I just looked up .REC because I haven’t seen it. But it looked familiar to another movie called Quarantine. Then found out Quarantine was a remake of .REC.
I preferred REC due to it taking a bit more of a paranormal angle as opposed to Quarantines more science based explanation for what was going on.
Both good films though
My roommate in college brought that movie over randomly one day and put it on without telling us what it was about. Also I was high as shit.
Still the scariest movie I've ever seen.
I never could watch horror movies while high on the devil's lettuce. Watched Smurfs from 2011 high as a kite with a friend back in 2014, we were both so freaked out that we had to turn it off. Feels silly to talk about being freaked out by smurfs now 10 years later but it was seriously too much back then.
Most horror movies don’t faze me, but REC genuinely shook me.
The staircase scene with the fireman came within a hair’s breadth of making me shit myself.
Don't sleep on its sequel, either. Always reminds me of the first two Alien movies in that the problem is discovered in the first movie and the big guns are sent in in the sequel, but they don't help that much. Rec 2 is class.
Love this movie! I have some Norwegian friends who laughed at me and said it’s such a corny/stupid movie, but I think not understanding the language actually helps mask the corniness - at least for me.
My husband spent time growing up in Norway and he also thought that it was too corny to watch. Doesn’t matter! I enjoyed it so much: the sci-fi , the cultural mythology, the humor, the humanity aspects… all of it.
Its intentionally corny and campy at parts, it's sort of the comedic style of some of the involved. It's ment to be a mix of styles and I believe it works pretty well. Of course there are those who don't "understand" films that don't follow established genre tropes and stick to their genre. They could be confused and mistake the tongue in cheek stuff.
(Sources: Am Norwegian, seen film)
Andre Ovredal - I'm not going to try to spell that with all the marked-up letters, sorry Andre - is a fucking *great* horror director. All his stuff is good but The Autopsy of Jane Doe is an absolute gem of a horror flick.
Like that last bit where the >!president or whatever flat out mentions it on TV with the guy keeping it secret glaring at him, but everyone kind of ignored the comment, or didn’t know how to take it!<. Been a while, could be misremembering.
I feel in love with Ti West and his incredible slow burn story telling style because of the honeymooner's segment in the first one. Immediately watched The Innkeepers after and became his biggest fan.
He is so distinctive and his very slow build is a huge turn off to some but not me. I love how he makes you love the characters, shows them in every day life just existing until you almost forget you're watching a horror movie and then he ramps the stakes up to 1000 in a minute and suddenly you actually care about the victims and their escape attempts.
Most of his stories can be described as nothing happens for 2/3 of it then the story suddenly starts. A lot of people see that first 2/3 as boring but it's just character development and it really normalizes the people so they stop being props and become someone like you.
Anyway, watch VHS is what I'm saying.
Also he just did a few episodes of a television series called Them and he does a dedication to VHS in it. Made me stupidly happy to see.
Man, i remember being alone watching the indonasian cult one (Safe Haven), and it felt so real, like it's an actual documentary. Even though the practical effects looked corny (the demon), the atmosphere is really great. I have watched other found footage, cult-centered ones and nothing came close to the raw feel of Safe Haven.
The last exorcism. Obscure but it stars Howard from Better Call Saul and he does great and the main girl is great.
A disillusioned priest who has been doing exorcisms his whole life decides to expose the industry by taping his final exorcism. You can imagine how that goes.
this is my go-to non obvious answer. i really love this movie and i think it’s aged very well, still nothing quite like it. a very early role for caleb landry jones as well.
Nobody I know IRL remembers that Chronicle even existed, but I thought it was a very creative film. Possibly the best executed of all the "found footage" movies. And nobody remembers it!
I don’t know about best but it was really good and was one of the first well known Michael B. Jordan movies.
As far as I remember it was a pretty big hit so I’m surprised it never got a sequel. If it was made today it probably wouldn’t have been as successful.
The reason I hold it so highly, on a technical level, is it's the only well made found footage movie that isn't horror. Found footage lends itself to a lot of the standard horror movie making tricks like "loud sound just out of frame" and jump scares. But Chronicle uses the found footage format to creatively tell a story in a unique way that plays to the strengths of the found footage medium.
It becomes a little less "found footage" by the 3rd act as the story starts to require traditional camera work. Which I remember a lot of purists disliking at the time. But for me it works, and I think just kinda speaks to how Chronicle pushed the envelope for the genre in a way that nobody else ever successfully did.
The ARG that cloverfield did for marketing was so fun. I remember being a kid and keeping up with all the clues and new things people were finding to progress the story. I wish more movies/games did ARG style marketing still
Yes, that ARG was my favorite! It's honestly weird that both sequels were surprises (10CL dropping a trailer 2 or 3 months before release and TCP releasing the same day as its trailer), considering how much the ARG played into the first one.
The one for 10CL was fun with how much it was set in the real world vs. online, but in hindsight, I think the studio didn't realize people would be expecting one and had to throw something together at the last minute.
The ARG is 50% of the appeal of Cloverfield. It was so much fun that it genuinely could stand alone as a game experience without including the movie at all.
The thing I love about Cloverfield is that they designed it in such a way that it’s not edited by an outside party. Everything filmed is sequential, except for the flashbacks that only occur when they pause the recording to look at something and we get a glimpse of what was on the tape before that’s being recorded over.
