10 Movie Innovations That Happened Earlier Than You Think

8. Found Footage - The Connection (1961)

Found footage is one of the most influential cinematic subgenres of the last two decades, popularised of course by the immense success of 1999's low-fi horror smash The Blair Witch Project.

And while genre fans will quite rightly point you to both The Last Broadcast - released the year prior to Blair Witch - and 1980's Cannibal Holocaust as prototypical found footage offerings, its beginnings actually go much further back.

Shirley Clarke's 1961 film The Connection was an early stab at both the found footage film and the mockumentary, revolving around a budding filmmaker who hangs out with eight drug addicts waiting for their hook-up, and quickly gets dragged into their lurid world.

Though a drama rather than a horror film, The Connection adheres to all the expected stylistic tenets of found footage, namely characters acknowledging the presence of the camera, and even opening with a title card explaining that the film's footage was assembled by the disappeared filmmaker's cameraman.

While the style didn't connect with mainstream audiences until many years later, Clarke's film laid the groundwork for one of cinema's most distinctive emergent genres.