10 Essential Found Footage Horrors To Watch Before Blair Witch

Alan Yates (Carl Gabriel Yorke) is a filmmaker from the Mondo Cane school of ruthless manipulation, whose previous documentary, The Last Road To Hell, showed several fake executions performed by soldiers paid to “do a bit of acting.”

When he and his colleagues enter the jungle to capture footage of a tribe “known for their cruelty”, they kill animals, burn huts and discharge weapons in order to get the shots they want, terrorizing the locals and forcing them into acts of savagery. Eventually, they’re torn apart and eaten in front of their own camera, footage that’s later recovered and screened by New York anthropologist Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman).

Ruggero Deodato’s film-within-a-film is so effective that Sergio Leone reportedly praised its authenticity but remarked that audiences would find it a little too real. Such remarks proved prescient when, shortly after the Italian premiere, Deodato was arrested and charged with obscenity, a charge he evaded only when he produced his actors in court to prove he hadn’t made a snuff movie. What he couldn’t dispute was that all the violence against animals in the movie was real.

In scenes intended to show the characters’ descent into savagery, pigs, racoons, turtles, monkeys and snakes were slaughtered by Ruggero and his crew, who subsequently cooked the critters and ate them.

Top that, Blair Witch.