9 Found Footage Fates Worse Than Death

Hearing the phrase "found footage" admittedly often creates a shiver down a horror hound's spine. While there are some brilliant found footage offerings out there, this is a subgenre that has been bastardised over the past few decades, with so many horrendous pictures being served up under this particular label.

When done right, there's nothing quite as unsettling as a clever found footage film. After all, the very nature of the sub-genre is to put we, the audience, in the middle of a situation that may even have a sense of relatability to it.

Regardless of the relatability or not, we're very much there, front and centre, with the protagonists of a found footage effort, experiencing first-hand what it would be like to be in some truly awful situations. Those awful situations, of course, usually then end up spiralling completely out of control.

On that front, while death is clearly a very common occurrence in this subgenre, there are those times in a found footage movie where death seems like a far more appealing option than what we see play out.

With that in mind, then, are nine times that found footage movies served up horrific fates that surely had their characters pleading for their deaths to arrive ASAP - rather than be faced with the terrors presented to them!

Host isn't the first film to make use of webcam technology or video calling, yet it's a movie that felt so fresh when it landed on our collective laps last year via the Shudder streaming platform.

2020 was a year in which the world was turned upside down, with quarantine restrictions and lockdown regulations in place across the globe. From the minds of Rob Savage, Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd, though, Host managed to take this painfully real situation and use it as the launching point for one of the most impressive horrors of the year.

Like the rest of us, the core cast of Host find themselves partaking in weekly Zoom calls to help pass the monotony of lockdown life and isolation. What was unique about the particular video chat featured in this picture, though, is that it began with a fake séance that ultimately led to a very real demonic presence coming to the fore.

By the time this swift 56-minute offering concludes, the only fates left up in the air are those of Jemma and Haley - as the rest of the characters have had their heads smashed into their PC screen, their necks broken, been burned alive or terrified enough to cause their own death.

For Jemma and Haley, they've had to watch the majority of these brutal ordeals unravel for their friends - all while being tormented themselves, up until the movie ends as the call's Zoom timer runs out.