10 Annoying Problems With Found Footage Movies

Every generation of horror is defined by some new gimmick, and for the past decade that's been found footage. The subgenre was revived thanks to Paranormal Activity in 2009, and now some of the most successful low budget films in recent years have made use of this device. So why is found footage so popular?

On a creative level, it's a way of placing the audience that much closer to the action, making it easier to relate to the main characters while experiencing their point of view. Found footage also helps establish these films as taking place in the real world as opposed to some fictional movie world, so when crazy things start happening, it's that much scarier. When done well, this first person style can result in some pretty amazing films. 

Yet there are plenty of annoying problems with this gimmick that a lot of films suffer from, annoyances and questions that pop up in even the best entries. These 10 issues are ones that the directors hope you'll just forget about, but when they happen over and over, they can really suck you out of the film. With the opening of The Gallows proving that found footage is still going strong, let's take a look at 10 annoying problems with the genre.

Here’s a question every found footage movie hopes the audience isn’t asking: who exactly is editing this footage together and presenting it to you?

With a lot of these films, this is apparently supposed to be footage directly from the camera. Yet there are clearly edits all throughout, with movie-like timing and cuts between scenes where it doesn’t make sense for the person to have just stopped recording. Sometimes there are even things added into the film in editing, like time stamps, title cards and music, so within the movie’s reality, there’s obviously an editor that combed through the tape and is presenting it to the audience.

But barely any of these movies ever address this (unless they're in the style of a fake documentary), and that creates a weird disconnect. Someone is obviously editing the footage, yet they don’t take out bits that clearly don’t need to be there, such as the scenes of characters just sitting around by the pool talking. So by the movie's logic, was this footage of people’s actual deaths acquired by some film studio that then hired an editor to piece it together into a scary movie? If so, that’s almost more messed up than anything in the actual films.