the word 'go'.
But you also can't just set up a bunch of cameras in a house and then stay put, because everyone at this point will just say you want to be Paranormal Activity. So a weird sort of inheritance sometimes happens: A lot of found-footage movies take the lessons of Paranormal Activity and carry them back out into Blair-Witch-style explorations of unfamiliar territory. The fact that these movies are opposites in terms of structure should let you know exactly how well that works.
The lesson that seems be learned most from the Blair Witch Project is that if you shake the camera and go AAAAAAUGH a lot, it's scary. The lesson that seems to be learned from Paranormal Activity is that if you take a straight standard horror narrative and shoot it on amateur equipment, it's scary. The lesson that seems to be learned from both of those is that if you let the camera linger on a scared woman as she's suffering, it's scary. While I can understand the thought proceeses that might have connected these dots, they're also wrong.
Here is my best impression of the terrible, terrible formula too many modern Blair-Witch-wannabe found-footage movies use:
00:00-20:00: happy establishing shots, introducing the characters and their cameras, regular life, lots of laughs, some guns on mantlepieces
20:00-30:00: the Bad Decision that leads to the inevitable doom
30:00-45:00: wandering around the sets, examining props, shaking the camera, a comic fake-out jump scare, getting separated
45:00-50:00: person #1 dies, at which point everyone realizes that shit has gotten terribly real
50:00-60:00: running around, shaking the camera, shaking the camera more, keep shaking it, that's right
60:00-70:00: some important Reasons are found about the haunting; party is reduced to 1-2 members; cameras linger on panicky (female) characters
70:00-85:00: running around, shaking the camera, seeing the ghost, shaking the camera
85:00-90:00: ironic deaths of (almost) everyone involved, jump scare with promise of sequel and future franchise, roll credits with indie song
...But as I look back on this list, despite my occasional snark, I see nothing inherently wrong with any of these things individual elements. Most of them are things found in found-footage horror we like! In fact, the whole plot together is actually pretty solid. So why, on our great big horror spreadsheet, do found-footage films make up such a significant number of two- and one-star movies? (Keep in mind, too, that for us, two stars is as bad as you can get just by sucking; one star means you went out of your way be so bad and/or incoherent you made us mad.)
I think a large part of it has to do with the assumption that the format will cover a multitude of sins. I object to how these movies seem to think on-the-scene camera work itself is sufficient for creating fear, so that lets them off the hook with regards to making that fear make any kind of visual or narrative sense. No time to explain! Run! Run some more! Now run this way!
It's not that a horror movie has to make sense at all times. Most of the hauntings in the Blair Witch Project don't make sense! And by that I mean there's no often direct explanation of 'this is why the scary witch put this scary thing here, and this is what she meant by it!' But you know already that a) there is a scary witch, b) there are certain things the scary witch is connected with, and c) this thing you are seeing is one of those things. That is internal logic sufficient to commence audience freaking out.
Obviously, another major objection I have is to shaking the camera, but incoherent visuals are a big problem in found-footage horror. While there is a certain devotion to realism in acknowledging that panicky people pursued by ghosts are not the best cinematographers, there is only so much [blurry wall, blurry door, maybe a foot, blurry wall again] I can handle before I check out. With no visual interest, there's no reason for me to keep looking at the screen. Worse, I can usually tell that it's a cheap ploy to keep me from noticing two pieces of footage have been stitched together. (It's not usually a very effective one, either.)
So much of this, though, ties back to this idea that the format will tie everything together, that the audience doesn't need to know what's going on so long as the cameras are focused on people screaming and suffering, consecutively and concurrently. That's a terrible idea. It not only has an incredibly limited (and limiting) shelf life, it reveals some really uncomfortable thought processes.
In fact, there's often so much first-person lingering on the suffering of humans that it often negates one of the things I like best about found-footage stuff, which is that it's basically without exception supernatural. While I never know what to expect when I pick up a found-footage movie, I can basically rest assured that any human-on-human violence in it will be because ghosts are making the humans be violent toward one another. (A general rule in this household is that we don't like watching horror if the story is conceivably something we could have picked up the newspaper and read about that morning.) So maybe there's no humans in this movie enjoying doing violence, but the camera is enjoying seeing violence. I'm not comfortable with that at all.
There's a line I have -- heck, one that probably everyone has -- between 'eek, I don't want to see that!' and '...no, seriously, I don't want to see that.' That's the difference between shouting DON'T GO UPSTAIRS! while you know exactly where that character is going and how entertaining it's going to be when they get there, and just really wanting to turn off the movie now, thanks.
This is the part where I talk about dread.
To do that, I want to hop over to talk about video games. drmoonpants often says that the threat of player-character death in a video game can't really be scary, because you yourself are in no danger of anything, except a lot of grumbling frustration as you try to remember where the hell you saved last. What's actually scary is that it's going to let you see or experience something that's going to make you leave the light on when you go to sleep tonight, and it's going to make you see or experience that thing to proceed.
