Found footage (film technique)

Although found footage was originally the name of an entirely different genre, it is now frequently used to describe pseudo-documentaries crafted with this narrative technique such as Lake Mungo, Noroi: The Curse and screenlife films such as Unfriended, Searching.

[2] As a storytelling technique, found footage has precedents in literature, particularly in the epistolary novel, which typically consists of either correspondence or diary entries, purportedly written by a character central to the events.

[3] However, Shirley Clarke's arthouse film The Connection (1961) and the Orson Welles directed The Other Side of the Wind, a found footage movie shot in the early 1970s but released in 2018, predate Cannibal Holocaust.

[4] America's Deadliest Home Video (1991), remains a potent use of the format as well as an unsung groundbreaker in the found-footage field - an ahead-of-its-time application of the vérité-video form to the horror/crime genre.

[10] Sayad highlights how the found footage genre invites the audience to “to anxiously scan the image for threatening presences”, blurring the boundary between what is on screen and what is real.

[10] Typical found footage techniques, like shaky handheld sequences and sudden zooms, create the illusion that the camera frame is unable to contain the evil of any film’s antagonist to the screen.