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Okay, not really.
The students were actors: Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard.
And they were actually shooting amockumentary a low-budget, unscripted horror movie merely designed to look like nonfiction.
There were those who really believed thatBlair Witchwas real, both at its Sundance premiere, and afterward.
There are a lot of bad found-footage horror movies.
The worst can turn a whole auditorium into hecklers, united in their disdain.
Sometimes, the genre becomes an excuse for amateurish or unimaginative filmmaking.
And too often it depends on an enormous suspension of disbelief.
The 25 cited below dont all adhere to the most literal definition of found footage.
What all the selections have in common is a nonfiction framing equipment.
They want to look real.
25.Cannibal Holocaust(1980)
25.
The very first found-footage horror movie is still the most notorious of them all.
This is the rare barf-bag anti-classic that lives up (or down?)
24.Late Night With the Devil(2023)
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23.Dashcam(2021)
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22.V/H/S/94(2021)
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21.Trollhunter(2010)
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20.Grave Encounters(2011)
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19.Unfriended: Dark Web(2018)
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18.The Outwaters(2022)
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17.The Bay(2012)
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16.Host(2020)
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All for $100,000 and across a mercifully, mercilessly trim 56 minutes.
15.The Visit(2015)
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14.The Last Exorcism(2010)
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Great characters are not something it’s possible for you to usually expect from found footage.
For one thing, dont many of these movies stick the people were followingbehindthe camera?
One exception is Cotton Marcus, the charlatan at the center ofThe Last Exorcism.
As a horror movie,The Last Exorcismoffers the same old Regan MacNeil scare tactics.
13.Ghostwatch(1992)
13.
On Halloween of 1992, the BBC aired a mockumentary about journalists investigating a purported case of paranormal activity.
The 91-minute program starred famous British news personalities and was presented, deceptively, as a live broadcast.
Even the relative restraint of the ending not exactly a gauntlet of terror strengthens the illusion.
Its a stunt worth studying, just like the Orson Welles radio play thatonce fooled a different gullible nation.
12.Willow Creek(2013)
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But Goldthwait also knows when to catch the laughs in our throat.
11.Paranormal Activity 3(2011)
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Two words: fan cam.
And then comes the slam-bang, run-and-hide climax, which finally makes the insidious threat tangible.
10.Cloverfield(2008)
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Leave it to J.J. Abrams to supersize found footage for the multiplex.
9.Creep(2014)
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Writer-director Patrick Brice casts himself as Aaron, a videographer who travels to a remote cabin on freelance assignment.
8.Be My Cat: A Film for Anne(2015)
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At the same time, could you blame Hathaway if she stayed far, far away?
7.Paranormal Activity(2007)
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6.Rec(2007)
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More than any other found-footage horror movie,Recgets a suffocating urgency out of its shaky handheld camerawork.
And the filmmakers evoke combat photography during the scenes of frantic violence and escape.
The subtitle-averse could do worse than the faithful American remake,Quarantine.
ButRecis also proof that pounding dread is a universal language.
5.V/H/S/2(2013)
5.
Popular wisdom holds that the originalV/H/Sis the pinnacle of the series.
Its a lesson the best segments of this ongoing franchise keep teaching again and again.
4.Lake Mungo(2008)
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For the most part, however, this Aussie cult favorite is much more haunting than rattling.
3.Man Bites Dog(1992)
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2.Unfriended(2014)
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Simply put, one of the definitive films about life in the 21st century.
Its a cautionary tale of the internet age, written in the language of that age.
1.The Blair Witch Project(1999)
1.
