8. Found Footage
I admit, Blair Witch Project kind of creeped me out. It was hard to see what was going on, which is as unnerving as it is nauseating. Then the relative clarity of the films last scenethe image of the missing hiker facing the wallwas shockingly effective. And the first Paranormal Activity was great: staring intently at the screen and recoiling as footprints appeared out of thin air is what horror is all about. But enough already. Really. Do we need four movies about a ghost that haunts a family in which every branch and every generation sets up video equipment throughout their entire houses? Do we need 18,000an admittedly inexact countpoorly-made rip-offs of Paranormal Activity? Do I need to sit through two more hours of a movie trying to silence that voice in my head insistently asking why would you carry the camera with you as you walk around your house? I realize that just about every horror movie is kind of unbelievable, and every horror hit leads to innumerable clones. But the nature of found footage exacerbates both these qualities. First the unbelievability. When I was little, I loved Americas Funniest Home Videos until my dad pointed out its unlikely a family would just happen to be filming a dog playing catch and happen to capture the image of the dog knocking over a little kid. It had to be staged. Obviously every horror movie is staged. But when the point of a sub-genrelike found footageis to seem real, and you spend the entire time struggling to accept the reality, theres a problem. Second the rip-offs. Film studios are not churning out found footage movies because of their pseudo-documentary value or ability to give us an unfiltered glimpse at horror. Theyre doing it because theyre cheap, even cheaper than the cheaply-produced slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s. I get horror films are rarely pieces of art, but when the latest found footage feature is neither well-done nor scary, its time to call it quits. I guess my irritation comes down to the fact that the entire sub-genre is basically built off of a gimmick; the hint of true-story behind the horror and the bare bones nature of the production and scares. It was clever at first, satisfyingly scary after a few iterations, but by now its just tired.