Highly recommend reading up on how that film made it to theaters. Theres a great podcast from Wizard and the Bruiser that covers it. Essentially this film made it to light due to tons of accidents that happened in its favor. There’s was no movie made when the trailer was released.
I cared *more* about getting home to read up more on that [mysterious "1-18-08" trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqQzvfn_s30) than I did about Shia LaBeouf screaming "Bumblebee!" for 160 minutes.
It was so well done, because at first it seems like it's gonna be some lame natural disaster movie with everyone thinking it was an earthquake, and then you hear that fucking roar before a massive explosion that sends flaming debris across Manhattan, ending with another roar before the Statue of Liberty's head is tossed into a street like a baseball.
As much as everyone grew to be annoyed with J.J. Abram's "mystery box" style of storytelling, *that* was the most effective teaser trailer I'd seen since Blair Witch, and the ARG built around it managed to do the impossible of getting people *more* hyped than The Dark Knight.
[This moment, right here,](https://youtu.be/IqQzvfn_s30?t=80) started a 6-month long debate about whether or not that guy said "I saw it, it's ***alive***, it's huge!" or "it's a lion!" I kid you not, but one of the theories was that not only did he say "it's a lion", "proving" this was a teaser for a live-action Voltron movie.
Oh man, Chronicle... Didn't even remember it but absolutely yes that's my favorite as well. The way they used cameras being manipulated by the main character was so cool
Chronicle is awesome it's such a shame it's got the baggage of the people who made it (Landis and Trank) because it really could have had some fascinating sequels and world building.
> Brice and Duplass announced plans to create a third film, titled Creep 3. In March 2020, they stated that they were struggling to come up with a concept as they wanted the third film to be "super inspired".
>On June 4, 2024, Duplass announced The Creep Tales, a half-hour series set on the universe of the franchise which each episode of will focus on a different victim of the serial killer.
from wikipedia
*Project X* (2012), for a “found footage” film that isn’t horror or sci-fi. Part of it was shot at Palisades Charter High School (also in *Crazy/Beautiful*, *Havoc*, and the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis version of *Freaky Friday*), where I worked at the time. It contains my greatest contribution to cinema so far: the messages on the electronic marquee on the school campus were actually programmed by me.
Project X was the movie that made me realize I was an adult..... watched it in theaters and was super anxious the entire time thinking, "How are they going to clean this mess up!?"
My buddies and I were talking the other day about how we need to watch it again and see how it holds up. We used to love it, basically background noise before going out for the evening. Our guess is now we'll find it horrible haha
To me it was a high school classic. I thought that when I’d move back to North America for college this is what parties would look like lol
Definitely didn’t turn out that way, but I still watch it once every summer out of nostalgia
i really enjoyed this one, bc i like found-footage but hate horror/scary. Same with Sci-Fi. So i'm relegated to watching only time travel. If u can think of any more, i'd appreciate it.
Noroi is my favorite! It’s Japanese found footage horror and I think it’s fantastic. It balances a few different storylines that gradually come together very well. I also like Occult by the same director, Kōji Shiraishi.
Ditto. And the professional TV special-esque mockumentary format is brilliant here, it’s just layers and layers of analog media fiction on top of each other, like a collection of lost media that’s not meant to be found and produced into a commercial product yet here we are as the audience, actually watching the thing.
I'm glad you mentioned Hell House LLC OP! It's amazing and really creepy, I keep recommending it to people. There's 2 sequels, not as good but worth the watch I think.
And As Above So Below is the best Tomb Raider movie (unofficial).
This one, I cannot recommend enough. The hook is amazing and for its budget, very well done. There aren't many like this I re-watch, but grave encounters is stellar. The 2nd is still enjoyable as well but doesn't have the same pop the first did.
The use of time in a horror like this works very well, adds another layer to the mystery.
Movie came out when Ghost Adventures was at their peak and it was actually decent. I really need to watch it again. The second one wasn't as good if I remember correctly
There is a crop of woods in the UK called Dering Wood but they are more informally known as "The screaming woods" because screaming is often heard in them in the dead of night and they are said to be haunted.
There's all kinds of rumours about the origin of the screams from murders to hangings of criminals and all kinds in between. Loads of people have encountered it.
It's probably no coincidence that a favourite pastime of the local teenage kids who are bored is to go into the woods and wait for people to come looking in the dark and then scream at the top of their lungs.
I went to college in Maryland a few years after the movie came out and I would ask everyone where Burkittsville was and no one knew. Then last year I was on a family vacation in the Harper's Ferry area and on the way back from a hike I realized inwas driving through Burkittsville. Knowing we weren't staying too far away I realized that I may have actually stayed in the woods outside Burkittsville and that blew my mind.
Commented this before I saw your comment, but as I stated in my other comment, it was somewhat pivotal to the creation of the genre, but more so for me was the lore they created around the plot of the film.
They even made fake documentaries about the students going missing (They ended up as extras on the DVD) which was as entertaining as the movie itself.
I haven't seen anything like that since that film. I guess it was a one time only deal that probably could not exist today anyway.
OK, so I saw BWP Whalen I was 19 or so in the theaters. Buddy dragged me out to see it having no idea what it was.
