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 didnt appreciate it, or was not scared by it, until the very end, where the documentarians - and this is a spoiler alert - enter the Witchs creepy house, Josh is seen in the corner, Mikes 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. Its 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.