Sure, people had already been doing found footage movies just look at The Last Broadcast a year earlier. Where Scream reinvented a genre by pulling the shades back to reveal the inner workings of horror, The Blair Witch Project went the opposite route by crafting a new style of presentation and especially promotion. The Blair Witch Project Year: 1999 Directors: Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick If there’s such a thing as “horror drama,” this documentary-style film deserves the title. Powerfully acted and subtly shot, it’s a tense (if grainy) family drama with hints of the supernatural drifting around the fraying edges of their sanity. It centers around a family that has been shattered by a daughter’s drowning, and the family’s subsequent entanglement in what may or may not be a haunting, and the mother’s desire to determine what kind of life her daughter had been living. You could call it a member of the “mumblegore” family, without the gore. Lake Mungo could scarcely be more different from something like Grave Encounters-there are no ghosts or demons chasing screaming people down the hall, and it’s chiefly a story about family, emotion and our desire to seek closure after death. Lake Mungo Year: 2008 Director: Joel Anderson Anyone genre-savvy will no doubt see where it’s going, but it’s a well-crafted ride that succeeds on the strength of chemistry between its two principal leads in a way that reminds me of the scenes between Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac in Ex Machina. The early moments of back-and-forth between the pair crackle with a sort of awkward intensity. Duplass, who can be charming and kooky in something like Safety Not Guaranteed, shines here as the deranged lunatic who forces himself into the protagonist’s life and haunts his every waking moment. It leans entirely on its performances, which are excellent. Starring the ever-prolific Mark Duplass, it’s a character study of two men-naive videographer and not-so-secretly psychotic recluse, the latter of which hires the former to come document his life out in a cabin in the woods. Creep Year: 2014 Director: Patrick BriceĬreep is a somewhat predictable but cheerfully demented little indie horror film, the directorial debut by Brice, who also released this year’s The Overnight. Here are the 40 best found footage horror movies:ġ. But also expect to find hidden gems of the subgenre, underappreciated franchise entries and plenty of films that will leave you wondering if what you saw was true. We at Paste enjoy horror of all flavors, so our ranking of the best found footage horror films include movies both from our ranking of the best 100 horror movies of all time, and our examination of 100 years of horror movies. An unstable camera, hyper-realistic performances that feel intentionally non-professional, the blurring of fiction and truth through framing devices-found footage has defining markers of its own, but it’s a truly distinct and diverse subgenre that’s got so much more to offer than Paranormal Activity (and even that movie is unfairly maligned).Īs found footage has evolved alongside technology, either through freaking out a new generation on TikTok or by updating its methods of being “found” for the digital era, the subgenre has proved itself one of the most flexible and welcoming to filmmakers looking to play around with form and to scare the bejesus out of us. But a relatively modern subgenre innovation, the found footage horror film, seemingly throws all that out the window.

Creepy sets and props, outrageous kills, gruesome makeup, and camera moves perfectly designed to deny us just enough-horror owes more to its consistent visual language than perhaps any other genre.

Horror movies made us jump for decades thanks to their calculated constructions.

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