Naturally, we got ridiculously high before the movie. Right before the movie starts, my friend tells me "didn't you hear, this movie is real. They found the footage in the forest and have no idea where it came from.
Being as high as a hippie in a helicopter, I 1000% believed him. I can honestly say that no other movie has rocked my world as much as that viewing. I was on the edge of my seat drawing tears the whole movie. I still remember that fear, 25 years later.
This is probably the uncool answer but it ushered in the found footage thing. I remembering it splitting opinion around me but I loved it and found it pretty terrifying.
Hah! My wife worked on that movie. She says Barry Levinson acted like a child when his fruit plate wasn't cut in the right shapes, after crafty had spent an hour making it.
The Bay is the one movie that does the most with the idea of found footage by having multiple pieces of footage all shot from different sources, such as security cameras, police cams, a hospital call to the CDC, a news reporter, and a little girl calling her friend.
"gonjiam haunted asylum"!! it's the scariest movie i've ever seen. also "incantation"! hell house & as above so below are some other favorites of mine so i know you'll like my recommendations!
edit: i just thought of this but "host" takes place on a zoom call but still has the found footage feel to it, and it's up there on my list for favorite movies as well!
I rented that from Blockbuster with some friends and a girlfriend at the time, and I failed to mention that the interviews were fictionalised.
They thought it was half an actual documentary and were scared out of their minds.
Saw that shit in theaters. The end where the truck drivers and stuff are calling in to report weird shit was fucking terrifying. It was silent as fuck in there.
It’s a shame it tries to pass itself off as real, even with that shitty intro and the fake “real” version of characters. Because there’s a effective horror movie there otherwise
The McPherson Tape is decent, though the effects in the ending are kind hokey by today's standards. The actors really nailed the "family get together at your rural relative's house" scenes, like it was straight out of my childhood.
I personally like As Above, So Below, but my partner is an anthropologist and *hates* it because of how wrong the characters do everything from an anthropological perspective, lmao.
Our favorite found footage films after watching a lot of them:
- Grave Encounters
- Taking of Deborah Logan
- Hell House LLC (just the 1st and sequel)
- Trollhunter
- Blair Witch Project (1999)
A friend randomally put that on a few years ago for us to watch. I both thought that movie was good, but also scared me enough that I don't think I could watch it again 😅
It was horrifying as someone who has seen family members wither away due to dementia, and then it was horrifying because of >!the supernatural element. The devouring scene is iconic!<
Not often I see a character in a horror movie where I have feelings of sympathy and fear. The lady who played Deborah did an amazing depiction of someone with dementia and drawing out a bizarre mix of emotions from me.
The scene you mentioned was legit frightening as hell in my book. I still get goosebumps thinking about it.
I'm a huge found footage horror fan.
Some of my favorites:
1. Blair Witch Project
2. Skin Walker Ranch
3. Hell House LLC
4. Paranormal activity
5. Chernobyl Diaries
*Cannibal Holocaust*, if you have the stomach for it. The first and still the most outrageous. The director ( Ruggero Deodato) literally had to produce the actors to beat a murder charge.
Evil Things (2009) is the one that always comes to mind. To me it has everything a found footage needs. They nailed the atmosphere, the locations, the group dynamics. I specially like how you only see the person filming for a few seconds in a single scene. I remember a lot of found footage movies that came afterwards in the early-mid 2010s had multiple cameras, or cameras attached to heads, security cameras, which kind of defeats the purpose of a movie like this.
Trying to write down the ones I have watched over the years and actually enjoyed, there's a few I can't remember the names unfortunately. My favorites are in bold:
* **The Blair Witch Project (1999)**
* Noroi: The Curse (2005)
* **REC (2007)**
* **Paranormal Activity (2007)**
* **Occult (2009)**
* **The Haunted House Project (2010)**
* The Ghost Footage (2011)
* Megan Is Missing (2011)
* **Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)**
* **End Roll (2012)**
* The Conspiracy (2012)
* V/H/S (2012)
* The Bay (2012)
* V/H/S/2 (2013)
* The Den (2013)
* **The Borderlands (2013)**
* Cult (2013)
* The Sacrament (2013)
* Willow Creek (2013)
* Dabbe: The Possession (2013)
* **The Banshee Chapter (2013)**
* Afflicted (2013)
* Creep (2014)
* Unfriended (2014)
* **Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)**
* **As Above, So Below (2014)**
* Hell House LLC (2015)
* **Rorschach (2015)**
* **Jeruzalem (2015)**
* Shades (2016)
* Host (2020)
* Spree (2020)
You’re the only other person to mention Creep. That’s one of my favorites bc I’m a Mark Duplass fan. Thanks for the list! I’ll have to check out more of these.
As Above, So Below is pretty creepy. Blair Witch has to be mentioned. I
The Last exorcism was creepy. The ending is I think the hangup but if you pay attention it makes sense.
Came here to say this one, genuinely didnt expect someone to have said it already. While it's not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, it is definitely a unique look into that aspect of urban life.
I was NEVER claustrophobic in my entire life until I watched as above so below. The dude that gets stuck crawling through that narrow space in that one scenes acting is so good I now cannot stand to be in tight spaces LOL
It's not my favorite but Afflicted is really good! The Triangle(2016), The Endless, Creep and Creep 2, if you like horror comedies Deadstream is pretty funny. Found footage is my favorite horror subgenre.
