found footage, in film, a cinematic technique in which some or all of a narrative film’s shots are presented as if they were recordings of nonfiction events that have been discovered and relayed to the audience with little or no mediation. Found footage can be considered a form of so-called “mockumentary” filmmaking, in which a narrative film is presented as if it were a nonfiction documentary film. The found footage film technique was popularized with the 1999 release of The Blair Witch Project, which purports to be the final footage shot by three missing documentarians who were investigating a supposedly haunted woodland, and has since been closely associated with the horror genre. Because of generally low budgetary requirements, found footage films can be extraordinarily successful investments—both The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity (2007) are among the most profitable films of all time in terms of their revenue compared with their production budgets.
Controversial Italian horror film Cannibal Holocaust (1980)—in which numerous real animals are slaughtered on-screen—is often considered the first found footage film, using the conceit that a professor has stumbled upon a lost film shot by a documentary crew who went missing in the Amazon Rainforest. Interestingly, Orson Welles had incorporated found footage techniques into his film The Other Side of the Wind years before Cannibal Holocaust, but the film was unfinished and unreleased until 2018. Few found footage films were made in the 1980s and ’90s. However, with the massive financial and critical success of The Blair Witch Project, as well as the development of increasingly sophisticated handheld video technology, found footage experienced a popularity boom with more than a thousand found footage films, the great majority of them horror films, being produced in the subsequent decades.
Found footage films typically present themselves in one of four ways, or some combination of the four. First, the film may operate under the conceit that one of the characters in the story is holding a camera, recording what is going on from a first-person perspective. This technique has several advantages, most notably that it is generally cheap, can provide an excuse for amateurish framing and sound recording, and can create tension by limiting the audience’s perspective to that of a single character. As seen in the 2008 blockbuster Cloverfield, it often involves the use of “shaky cam,” in which the camera moves continually and unpredictably to convey realistic movement and disorient the audience.
A second common approach leans into the mockumentary format, using interview footage and ostensibly more-professional camerawork. Presenting the film as having been recorded as a more formal document of the events ensures a narrative reason for the story to be recorded and provides opportunities for expository dialogue. Though the mockumentary format is very popular, in order to be a true found footage film, the film must be presented as if the footage had been lost and was rediscovered, as in The Last Exorcism (2010), and not presented as intended by the “documentary” filmmakers.
A related method is to present the found footage as news coverage of the events of the story, often using the conceit of a camera operator and a reporter on the site of the events of the film. This can justify the inclusion of features of both the handheld approach and the mockumentary approach and is the primary style used in the influential Spanish horror film [REC] (2007).
Finally, the footage in the film may be presented as if it were surveillance footage or other passive recordings of the events. In this format, the camera is generally static, and the events of the film are depicted as having been automatically recorded, with the footage later recovered. This method allows the filmmakers to free the camera from the perspective of a character in the story, allowing characters to appear together and justifying shots in which there may be no characters present. This approach is rarely the only one used in a feature-length film, but it has been used to great effect in Paranormal Activity and its sequels.
These formats are frequently used in concert. In the found footage superhero thriller Chronicle (2012), for example, much of the early footage is presented as having been shot by the main character, but, as the film progresses, footage taken by other characters, from news reports, and from surveillance cameras is used to provide different perspectives on the film’s events. Found footage can also be blended with more traditional filmmaking techniques to create hybrid films, such as the Japanese horror comedy One Cut of the Dead (2017).
An offshoot of found footage is the so-called “screenlife” technique, in which a film is presented as taking place on the screen of a single device (or occasionally multiple devices), such as a laptop, tablet, or cell phone. Characters are often shown through video chats and may also communicate with each other via e-mail or text message. Found footage techniques are common in these films, including the use of simulated news footage, handheld streaming video, and footage found online. Notable examples of screenlife films are the horror movie Unfriended (2014) and the mystery Searching (2018).
The term found footage can also refer to film works that genuinely consist of, or otherwise incorporate, old footage found by directors and exhibitors. These materials may be repurposed into new art or exhibited as is at film festivals.