5. Found Footage
I get it. These movies are cheap to make. People like them. What I
don't get is€ why do people like them? I mean, they have a terrible reputation for being downright awful. Think back to the last found footage horror you went to see. It was rubbish, wasn't it? You felt like you wasted your entire evening, didn't you? You forgot it a day later, right? That's because there are only, like, five genuinely good found footage movies in existence:
The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, REC, Chronicle, and
Paranormal Activity. And I'm not even totally sure about
Paranormal Activity (I'm not including
District 9, because that kind of abandoned its found footageness halfway through). The rest? Simply not worth your time. As long as we keep going to see them, of course, they're going to keep getting made. Audiences like the idea of being scared, and since
Blair Witch I think people are still convinced that these types of movie are the "scariest" (and therefore the best suited to make them jump). Which is fine, I suppose, but they're all the same, relentlessly produced and - ultimately - boring as hell. There also seems to be something of a "have you seen the latest ?" aspect to modern living, as though society demands we keep up with the movies in this specific subgenre. Barely any of these movies are going to stand the test of time, though, and the less of them Hollywood makes the better. What we need is a nice, decade-long break from found footage movies and then somebody can come back and deconstruct this little sub-genre ala
Cabin in the Woods. Maybe then we'll realise how ridiculous the concept really was all along.