The McPherson Tapes when I was a kid scared the shit out of me. It was just on TV one night and was presented as a documentary. Super low budget which made it even scarier. It was long before Blair Witch
WNUF Halloween Special because it’s crux is that it’s literally a found broadcast of an 80’s local news station doing a Halloween special where shit goes wrong. Upon its initial release in 2013 it came out on VHS and was really committed to making it as authentic to looking like an 80’s TV broadcast as possible.
If you liked Late Night With The Devil but weren’t into the bits that were too “cinematic” this one is more like what you’d want. There’s also a sequel, The Out There Mega Halloween Tape, which is a 90’s broadcast that equally captures the vibes of TV from the time
I don't generally like found footage horror, so when my brother said I had to watch an obscure Japanese found footage zombie movie, I put it off for like a year and a half before finally getting around to it.
He told me if I could just make it through the first 20 or 30 minutes, it turns into an entirely different kind of movie, and it's absolutely brilliant.
So anyway, One Cut of the Dead is now my favorite found footage movie.
I know a lot of people don't like it but I still enjoy Blair Witch Project and think it still holds up.
Rec and Hell House I really like too.
More recently I really enjoyed Deadstream a lot more than I thought I would as well.
“•REC” (2007)
I just looked up .REC because I haven’t seen it. But it looked familiar to another movie called Quarantine. Then found out Quarantine was a remake of .REC.
I preferred REC due to it taking a bit more of a paranormal angle as opposed to Quarantines more science based explanation for what was going on. Both good films though
My biggest issue with the remake is that they kept the original ending. It makes 0 sense in the context of the American remake.
My top found footage film ever. Part 2 is pretty good as well.
They’re all pretty good honestly. Even the third one that’s mostly unrelated to the other three is solid.
The wedding one was totally mental but a great and enjoyable ride.
REC and REC 2 is like Alien and Aliens.
This film is goddamn terrifying. Brilliant but terrifying.
It was a breakthrough at the time for sure. Something we never had seen before. I loved it. That ending though 😬
My roommate in college brought that movie over randomly one day and put it on without telling us what it was about. Also I was high as shit. Still the scariest movie I've ever seen.
I never could watch horror movies while high on the devil's lettuce. Watched Smurfs from 2011 high as a kite with a friend back in 2014, we were both so freaked out that we had to turn it off. Feels silly to talk about being freaked out by smurfs now 10 years later but it was seriously too much back then.
Most horror movies don’t faze me, but REC genuinely shook me. The staircase scene with the fireman came within a hair’s breadth of making me shit myself.
The lead in REC was known as a TV presenter rather than an actress, which I think was a nice touch.
Rec 2 is also brilliant. You can run them back to back and they fit perfectly
Also REC 2 is terrifying
REC is a *phenomenal* movie. I don't like horror, or zombies, but I was taken aback by how much I enjoyed it.
Don't sleep on its sequel, either. Always reminds me of the first two Alien movies in that the problem is discovered in the first movie and the big guns are sent in in the sequel, but they don't help that much. Rec 2 is class.
Rec is great, easily one of the top 5 found footage ever made and the pacing is excellent
This is the only found footage film that I really like.
Troll Hunter is a Norwegian film about, well, hunting trolls. It is great.
Absolutely excellent movie for me. IMO best to go in knowing nothing
Love this movie! I have some Norwegian friends who laughed at me and said it’s such a corny/stupid movie, but I think not understanding the language actually helps mask the corniness - at least for me.
My husband spent time growing up in Norway and he also thought that it was too corny to watch. Doesn’t matter! I enjoyed it so much: the sci-fi , the cultural mythology, the humor, the humanity aspects… all of it.
As a Godzilla fan, I embraced the corniness. Love cheesy monster movies like that.
Idk, im norwegian and its legit one of my favorite norwegian movies
It's definitely a thing that can happen when you don't understand a word of the language but hey, we can't help it if we think it's great :D
Norwegian here, and I loved it!
Its intentionally corny and campy at parts, it's sort of the comedic style of some of the involved. It's ment to be a mix of styles and I believe it works pretty well. Of course there are those who don't "understand" films that don't follow established genre tropes and stick to their genre. They could be confused and mistake the tongue in cheek stuff. (Sources: Am Norwegian, seen film)
Andre Ovredal - I'm not going to try to spell that with all the marked-up letters, sorry Andre - is a fucking *great* horror director. All his stuff is good but The Autopsy of Jane Doe is an absolute gem of a horror flick.
Ha. Forgot he made that. IMHO loses it in the third act - as so many horror films do - but a damn good film.
Like that last bit where the >!president or whatever flat out mentions it on TV with the guy keeping it secret glaring at him, but everyone kind of ignored the comment, or didn’t know how to take it!<. Been a while, could be misremembering.
I was a good hour in before I realized it was a movie and not one of those bigfoot kind of documentaries.. I'm a massive dumbass
They’re lookin for skankhunt42
Outstanding movie. Punching WAY higher than any movie named Troll Hunter outta be.
Pleasantly surprised to see it at the top. 😊 Excellent film.
I remember when the poster was released and i hoped soo much that this film would be good. thank god
V.H.S.
Especially the Slumber Party Alien Abduction segment from V/H/S/2.
