In 1999, The Blair Witch Project made around $250 million at the movie office while costing only $60,000 to produce. Even now, it’s still hard to properly comprehend that figure. The reason the movie was successful was not because it had any production merit, but rather because it left viewers wondering for a few uncomfortable days whether what they were seeing was real. The result was that ambiguity. It was only three actors in the woods with a camera.
Somewhere around the middle of the 2010s, found footage horror went out of style. The shaky camera became a byword for low budget rather than low budget done effectively, the market was overrun by copycats, and viewers became weary of a genre that had been used for everything from superhero origin stories to alien encounters to haunted flats. It began to seem like a gimmick. overexposed. predictable. Then the world changed in a way that restored the format’s relevance.
These days, we constantly watch a documentary about ourselves. Doorbell cameras record deliveries, disputes, and mishaps. Dashcams capture altercations and collisions. Every public gathering, demonstration, and every everyday street corner encounter that has the potential to become exceptional has phone cameras. Convenience store security footage appears on the evening news. Recordings from ring cameras are shared on local apps. The style that found footage filmmakers worked for years to create as a convincing fake is now merely Tuesday.
In its recent comeback, the genre is taking advantage of this societal shift. A horror movie no longer appears to be an artistic decision when it begins with shaky smartphone footage of something in the trees; instead, it appears to have been filmed. The brain’s danger detection system struggles to discern between “this is a stylistic decision” and “this is real,” particularly when the visual grammar is consistent with what we see on our daily screens. The movies that have grasped this the best in recent years haven’t made an effort to persuade viewers that they are real. Because the scenarios themselves are part of everyday life, they have created scenarios that feel authentic.
This was expanded upon by the screenlife format. Movies like Unfriended completely repositioned the camera, allowing viewers to see a horror story evolve via a desktop computer, video calls, chat windows, and file folders. Millions of people spend the majority of their waking hours in the exact interface where it is configured. There is no sense that the fear is taken from another realm. It seems as though it might appear on your own screen.
The Backrooms phenomena, which originated on the internet, expanded the reasoning into something more bizarre. On image boards, YouTube, and Reddit, footage of deserted hallways, fluorescent-lit office corridors that seem endlessly long, and the enduring feeling that space has been arranged by something that doesn’t comprehend how people move through the world spread, creating real, persistent dread without a conventional narrative structure. Not one character. No storyline. Just video of the kind of area that ought to be empty but isn’t.
Big studios have taken note. Production is underway for a reboot of Blair Witch. The format appears to be attracting both new creative energy and nostalgia-driven funding, as evidenced by independent films like Heritage and a remake of Faces of Death. The track record of high-budget found footage is uneven, in part because the need to polish something goes against the requirements of the genre.