The straight-up scariest horror game I have ever played is the first Fatal Frame game. I have lots of stories about it (maybe for a different post), but here's one thing I loved: the doors. Most of the time, when you're running around, you see your player character from distant (and often very unhelpful) fixed third-person angles, so you can see her whole body. When she goes to open a door, though, the camera cuts in close to a slow, several-second-long animation of her doing the opening, during which you cannot control her or stop her in any way. Just about the time you've gotten the hang of this, you enter a room and explore it, and when you're done you open the door to leave and HOLY SHIT STUPIDLY POWERFUL GHOST ON THE OTHER SIDE GRABBING YOU, and you're left stumbling and staggering and panicky and trying to get your fighting camera up, and it's quite a heart-pounding surprise.
The game never pulls that again. It straight-up does not matter. Every. single. door. that I opened for the rest of that game, I held my breath. Even doors I'd gone through before, I couldn't trust. It was just a constant knotted-up expectation, and it never unknotted because even though I knew I'd made it through a door okay once, it wasn't guaranteed to be safe the next time.
That's dread.
A lot of the reason I'm writing this is because we saw the Gallows on Sunday and it was terrible. It did, however, do one scene pretty right, and that is when one character is separated from the others and navigating the world via the night-vision setting on his smart phone (okay). He's winding around through the backstage of an auditorium, through various prop and costume storage, and he comes upon this small, half-hidden open door that leads somewhere completely dark. And he stops. And looks. And takes several deep breaths.
And you know he's going to go in there, because of course he is, but you don't want him to go in there, because that door and what's behind it might as well be wearing a sign that says Bad Things Here. He hesitates long enough, though, that he might be backing out ... but then he goes in anyway. And nothing happens! Okay, he sees something spooky through a hole in the ceiling, and then there's a sudden crashing noise from afar that makes him run out of the room and towards the source, but nothing happens in the room itself. I was still keyed-up every second he was in there because I knew that he was in a bad place, and any second he could turn the corner and see something I didn't want to see.
Jump scares don't work in the absence of dread, though, but creating actual dread takes work and thought and time. So instead you get The Hum, which is artificial dread. Speaking ill of the Gallows now, the first real 'haunt' in the movie is several seconds' worth of The Hum, followed by a locker door's slo-o-o-o-owly swinging open. It was hilarious! I can't recall having seen something so blatantly telegraphed. Had the movie actually developed a heavy, creepy atmosphere, that isolated, unnatural motion could have given me the heebiejeebies. As it was, it might as well have had an Utena blinky finger going. (All love to the blinky finger, but it has its place.)
That's not the Gallows' first jump scare, though. There's one earlier where a stationary camera is pointing at a room and filming ... well, nothing; the only way you know the film didn't freeze is that the picture captures a TV in one corner, and that TV is still going. Ooh, camera on a single empty frame, something interesting must be about to happen! And so it seemed, until the camera stayed there for a hilariously long time. The whole thing started at intriguing, worked up to tense as nothing happened, and then backslid into humorously awkward as nothing continued happening. About two seconds before it hit out-and-out boring, the film's main asshole-jokester-who-deserves-death popped up from the bottom and went BOO! to the camera, his camera. Ha ha. So exciting. I don't even know why he was doing it, and to be fair, I don't think the character knew either. It was just that we! need! jump! scares! And the first one is always a kooky one. So wacky!
Jump scares are a divisive thing; I know some people think they're great, while others will not watch horror movies at all because they don't like them. I am not here to debate the relative merits of jump scares in entertainment. What I am going to say, though, is that they're so easy to do that the people doing them can get real lazy about it. Without the appropriate atmosphere of dread, you have to telegraph a scare (see: The Hum). If you telegraph a scare, anyone who can read a text knows it's coming, and the scare is no longer effective. So the whole movie becomes like someone in a rubber mask saying 'I'm going to scare you now!' before shouting boo!, and then repeating that every five minutes for an hour.
The trend of ending on a jump scare, too, has become so ridiculous that it's completely lost its effect. There is exactly one context in which that's effective, and that's in a packed-tight movie theater where everyone's hopped up on extra-large cokes and has already spent the past hour screeching intermittently. The final jump! Everyone screams! And then everyone laughs together because they've all survived! And while that kind of communal experience can be awesome, it also means that under pretty much any other circumstances, those last few frames fall flat as an unsurprising fart.
A movie cannot put you in physical danger (emotional triggers are a whole 'nother discussion), just like you know there's nothing under the bed that's going to grab your ankles when you walk by. In the short term, a movie can startle you by showing you something under a bed that isn't yours. In the long term, it can make you un-know that nothing's lying in wait for you at home.
I think my punchline is here, and it is this: The reason most found-footage horror movies fail is because they had no business being found-footage in the first place.
The Blair Witch Project would not have worked as a more traditional horror film. Same goes for Paranormal Activity. They are both stories that understand they are being told in a very particular way, and they go out of their way to make those stories match the medium.
