Found footage: horror shot as if someone recorded it

Found footage is horror that pretends to be a recording: tapes, phone video, security cameras, a livestream, discovered after whatever happened and presented without a narrator. The camera belongs to a character, and what it does not show is as important as what it does.

Where it comes from

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) framed its jungle atrocities as reels recovered from a missing documentary crew and was briefly believed to be real. The Blair Witch Project (1999) took the idea to a wide audience with three students, a forest, and a website that let people think the footage was genuine. Paranormal Activity (2007) moved it indoors and onto a fixed bedroom camera, and the sequels, along with [REC] (2007), Cloverfield (2008) and Lake Mungo (2008), established it as a subgenre with its own rules. Host (2020), shot on a video call during lockdown, proved the form could still frighten with no budget at all.

Why it matters

Found footage removes the one comfort other horror gives you: the sense that someone is in control of the frame. There is no score, no cut away, no shot from the monster's point of view. The camera looks where a frightened person would look, which is usually the wrong place. That is why its best moments are often the quiet ones, a figure at the edge of a corridor, a tent shaking, a door that was not open before.

It also divides fans sharply. For some, the realism is the scariest thing horror has produced. For others, the shaky camera and the characters' refusal to put it down break the spell within minutes.

In Gasper

Found Footage is a Discover shelf, resolved from TMDb keywords, and the site's found footage subgenre page walks through the key films. Members' rankings in it tend to carry Slow burn and Tense, and rarely Gross, since the form hides more than it shows. In the "Which was scarier?" head-to-head, it is a subgenre where personal Scare Tolerance shows most clearly: a member who scares easily will often rank The Blair Witch Project above films with ten times the body count, and the Community Scare on these films reflects that split.