When Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin claimed to have shot footage of the creature known as Bigfoot in 1967, they unwittingly inspired a clutch of dirt-cheap docudramas where the line between fact and fiction was kept deliberately blurry. One of the most popular was Charles B Pierces The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1972), which purported to be an investigation into monster sightings in Arkansas swamp country. Years later, filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, searching for a story they could film cheaply and quickly, took inspiration from those movies to create The Blair Witch Project. They may also have been familiar with the Mondo Cane school of exploitation documentaries - where events were staged or manipulated - a technique that also inspired Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Then there was Man Bites Dog (1992), where a film crew follows a killer around Brussels as he randomly murders people. The film ends with a shot that would become the trademark of most future found footage films (including Blair Witch) as the cameraman drops the camera and the movie cuts to black. When Blair Witch opened in 1999, backed by a saturation marketing campaign, it went on to become one of the most profitable and influential horror films of all time, providing no-budget filmmakers with a virtual blueprint for realizing their vision as cheaply as possible. What was a novelty, however, quickly became tired, familiar and predictable as too many people with too little inspiration boarded the bandwagon. If youre in the mood for self-abuse though, try watching the following films in one sitting.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