So many of the failed found-footage films I'm thinking of are ones that would have failed even as traditional films, but that's because once you take away the found-footage gimmick, they've got basically nothing that isn't a couple jump scares punctuating a lot of running while screaming and shaking the camera. Others would have succeded if they'd lived out their lives as director's-eye movies, but wind up feeling like their potential plot and character development got put on the back burner in order to shoehorn in some running while screaming and shaking the camera.
I blame part (though not all) of this on the ubiquity of smart phones. In 1999, if you wanted to create a narrative around a bunch of people who filmed a horrifying event, those people had to have pretty specific reasons to have equipment that would let them record that much for that long, and to have that equipment with them in the first place. Now, you just need to have a bunch of Instagram-happy Millennials (and if you can work in a couple of digs against the narcissism of selfie culture, so much the better). What this means, though, is that because you basically can't separate horror-movie-aged-characters from film technology, some found-footage films no longer see a reason for creating a narrative specific to the way it's being told.
To try and justify their belonging to the genre, most of these found-footage movies involve framing devices that are just ridiculous. To pick on the Gallows again (because it's fresh in my mind), its frame starts with some text at the beginning about how this footage is property of such-and-such police department, evidence, official numbers, blah blah. Triple fail! One, no it's not, this is 2015 and we all know it's a movie. Two, we're expected to believe a local police department would just sit on some amateur and cop body-cam footage that shows, uh, actual ghosts? And three, that makes the first twenty happy-normal minutes of the movie weird, since there's no reason any of that footage of bullying nerds and checking lipstick would count as evidence. If you deleted those first fifteen seconds, nothing would change, which is the sign of a pretty unnecessary frame.
Tell you what, the Gallows would have been a lot more successful as a more traditionally told film. It still would have had a paper-thin reason for a haunting and strain credibility in a billion other ways, but it would have held together just fine, without all the extra 'why are they still filming? who cut this together?' suspensions of disbelief. The same things could have happened. Even the whole red-lit stairwell scene (which got shown in its entirety in the trailers, for some reason) could have been filmed almost exactly the same, without pretending someone had dropped a camera that miraculously framed the action perfectly. And also there wouldn't have been a lot of running while screaming and shaking the camera.
Please stop running while screaming and shaking the camera. Please.
Okay! There's a lot more to be talked about here -- experiential vs. narrative horror, the pornography of first-person suffering, the male gaze, spiritual specialists and (anti-)intellectualism, how to kill your cast ironically, what found-footage storytelling does to the concept of the Final Girl -- but I think I've babbled on way too long already, so I'm going to wind it up.
Who Does It Right?
It may shock you to find out that I still like found-footage as a genre! So many terrible, terrible things have been done with and to it, but when it works, it works so good. Here are some films I feel understood (at least in part) what The Blair Witch Project did right, then set out with that information to do something different.
Paranormal Activity: Yes, everything else I said above is true, plus it is shit on gender, and it makes heterosexuality look about as appealing as drinking grapefruit juice after brushing your teeth. But it really does the genre proud, as evidenced by how it ushered in a whole legion of imitators. It establishes a reason to have eight billion cameras running at all times, it relies heavily on practical effects, and it actually pulls off some serious scares (though now that I've warned you about The Hum, I may have ruined the whole thing for you, sorry).
Grave Encounters: Part of the brilliance here is that the whole thing is presented like a TV special, so the constant cuts and edits make sense in that context. It's just balls-to-the-wall scary. As the situation deteriorates, it does so not into panic, but into long stretches of quiet hopelessness. ...All of which makes the ending just plain goofy, but hey, by that point we were both so stomach-clenchingly scared that a stupid, overdramatic, and frankly nonsensical CGI-heavy ending was just what the horror doctor ordered.
Lake Mungo: The one takes the found-footage bits, adds some found-audio bits, and puts them into a fake documentary that contextualizes everything that's going on. All the recordings presented are given with the reasons why they were recorded at the time, and they're interspersed with static images, news footage, and interviews. Thus, if you (like me) hate compulsive, excessive camera-shaking, this is definitely the way to go. It remains one of my all-time favorite horror movies, and it makes me cry in both sadness and terror whenever we watch it.
Europa Report: This time the footage comes from space! So it's not straight horror, it's science-fiction horror, which adds an entirely new dimension to things. And this one, more than any of these others except Lake Mungo, relies on the after-the-fact interpretation of the footage to make the footage itself make sense.
Rec: Two of the big problems with found footage: why the hell aren't they running away, and why the hell are they still filming? The folk with cameras in Rec are a news crew! They have a duty to document these weird goings-on, as they're trapped in an apartment building, under quarantine as something awful goes on inside and/or outside, it's sometimes hard to tell.
Unfriended: While there have been plenty of memorable Skype horror bits (the bone-chilling bit from the first V/H/S comes to mind), Unfriended commits for an entire full-length movie, shot in real time and presented as a single computer screen. Perhaps its best choice is to leave the cursor onscreen and to use it instead of any keyboard shortcuts; that not only directs the viewer's attention, it makes sure windows don't appear just to be swapping and disappearing with no reason. Minus its last ten dopey seconds, where it falls into the END WITH A JUMPSCARE! cliche, it's a solid, scary film.