For $15,000, Oren Peli made what is probably the most effective “for the price” horror movie ever released, surpassing The Blair Witch in terms of both tension and narrative while pulling off incredibly unnerving minimalist effects. The original Paranormal Activity is a masterful piece of budget filmmaking. That’s what happens in the wake of massive overnight success, and immediately derivative, inferior sequels: The original gets dragged down by its progeny. Here’s a statement: Paranormal Activity is the most wrongly derided horror film of the last decade, especially by horror buffs. So in that sense, The Blair Witch Project reinvented two different genres at the same time. It was also proof positive that a well-executed micro-budget indie film could become a massive box office success. Otherwise reasonable human beings seriously went into The Blair Witch Project believing that what they were seeing might be real, and the grainy, home movie aesthetic captured an innate terror of reality and “real people” that had not been seen in the horror genre before. But this was the first to get a wide, theatrical release, and distributor Artisan Entertainment masterfully capitalized on the lack of information available on the film to execute a mysterious online advertising campaign in the blossoming days of the Internet age. 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. Jim Vorelĭirectors: Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick 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. Here are the 35 best found footage horror movies:Ĭreep is a somewhat predictable but cheerfully demented little indie horror film, the directorial debut by Brice, who also released this year’s The Overnight. 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.

28 days later movie poster