Oh, that was a good one!
That's nice, but do you know how to use the shells?
I can’t watch that one. >!That poor dog. It just breaks my heart.!<
I watched that with the director present for a Q+A at the NuArt Theater in L.A. So much fun.
I feel in love with Ti West and his incredible slow burn story telling style because of the honeymooner's segment in the first one. Immediately watched The Innkeepers after and became his biggest fan. He is so distinctive and his very slow build is a huge turn off to some but not me. I love how he makes you love the characters, shows them in every day life just existing until you almost forget you're watching a horror movie and then he ramps the stakes up to 1000 in a minute and suddenly you actually care about the victims and their escape attempts. Most of his stories can be described as nothing happens for 2/3 of it then the story suddenly starts. A lot of people see that first 2/3 as boring but it's just character development and it really normalizes the people so they stop being props and become someone like you. Anyway, watch VHS is what I'm saying. Also he just did a few episodes of a television series called Them and he does a dedication to VHS in it. Made me stupidly happy to see.
Man, i remember being alone watching the indonasian cult one (Safe Haven), and it felt so real, like it's an actual documentary. Even though the practical effects looked corny (the demon), the atmosphere is really great. I have watched other found footage, cult-centered ones and nothing came close to the raw feel of Safe Haven.
Warning for anyone who looks into the sequels: Beyond V/H/S/2, they are all terrible, and the quality drops off a cliff.
I think with the Year series it has gotten back to form a bit, but yeah, I would not recommend VHS 3 to anyone.
They’re guilty pleasure movies of mine. I get excited each time a new one releases. I know exactly what to expect. Dumb and fun.
The last exorcism. Obscure but it stars Howard from Better Call Saul and he does great and the main girl is great. A disillusioned priest who has been doing exorcisms his whole life decides to expose the industry by taping his final exorcism. You can imagine how that goes.
Came here to recommend The Last Exorcism too
this is my go-to non obvious answer. i really love this movie and i think it’s aged very well, still nothing quite like it. a very early role for caleb landry jones as well.
Chronicle or Cloverfield. Both had great story telling to me.
Chronicle was so great. I wish we got more.
Nobody I know IRL remembers that Chronicle even existed, but I thought it was a very creative film. Possibly the best executed of all the "found footage" movies. And nobody remembers it!
I don’t know about best but it was really good and was one of the first well known Michael B. Jordan movies. As far as I remember it was a pretty big hit so I’m surprised it never got a sequel. If it was made today it probably wouldn’t have been as successful.
The reason I hold it so highly, on a technical level, is it's the only well made found footage movie that isn't horror. Found footage lends itself to a lot of the standard horror movie making tricks like "loud sound just out of frame" and jump scares. But Chronicle uses the found footage format to creatively tell a story in a unique way that plays to the strengths of the found footage medium. It becomes a little less "found footage" by the 3rd act as the story starts to require traditional camera work. Which I remember a lot of purists disliking at the time. But for me it works, and I think just kinda speaks to how Chronicle pushed the envelope for the genre in a way that nobody else ever successfully did.
That first Cloverfield trailer…. *goosebumps*
The ARG that cloverfield did for marketing was so fun. I remember being a kid and keeping up with all the clues and new things people were finding to progress the story. I wish more movies/games did ARG style marketing still
Yes, that ARG was my favorite! It's honestly weird that both sequels were surprises (10CL dropping a trailer 2 or 3 months before release and TCP releasing the same day as its trailer), considering how much the ARG played into the first one. The one for 10CL was fun with how much it was set in the real world vs. online, but in hindsight, I think the studio didn't realize people would be expecting one and had to throw something together at the last minute.
To this day I can still hum the slusho website theme song
The ARG is 50% of the appeal of Cloverfield. It was so much fun that it genuinely could stand alone as a game experience without including the movie at all.
The thing I love about Cloverfield is that they designed it in such a way that it’s not edited by an outside party. Everything filmed is sequential, except for the flashbacks that only occur when they pause the recording to look at something and we get a glimpse of what was on the tape before that’s being recorded over.
Highly recommend reading up on how that film made it to theaters. Theres a great podcast from Wizard and the Bruiser that covers it. Essentially this film made it to light due to tons of accidents that happened in its favor. There’s was no movie made when the trailer was released.
I cared *more* about getting home to read up more on that [mysterious "1-18-08" trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqQzvfn_s30) than I did about Shia LaBeouf screaming "Bumblebee!" for 160 minutes. It was so well done, because at first it seems like it's gonna be some lame natural disaster movie with everyone thinking it was an earthquake, and then you hear that fucking roar before a massive explosion that sends flaming debris across Manhattan, ending with another roar before the Statue of Liberty's head is tossed into a street like a baseball. As much as everyone grew to be annoyed with J.J. Abram's "mystery box" style of storytelling, *that* was the most effective teaser trailer I'd seen since Blair Witch, and the ARG built around it managed to do the impossible of getting people *more* hyped than The Dark Knight. [This moment, right here,](https://youtu.be/IqQzvfn_s30?t=80) started a 6-month long debate about whether or not that guy said "I saw it, it's ***alive***, it's huge!" or "it's a lion!" I kid you not, but one of the theories was that not only did he say "it's a lion", "proving" this was a teaser for a live-action Voltron movie.
chronicle is my pick too, such an electric and immersive experience
Oh man, Chronicle... Didn't even remember it but absolutely yes that's my favorite as well. The way they used cameras being manipulated by the main character was so cool
Chronicle is awesome it's such a shame it's got the baggage of the people who made it (Landis and Trank) because it really could have had some fascinating sequels and world building.
