2. Poor Editing Choices
One of the things that I like best about found footage movies is that in certain situations, it presents the opportunity for long, continuous takes of action sequences. These can bring great suspense and show off really clever applications of special effects. One of the things I dont love, however, is when these scenes are broken up by camera glitches and needless and unexplained cuts in the footage. I understand that this is done to splice different takes together, but it breaks up the action in too jarring a fashion. The long take is one of the best things found-footage has going for it, why ruin its rhythm by cutting it up? Take, for example, the last short film in the horror anthology
V/H/S. The main characters are bolting through a haunted house, searching for escape. As they pass through the halls, arms reach out to grab them, furniture moves and flies around, and doors and windows vanish. Its a great scene, but then it starts getting split up by unnecessary jump cuts and edits. Each time the scene cuts, were pulled a step back out of the action, instead of being pulled deeper and deeper into the mania taking place on screen.