10 Deceitful Movies That Lied About Film-Making

8. Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)

Ruggero Deodato's brutally disturbing film Cannibal Holocaust is one of the first "found footage" films to have ever been produced. It wasn't until 1999, though, that the found footage genre would hit the mainstream with the release of The Blair Witch Project. Since then the genre has taken off, with popular films like Cloverfield and REC having come out of Hollywood. Cannibal Holocaust claims to be about an American television station that wants to broadcast a series of reels that were found in the Amazon Rainforest- the remaining evidence from a lost documentary film crew. The film was actually shot in the Amazon, using real natives and containing real acts of brutality, including violence, sexual assault and the slaughter of live animals. It's an incredibly disturbing film, not for the faint of heart. After its Italian premiere, Deodato was arrested on charges obscenity and faced accusations that actors were actually killed on camera. He was later cleared of all charges, but the film was banned around the world- relegating it to a state of obscurity. Prior to the internet at least... Found footage films like Cannibal Holocaust tend to fraudulently emulate amateur films- with the actors themselves often shooting on handheld camcorders, with shaky imagery and natural- sometimes unscripted- acting. Lloyd Kaufman (of Troma fame) has pointed out that, "In Cannibal Holocaust, we see the actors kill and rip apart a giant sea turtle and other animals. The brain has been conditioned to accept that which it's now seeing as real. This mixture of real and staged violence, combined with the handheld camerawork and the rough, unedited quality of the second half of the movie, is certainly enough to convince someone that what they are watching is real." With this in mind, it's safe to say that found footage films have lied about their origins to achieve a certain effect- one usually adopted in horror films. Similar to what we will see in the next section with documentaries, found footage films rely upon the viewers conditioning, which directs them to accept the authority of the realistic looking images they are seeing on the screen.