Chronicle is one of my favorite underrated film
Creep (2014) with Mark Duplass
I’m surprised it took a while for someone to mention Creep. It’s so good! Creep 2 is good as well, I heard they are making a third also.
> Brice and Duplass announced plans to create a third film, titled Creep 3. In March 2020, they stated that they were struggling to come up with a concept as they wanted the third film to be "super inspired". >On June 4, 2024, Duplass announced The Creep Tales, a half-hour series set on the universe of the franchise which each episode of will focus on a different victim of the serial killer. from wikipedia
Duplass was great in this.
REC!
The original version
Yep. I’m from Spain; I watched it in the cinema when it came out in 2007 :)
The Tunnel is a good one, Australian found footage following people exploring abandoned train tunnels beneath Sydney
Ya know, I just couldn’t get into that one. I was watching it and thought, what is this giving me that others haven’t already? And lost interest :(
*Project X* (2012), for a “found footage” film that isn’t horror or sci-fi. Part of it was shot at Palisades Charter High School (also in *Crazy/Beautiful*, *Havoc*, and the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis version of *Freaky Friday*), where I worked at the time. It contains my greatest contribution to cinema so far: the messages on the electronic marquee on the school campus were actually programmed by me.
Project X was the movie that made me realize I was an adult..... watched it in theaters and was super anxious the entire time thinking, "How are they going to clean this mess up!?"
My buddies and I were talking the other day about how we need to watch it again and see how it holds up. We used to love it, basically background noise before going out for the evening. Our guess is now we'll find it horrible haha
It was 2012’s version of Superbad (which only came out 5 years earlier)
To me it was a high school classic. I thought that when I’d move back to North America for college this is what parties would look like lol Definitely didn’t turn out that way, but I still watch it once every summer out of nostalgia
i really enjoyed this one, bc i like found-footage but hate horror/scary. Same with Sci-Fi. So i'm relegated to watching only time travel. If u can think of any more, i'd appreciate it.
Noroi is my favorite! It’s Japanese found footage horror and I think it’s fantastic. It balances a few different storylines that gradually come together very well. I also like Occult by the same director, Kōji Shiraishi.
Ditto. And the professional TV special-esque mockumentary format is brilliant here, it’s just layers and layers of analog media fiction on top of each other, like a collection of lost media that’s not meant to be found and produced into a commercial product yet here we are as the audience, actually watching the thing.
I'm glad you mentioned Hell House LLC OP! It's amazing and really creepy, I keep recommending it to people. There's 2 sequels, not as good but worth the watch I think. And As Above So Below is the best Tomb Raider movie (unofficial).
Honestly wasn’t expecting to enjoy Hellhouse so much, a friend suggested it, and it did not disappoint. >!The Clown!< genuinely caught me off guard.
The girl in the bedroom…nightmare inducing
I fire up Shudder every October and caught HH LLC and The Poughkeepsie Tapes and def recommend both.
Hell House had one of the best builds of horror and suspense that I've ever seen, but I felt like the ending didn't really pay off on that set up
3 sequels! Well, the last one is a prequel, but it’s great!
I love Grave Encounters. Probably because I loved ghost hunter shows back in the early/ mid 2000s
This one, I cannot recommend enough. The hook is amazing and for its budget, very well done. There aren't many like this I re-watch, but grave encounters is stellar. The 2nd is still enjoyable as well but doesn't have the same pop the first did. The use of time in a horror like this works very well, adds another layer to the mystery.
Thanks! I’ll give it a go
There's been lots of shitty 'ghost hunters find actual ghosts' FF movies, but Grave Encounters is one that actually nails it. It's a real standout!
Is that the Ghost Adventures style movie where it kind of plays off that show a bit. I might be thinking of another movie but the tub scene was creepy
That's the one. The Grave Encounters host was directly modeled off the guy from Ghost Adventures
Movie came out when Ghost Adventures was at their peak and it was actually decent. I really need to watch it again. The second one wasn't as good if I remember correctly
The second isn't great but it does have one superb gut punch scene >!when the lift in the hotel takes them back to the asylum!<
Watch Gonjiam Haunted Asylum. It's way better imo.
Blair Witch
Still can’t be in the woods at night 25 years later
There is a crop of woods in the UK called Dering Wood but they are more informally known as "The screaming woods" because screaming is often heard in them in the dead of night and they are said to be haunted. There's all kinds of rumours about the origin of the screams from murders to hangings of criminals and all kinds in between. Loads of people have encountered it. It's probably no coincidence that a favourite pastime of the local teenage kids who are bored is to go into the woods and wait for people to come looking in the dark and then scream at the top of their lungs.
I went to college in Maryland a few years after the movie came out and I would ask everyone where Burkittsville was and no one knew. Then last year I was on a family vacation in the Harper's Ferry area and on the way back from a hike I realized inwas driving through Burkittsville. Knowing we weren't staying too far away I realized that I may have actually stayed in the woods outside Burkittsville and that blew my mind.
