David Barnett

T ONE point in the 1999’s Blair Witch Project, which tells the story of three young film-makers who head into the Maryland woods to make a documentary about a local legend, one of the trio, Josh, tells the lead Heather: “I see why you like this video camera so much.”

“You do?” she says. “It’s not quite reality,” muses Josh. “It’s like a totally filtered reality. It’s like you can pretend everything’s not quite the way it is.”

Welcome to the cinematic subgenre known as “found footage”, where – like Heather, who leads her friends into supernatural doom in the endless woods – we can pretend that everything we know might just be wrong.

Found footage movies, like the original Blair Witch Project and like the much-anticipated sequel, Blair Witch, purport to be true stories assembled from discovered videos left behind after some mystery or horror. We know what we’re watching is fiction, we know it’s carefully constructed, but it’s not strictly the “reality” of normal drama, and for a couple of glorious hours we can imagine, as Josh said, that what we’re watching is not quite the fiction it is… and that it really, truly happened.

Ato something we couldn’t really understand.

Blair Witch set the standard and having done so, nothing really happened for another seven or eight years. Then there were a rash of found footage movies, including REC (2007), in which a reporter and cameraman trapped in a quarantined building record a zombie outbreak; Cloverfield (2008), JJ Abrams’ take on Godzilla, with a grotesque monster devastating New York caught on camera by a man tasked with videoing his friend’s leaving party, and Paranormal Activity (2007), featuring the footage shot by a couple trying to gather evidence of ghostly happenings.

Dr Johnny Walker is a senior lecturer in media at Northumbria University and the editor of a book released this year on the urban myth of “snuff ” movies that were reputed to contain footage of real, on-screen murders ( Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media). He says that it was the start of the Paranormal Activity franchise (it has spawned several sequels) that really fed the public appetite for found footage movies.

Although The Blair Witch Project is considered the start of the trend, Walker points to one of the classic “video nasties” of the 1980s as the true beginning – the Cannibal Holocaust, a 1980 Italian exploitation movie which Walker describes as a “hybrid” – part found footage, part conventional movie framing – the “documentary” based on the film supposedly shot by an ill-fated expedition into the South American jungles.

But the “found footage” concept goes back further, before the dawn of movies. As far back as the 1830s, the quintessential weird fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe was presenting ambitious stories that were titled as though to imply they were true accounts – see his 1833 short story MS. Found In A Bottle, about a sailor who falls in with a strange crew, and his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which drifts on similar tides and when first published in 1838 was printed without Poe’s name on the title page, suggesting it was a true account written by the fictional Pym.

Even Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, is composed of letters, reports and journal entries without any orthodox prose fiction at all, as though it were a collection of documents assembled to portray a horrifying narrative.

A century on, The Blair Witch Project brought that concept bang up to date and 17 years later, Blair Witch repackages it for the smartphone generation. Walker will be going to see the new movie, but he does suspect that the found footage trend is on the wane.

“The market has become a little saturated recently,” he says, “and perhaps the two Blair Witch movies will book-end the trend, certainly for mainstream audiences. I imagine there will still be found footage movies made, but they’ll need to do something different and original to get such a high profile as Blair Witch.”

That said, as Walker points out, we all carry around more video technology in our pockets than the amateur film-making crew had for the first Blair Witch movie. In other words, perhaps we’re all a found footage horror story waiting to happen. – The Independent