I’m mildly obsessed with found footage movies. Not exactly the movies themselves, even though I like a lot of them, but more the concept. Much like serial killers, if one is good enough, we’d never even know it existed. If a found footage movie achieves its ostensible goal, it’s just a weird old tape, or is indistinguishable from a documentary. 

While the high points of the genre in mainstream terms might be The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, or Paranormal Activity, it has quietly mutated, capable of making a statement with every new cultural movement since it’s inception with the borderline unwatchable Cannibal Holocaust.

In reality though, most just fit a genre mold, break or bend the rules when convenient and look like the result of their incredibly inexpensive barrier of entry. They aren’t fooling anyone, and the style can end up counterintuitively making you even more aware of how fake they are.

So instead of wading through the garbage, here’s a list of ten movies that maybe don’t reach culturally relevant flagship status, but are better than what you might expect from a style with very little in the way of gatekeeping.

I’m loose about what “found footage” means, and I’d probably open this list up to things like the Fox special from the 90s Alien Autopsy, Garth Marhengi’s Darkplace and even YouTube videos about haunted mines. But for the sake of clarity its gotta be a movie and its gotta be presented as reality and shot in a way that uses footage seemingly not initially intended as a narrative film, but is actually a narrative film. Which is a long way of saying I’m not including One Cut of the Dead or The Cleansing Hour even though they incorporate found footage elements and they rule.

Hell House, LLC

Man, I just really love this movie. It’s about a group of friends that rehab an old hotel to turn into a haunted house, and gang? Things don’t go as planned. I’m not sure what the term is but there needs to be a different genre for “haunted house” movies that are about theme park attraction-style haunted houses and not a house whose wall’s bleed. This is… a little of both wrapped in a shakycam package. It’s played pretty realistically, and I like the touch of adding talking head segments that look back on “the incident.” The scares are earned and I just have a soft spot for movies that are about a location. Much like Session 9 or The Invitation (2015), I watch this gem annually just to go back to the house.

Host

I basically hate covid-centric entertainment and think it shouldn’t exist just to exist. We lived it, we get it, it’s unlikely you’re going to reveal anything new to us that we didn’t already think of ourselves. If you need to do something covid-y it’s better to have it live in the background (like Pearl) or it should somehow reveal more to us than the surface level “remember wiping our groceries???” stuff. Host, so far, is basically the only covid thing I’ve liked. It’s a brief 1 hour (amazing!) runtime about a Zoom call between friends where, in their quarantine boredom, have a seance.

The Fourth Kind

It’s pretty uneven and alters the format by admitting upfront that the whole movie is a dramatization of real existing audio and video records. It makes some interesting choices by doing a lot of split screens that incorporate the “real” footage and the reenactments but the gimmick is more distracting than immersive. But I’ll give it a pretty solid recommendation if you like the spooky alien episodes of X-Files, plus it has amazing representation for actors with receding hairlines so I’m all in.

Devil’s Pass

Devil’s Pass starts somewhat similarly to Blair Witch in that it’s about a journey into the wilderness to investigate a legend. This time the investigation is about the real life story of nine hikers that were killed at the Dyatlov Pass in the late 1950s. It essentially works like a crime scene investigation: the original hikers had internal injuries, were naked, someone’s tongue was missing and they all had elevated radiation levels. This movie fills in the blanks to discover what exactly happed. It’s great until the third act, where they fumble the bag by showing too much stuff that just kind of looks like shit on screen, but the story is there and it’s a fun mystery!

The Conspiracy

This movie from 2012 harkens back to a day when conspiracies were a little more fun. Before Q Anon, Alex Jones and upsettingly mainstream antisemitism put a real wet blanket over the act of wildly speculating. This is the post-George W. Bush-Skull & Bones version of conspiracies; a frankly much more entertaining and less problematic version while still feeling more grounded than the lizard people/hollow earth kind. This kind of thing is either up your alley or it’s not, but I’m all in and it manages to have a nice slow build as the scope widens, and a great third act.

Trollhunter

This is such a fun, and funny update on old Norwegian folk legends (I’m assuming). The pace is active and the story is interesting as it explores the Scandinavian wilderness for all it’s worth, revealing what might be in this expansive uncharted land. It’s mostly hulking multi-headed monsters it turns out. It’s maybe more action oriented than scary, but it definitely benefits from the found footage aesthetics. The night vision makes it acceptable to show 50 foot tall CGI trolls in a way that would look laughable (in the bad way) were it a more traditional format. There’s a great tradition of atmospheric Scandinavian TV and film and this scratches that itch while exploring territory often avoided by the more common detective movies.

The Taking of Deborah Logan

A movie that makes a cardinal sin right out of the gate by casting a very recognizable actor (Anne Ramsy from A League of Their Own and Mad About You) but somehow overcomes it because she’s so good in it. The plot centers around a documentary crew observing Deborah Logan (Ramsay’s character’s mother) as her mental health declines due to dementia. It’s a real life affliction and it’s handled pretty well all things considered. The lines get blurry when we realize Deborah Logan isn’t just  suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s. The climax of the movie has an unforgettable visual, but it nearly undoes all the cool stuff with a corny final shot. Endings are hard! Still well worth a watch and the performances are played with a creepy realism.

REC

A fun element of zombie movies is that they can be as large or as small as the film needs or allows. Romero obviously made the rules by widening his scope with every Dead sequel, but REC takes it back to basics with a stylistic update. It’s one location as seen through the lens of a live TV camera, and a bunch of death. Yes, it’s a critique of TV and our declining culture and is a metaphor like all zombie movies, but the actually cool part about zombie movies is that they’re about running around covered in blood, screaming, and this nails it.

Lake Mungo

This one was new to me, but came out in 2008. It’s an Australian movie that plays like a TV report. There aren’t any twists in format like how REC is about a broadcast spiraling into chaos, instead Lake Mungo relies on structured storytelling and revealing it’s twists in a calculated way. It’s somehow one of the most realistic “found footage” movies on this list, because it feels like a throwback to a creepy reality-based TV show like Unsolved Mysteries.

Man Bites Dog

I haven’t seen this one since college, so I’m not going to come out here and say it’s genius and hilarious and all that, because I’m a different man than I was then. But a lot of other people have said that and I vaguely remember a scene where the main character talks about how to properly weigh a body down to throw it in a river which was a pretty novel topic in 1993. It’s been in the back of my head for years calling me and researching this list was enough to put it back to the forefront so I’m going to go rewatch it now.

Recommend If You Like is not owned or funded by a billionaire or even a millionaire. We do have a Patreon. If you can’t afford to become a patron, please sign up to our mailing list. It’s free and we’re asking here instead of a pop-up. Pop-ups are annoying.