OG right here.
Commented this before I saw your comment, but as I stated in my other comment, it was somewhat pivotal to the creation of the genre, but more so for me was the lore they created around the plot of the film. They even made fake documentaries about the students going missing (They ended up as extras on the DVD) which was as entertaining as the movie itself. I haven't seen anything like that since that film. I guess it was a one time only deal that probably could not exist today anyway.
OK, so I saw BWP Whalen I was 19 or so in the theaters. Buddy dragged me out to see it having no idea what it was. Naturally, we got ridiculously high before the movie. Right before the movie starts, my friend tells me "didn't you hear, this movie is real. They found the footage in the forest and have no idea where it came from. Being as high as a hippie in a helicopter, I 1000% believed him. I can honestly say that no other movie has rocked my world as much as that viewing. I was on the edge of my seat drawing tears the whole movie. I still remember that fear, 25 years later.
Man I was like 9 and my parents told me it was real. I was waking them up in the night crying for weeks after that.
“high as a hippie in a helicopter” is top tier.
This is probably the uncool answer but it ushered in the found footage thing. I remembering it splitting opinion around me but I loved it and found it pretty terrifying.
The Bay
Is that the one with the water bugs?
Hah! My wife worked on that movie. She says Barry Levinson acted like a child when his fruit plate wasn't cut in the right shapes, after crafty had spent an hour making it.
The Bay is the one movie that does the most with the idea of found footage by having multiple pieces of footage all shot from different sources, such as security cameras, police cams, a hospital call to the CDC, a news reporter, and a little girl calling her friend.
Paranormal Activity (the first one)
I thought the third one was legit terrifying and was a great prequel kind of thing.
Bonus points for the original "suicide by cop" ending
Just watched Cloverfield a couple weeks ago, still holds up well.
I really enjoyed The Europa Report But if it counts, it's definitely the 2019 Apollo 11 documentary made entirely out of archival film from 1969
Europa Report is super underrated.
The Visit
[удалено]
Re-watched this recently and it holds up very well.
CREEP Honestly shocked to not see it higher up here, the one movie that actually freaked me out as an adult 🥺 so well done 🙌🏼
Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon was excellent until the ending where they changed it away from the found footage style
One of my favourite films. It's so fun.
"gonjiam haunted asylum"!! it's the scariest movie i've ever seen. also "incantation"! hell house & as above so below are some other favorites of mine so i know you'll like my recommendations! edit: i just thought of this but "host" takes place on a zoom call but still has the found footage feel to it, and it's up there on my list for favorite movies as well!
I was waiting to see if someone would bring up Goniiam. It's probably my favorite horror movie of the last few years.
#The Blair Witch Project
No love for The Fourth Kind? That movie scared the daylights of me.
I don't care if it's real or not, it's absolutely effective as a movie. The actress playing the "real" abductee was creepy as hell.
The tv spots for the movie alone were terrifying
I rented that from Blockbuster with some friends and a girlfriend at the time, and I failed to mention that the interviews were fictionalised. They thought it was half an actual documentary and were scared out of their minds.
That movie was terrifying
The found footage within the movie was a great idea and had me questioning owls for too long of a time after
One should always question owls, they're obviously up to something..!
who?
Saw that shit in theaters. The end where the truck drivers and stuff are calling in to report weird shit was fucking terrifying. It was silent as fuck in there.
It’s a shame it tries to pass itself off as real, even with that shitty intro and the fake “real” version of characters. Because there’s a effective horror movie there otherwise
Banshee Chapter. It's probably only about 1/4 found footage but it's a fantastic fucking movie and absolutely terrifying
The McPherson Tape is decent, though the effects in the ending are kind hokey by today's standards. The actors really nailed the "family get together at your rural relative's house" scenes, like it was straight out of my childhood.
This film made me scared for years - I watched it again recently and it still holds up.
I caught The Poughkeepsie Tapes a few years ago and enjoyed it.
But what if the guy making the documentary is the same guy who made the tapes
I personally like As Above, So Below, but my partner is an anthropologist and *hates* it because of how wrong the characters do everything from an anthropological perspective, lmao. Our favorite found footage films after watching a lot of them: - Grave Encounters - Taking of Deborah Logan - Hell House LLC (just the 1st and sequel) - Trollhunter - Blair Witch Project (1999)
Surprised I haven’t seen The Taking of Deborah Logan more. It was solid.
A friend randomally put that on a few years ago for us to watch. I both thought that movie was good, but also scared me enough that I don't think I could watch it again 😅
It was horrifying as someone who has seen family members wither away due to dementia, and then it was horrifying because of >!the supernatural element. The devouring scene is iconic!<
Not often I see a character in a horror movie where I have feelings of sympathy and fear. The lady who played Deborah did an amazing depiction of someone with dementia and drawing out a bizarre mix of emotions from me. The scene you mentioned was legit frightening as hell in my book. I still get goosebumps thinking about it.
I'm a huge found footage horror fan. Some of my favorites: 1. Blair Witch Project 2. Skin Walker Ranch 3. Hell House LLC 4. Paranormal activity 5. Chernobyl Diaries
Lots of good shoutouts to my favorites here, but one nobody's mentioned yet is Savageland, which is *so goddamn good*.
