7 Reasons Why Found Footage is the Future of American Horror

Here's why found footage is American horror's saving grace.

A few times in your lifetime as a cinemagoer, you are lucky enough to be around when a real game-changer is released - for example, The Dark Knight, Avatar (debatable...) or Toy Story come to mind for me. But one film, like it or not, that is without question a game-changer in American cinema was The Blair Witch Project - it is one of the most profitable films of time, which practically invented viral marketing in the age of the Internet, and ushered in a whole new level of audience interaction beyond the screen; in short, a true milestone and a phenomenon. I was very young when I watched it, so perhaps that is why I didn€™t appreciate it, or was not scared by it, until the very end, where the documentarians - and this is a spoiler alert - enter the Witch€™s creepy house, Josh is seen in the corner, Mike€™s camera is dropped and we end on Heather screaming. It was simple, perhaps too simple, and very effective - it has stayed with me since, and was genuinely a very affecting moment. It€™s not the greatest example of horror, but it represents horror, nay, filmmaking as a whole at its best - it did to the woods what Jaws did to the Ocean. It shook up the genre like Halloween before it. Most importantly, it successfully introduced a type of horror filmmaking to the mainstream unlike any of its predecessors - that of "found footage". And in my opinion, this is the future of American horror cinema. I intend to illustrate my point by detailing the state of American horror cinema, 4 remarkable examples of the benefits of this new subgenre, and how a new generation of terror can avoid the pitfalls of found footage and create horror films to stand up among the past greats.
Contributor
Contributor

Aspiring Director, Screenwriter and Actor. Film is my passion, but I indulge in TV, Theatre and Literature as well! Any comments or suggestions, please tweet me @IAmOscarHarding