15 Worthwhile Found Footage Thrillers You've Never Seen

15. The Last Broadcast (1998)

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Setting aside Cannibal Holocaust in the 80€™s, it€™s The Last Broadcast€”making festival rounds a full year before the emergence of The Blair Witch Project€”that was the first €œfound footage€ horror movie out of the gate. In fact, the two films have a very similar initial gist; filmmakers looking to explore a local legend go into the woods and never come out alive. While The Blair Witch Project left its story to the discovered footage, Broadcast presents everything from a faux documentary special perspective. So, why did one garner all the acclaim, and the other was promptly forgotten about?

Marketing and approach no doubt played into this, and by the time your average viewer even heard of Broadcast€”provided they did€”it was a footnote to Blair€™s popularity. There€™s also the reality that BWP is just the better movie and it emotionally involved the audience in its doomed characters plight. Nonetheless, The Last Broadcast is still worth seeing, if for no other reason than to observe how the crew got around their own budgetary limitations and pre-empted the entire headspace that would eventually spawn from the found footage craze.

There€™s not attempt to connect with the characters in Last Broadcast, but as we watch documentary filmmaker David Leigh struggle to put together evidence to exonerate murder suspect Jim Suerd (who has been blamed for the dead kids in the woods), the movie plays with perception and the way media can create bogeyman without the aid of supernatural forces. The ending breaks from the rigorous format and doesn€™t necessarily make a lot of sense, but it puts a cap on an interesting exercise that still has something to offer curious viewers.

 
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