This decade's most prominent gimmick, found footage, is full of cliches that can quickly get annoying. There's the protagonist who inexplicably films everything in the face of danger, and inevitably one of his friends yells at him to stop recording. The cheapest trope, though, is the jump scare based entirely around editing. Here's what will happen in way too many of these movies: the character is filming something and everything is really quiet. Maybe they're walking through a creepy house or some sort of abandoned ruins. Then, because this is just somebody's home movie, the tape suddenly cuts to another scene which is super loud, and so the audience jumps because of the sudden spike in audio. This is essentially an excuse to sneak in an easy jump scare and make it seem like a natural part of the footage. What you're jumping at isn't anything scary; it's just the fact that there was no audio before and then everything got loud out of nowhere. At least with other jump scares, it makes sense because the audio spike is part of the soundtrack. What's going on here, though? Was the person walking along and then they randomly stopped recording? Did whoever was editing this footage want to freak people out, so they put in a quick cut? It's cheap, overused, and needs to be retired.
