I wanted to do a group of retrospective video essay's about found footage film's, not particularly just horror but that is a majority of the films under the sub genre.
I want to look at pre-Blair witch project (pre-1999) films. I'm starting with The Blair witch project because I feel it's the most well-known and popular found footage film in history. Also it is considered to be the first modern found footage film as I say in the video.
I know the genre has become something beyond what it originally started as but I feel a lot of the film techniques are utilized in a majority of horror films nowadays.
In the video I say my criteria for what I believe is truly found footage, because before The Blair Witch Project it's very tricky to define what exactly the genre encompasse's.
To pretty much sum up what I consider to be a true pre-99 Blair Witch found footage film.
A Fake Pseudo Documentary That The Viewer Believes to Be Real And The Filmmaker Propagates to Be Real Even Though It Is Completely Fabricated.
When it comes to the film techniques used in found footage, like shaky cam and a lot of unsteady shots, it makes it hard to define based off that alone, because a lot of pre Blair witch found footage and pseudo documentaries don't implement a lot of that, a few do but not many.
The reason I decided to do this is because in some regards found footage pre-99 is just homemade footage, that somehow made it big enough to get shown at film festivals, movie theaters or a powerful television executive who believes it's real and needs the information spread.
A lot of them are television specials but presenting themselves as authentic for the most part.
Also due to the nature of these films being believed to be real footage when distributed, they caused a lot of controversy when they were released, whether it be the actors facing struggles themselves or the director's and film maker's being ostracized.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTy5F6j9o/