The Future of Found Footage

The found footage genre is always one that has appealed to me so much as a horror fan. There’s an immediacy to it, a purported direct access to this moment and this person and this fear, that appeals to me: The Blair Witch Project is still up there with my favorite movies of all time, but the finest examples of the genre span everything from Ghostwatch to Grave Encounters to to Cloverfield to Baghead to Paranormal Activity to The Visit with dozens upon dozens of movies in between. It’s a genre that attempts to capture something that’s closer to reality than most horror films, and something about that, about the slow picking apart of the real world into some nightmare vision determined to keep me up at night in cold sweats, works.