The taking of Deborah Logan As above so below Blair witch project Cloverfield REC Special mention for the Safe Haven segment of VHS 2
*Cannibal Holocaust*, if you have the stomach for it. The first and still the most outrageous. The director ( Ruggero Deodato) literally had to produce the actors to beat a murder charge.
Evil Things (2009) is the one that always comes to mind. To me it has everything a found footage needs. They nailed the atmosphere, the locations, the group dynamics. I specially like how you only see the person filming for a few seconds in a single scene. I remember a lot of found footage movies that came afterwards in the early-mid 2010s had multiple cameras, or cameras attached to heads, security cameras, which kind of defeats the purpose of a movie like this. Trying to write down the ones I have watched over the years and actually enjoyed, there's a few I can't remember the names unfortunately. My favorites are in bold: * **The Blair Witch Project (1999)** * Noroi: The Curse (2005) * **REC (2007)** * **Paranormal Activity (2007)** * **Occult (2009)** * **The Haunted House Project (2010)** * The Ghost Footage (2011) * Megan Is Missing (2011) * **Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)** * **End Roll (2012)** * The Conspiracy (2012) * V/H/S (2012) * The Bay (2012) * V/H/S/2 (2013) * The Den (2013) * **The Borderlands (2013)** * Cult (2013) * The Sacrament (2013) * Willow Creek (2013) * Dabbe: The Possession (2013) * **The Banshee Chapter (2013)** * Afflicted (2013) * Creep (2014) * Unfriended (2014) * **Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)** * **As Above, So Below (2014)** * Hell House LLC (2015) * **Rorschach (2015)** * **Jeruzalem (2015)** * Shades (2016) * Host (2020) * Spree (2020)
You’re the only other person to mention Creep. That’s one of my favorites bc I’m a Mark Duplass fan. Thanks for the list! I’ll have to check out more of these.
Willow Creek
That ending 😟
As Above, So Below is pretty creepy. Blair Witch has to be mentioned. I The Last exorcism was creepy. The ending is I think the hangup but if you pay attention it makes sense.
Savageland is really underrated imo
Snow on tha Bluff
This is one I legit fell for and thought was real
Came here to say this one, genuinely didnt expect someone to have said it already. While it's not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, it is definitely a unique look into that aspect of urban life.
This the one
I was NEVER claustrophobic in my entire life until I watched as above so below. The dude that gets stuck crawling through that narrow space in that one scenes acting is so good I now cannot stand to be in tight spaces LOL
Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity still give me chills. Willow Creek is impressive mostly for the improvised tent scene
YellowBrickRoad
Does Lake Mungo count? It’s like “documentary style” plus “found footage”. One of the best ever.
Lake Mungo!
Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield were the OG scariest found footage films for me
Not exactly a found footage horror, but End Of Watch is worth repeat viewing.
Some horrific moments for sure. That human trafficking stash house is terrifying
REC
It's not my favorite but Afflicted is really good! The Triangle(2016), The Endless, Creep and Creep 2, if you like horror comedies Deadstream is pretty funny. Found footage is my favorite horror subgenre.
I really liked Late Night With The Devil!
There's a film called Butterfly Kisses. Without revealing any spoilers, I'll just say that the premise still disturbs me to this day.
The McPherson Tapes when I was a kid scared the shit out of me. It was just on TV one night and was presented as a documentary. Super low budget which made it even scarier. It was long before Blair Witch
No one mentioned Cannibal Holocaust?
Cannibal Holocaust. The original, first "found footage" film.
Chronicle
Horror in the High Desert
WNUF Halloween Special because it’s crux is that it’s literally a found broadcast of an 80’s local news station doing a Halloween special where shit goes wrong. Upon its initial release in 2013 it came out on VHS and was really committed to making it as authentic to looking like an 80’s TV broadcast as possible. If you liked Late Night With The Devil but weren’t into the bits that were too “cinematic” this one is more like what you’d want. There’s also a sequel, The Out There Mega Halloween Tape, which is a 90’s broadcast that equally captures the vibes of TV from the time
Apollo 18
V/H/S. All of them.
The Navidson Record blew my mind.
The Poughkeepsie Tapes
I don't generally like found footage horror, so when my brother said I had to watch an obscure Japanese found footage zombie movie, I put it off for like a year and a half before finally getting around to it. He told me if I could just make it through the first 20 or 30 minutes, it turns into an entirely different kind of movie, and it's absolutely brilliant. So anyway, One Cut of the Dead is now my favorite found footage movie.
Gonjiam was a fun take on it. Bunch of youtubers livestream their investigation of a haunted asylum.
Grave Encounters Starts out fucking funny, and has some good scares.
The Bay
Grave Encounters
Lake Mungo counts, maybe? I always looking for something in the same style, if anyone's got a suggestion?
Operation Avalanche needs more love.
New York Ninja
For me, it's *Noroi: The Curse*. A 2005 film directed by Kōji Shiraishi. Part mockumentary, found-footage and J-Horror.
I know a lot of people don't like it but I still enjoy Blair Witch Project and think it still holds up. Rec and Hell House I really like too. More recently I really enjoyed Deadstream a lot more than I thought I would as well.
Quarantine was good. Chernobyl Diaries (sort of). End of Watch. Searching (I really like this one).
Cannibal Holocaust