Do You Remember Found Footage Horror?
I predicted box-office success for Paranormal Activity. What’s next in horror?
Do you like scary movies to have shaky hand-held camerawork and documentary-like storytelling?
After watching it at a packed Slamdance Film Festival screening in 2008, I predicted box-office success for director Oren Peli’s no-budget, ghosts-in-the-house horror film Paranormal Activity.
I can still feel the ramshackle screening room at Slamdance’s Main Street Park City HQ and the young audience screaming from start to finish before heading outside to chain smoke.
It’s funny to look back at my New York Magazine piece and see the headline, ‘Is a Slamdance Horror Movie the Next ‘Cloverfield?’ because the Paranormal Activity franchise quickly outpaced the Cloverfield movies.
I also remember laughing because Paranormal Activity’s Slamdance audience was too young to remember another found-footage horror discovery from Park City, The Blair Witch Project from 1999’s Sundance Film Festival. Then again, Blair Witch directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez borrowed from the documentary-trash genre, a combination of fantasy and reality made famous in ’70s pulp movies like Chariots of the Gods (1969) and Mysteries from Beyond Earth (1975) long forgotten by the Sundance festivalgoers.
It’s a unique position being someone who watched festival premiere showings of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity and immediately understood the powerful connection between the audience and the movie.
Add the fact that I watched the debut screenings of Scream in 1996 with a screaming New York City audience and Saw and Insidious with first-time crowds in Toronto, and it’s safe to describe me as a Zelig for Horror, someone who appears at significant events in horror movies.
Working as a critic is one thing. Understanding entertainment trends and audience insights is a higher level of analysis and writing. When I look back at my media reporting, my news-making coverage of Paranormal Activity is a forecast of my future work as a marketing consultant. Identifying top trends through mind mapping is critical to my storytelling strategies.
Horror remains a profitable genre from the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, TV series like Yellowjackets and American Horror Story to family-friendly movies Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, slasher fare like Ti West’s X Trilogy, and tech-gone-awry horror like M3GAN.
It falls on experienced horror fans to pull from the trailblazing movies Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project to forecast what’s next in horror.
Veteran filmmaker Steven Soderbergh upends the haunted house thriller with Presence, a horror story told from the perspective of a ghost. Will Soderbergh ignite a new horror franchise when Presence opens in cinemas on January 24, 2025, or will it fade away like another one of his experimental movies?
Will audiences embrace a return of classic monsters like the Wolf Man from filmmaker Leigh Whannel, writer of Saw, and producer Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity)? Art-house director Robert Eggers remakes the 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu with a new tale featuring the monstrous Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgard).
Fantasies featuring dragons and knights remain popular, but I’m convinced that future audiences want horror tales that feel familiar and close at hand. They want folklore and local legends more than AI-powered monster robots or swords-and-sorcery fantasies.
What follows found footage storytelling? Look for user-generated horror. How will user-generated horror interact with audiences? Let’s craft the genre and find out together.
