Found Footage Horror Films

As the horror subgenre du jour, found footage horror’s amateur filmmaking look has made it available to a range of budgets. Surviving by adapting to technological and cultural shifts and popular trends, found footage horror is a successful and surprisingly complex experiment in blurring the lines between quotidian reality and horror’s dark and tantalizing fantasies. Found Footage Horror Films explores the subgenre’s stylistic, historical and thematic development. It examines the diverse prehistory beyond Man Bites Dog (1992) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), paying attention to the safety films of the 1960s, the snuff-fictions of the 1970s, and to television reality horror hoaxes and mockumentaries during the 1980s and 1990s in particular. It underscores the importance of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007), and considers YouTube’s popular rise in sparking the subgenre’s recent renaissance.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is a film critic and author of ten books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema with an emphasis on gender politics.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 244
Bibliographic Info: 28 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2014
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7077-8
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1321-5
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents

Preface 1
Introduction 3
Part 1: Expanding the Prehistory: 1938–1998 29
One. Safety Films 42
Two. Snuff-Fictions 58
Three. Television 72
Part 2: A Critical Chronology: 1998–2009 87
Four. Revisiting The Blair Witch Project 93
Five. The Vanishing of the Real 112
Six. Approaching Paranormal Activity 129
Part 3: Further Discoveries: 2007–2013 149
Seven. Exorcism Films 151
Eight. The Family 165
Nine. Nation, History and Identity 178
Conclusion: The Specter of Commercialism 192
Notes 203
Bibliography 217
Index 227

“excellent addition to the shelves or tablets of any horror scholar”—Dead Reckonings; “his research is quite impressive”—Scarlet the Film Magazine; “definitive”—SFCrowsnest; “a gratifying, thorough and wide-in-scope look”—Flick Attack.