10 Annoying Problems With Found Footage Movies

Nearly every found footage movie struggles with the fact that in many of these circumstances, it makes absolutely no sense for the person to still be holding the camera and pointing it at the action.

Of course, they have to do so because otherwise there's no movie, but when a giant monster is attacking New York City, would you really still be carrying around a camcorder and filming everything? When you drop the camera in the midst of people dying all around you, would you really run back and grab it? Would you still be filming as everyone's life is at risk including your own?

Some of these movies try to deal with this by explaining that filming helps the main character deal with the situation at hand, like in Chronicle where Andrew starts recording as a coping strategy. Other films have gotten more innovative over time and placed the camera out of the characters’ hands to avoid this problem, such as a segment in V/H/S where the camera is on the character’s head.

But for any movie that involves a person actually holding a camera, there is almost always the inevitable moment where any reasonable person would have dropped that thing already.