He quickly learns that the sights he plans to see don’t allow him to film, and the Parisian locals are frigid at best and hostile at worst. As one can expect, things go exceptionally poorly for Sorgoï. He’s in Paris as part of a “European Dream” tour, where he travels around Europe in a heart shape, seeing the sights, meeting locals, and filming a documentary for Sdorvie public access television.

It follows Sorgoi Prakov, a journalist from the fictional Eastern European country of Sdorvie. It was later picked up by, re-cut, released on Amazon, then recut again and rereleased. I discovered many of these films through their programming and recommendations, although a few come from outside that sphere as well.ĭescent into Darkness(Rafael Cherkaski, France, 2013)Īlso known as Sorgoï Prakov, My European Dream and later as Descent into Darkness: My European Nightmare, Descent into Darkness is a French film that’s most easily described as “Borat, but found footage horror.” The film was initially released directly to YouTube with little-to-no context, but was quickly taken down for including illegal footage of French police. I’m fortunate enough to get an unusually hefty dose of found footage, courtesy of the San Francisco Unnamed Footage Festival, a one-of-a-kind film festival that focuses solely on found footage horror. Instead, I really want to bring light to films you might find on the third or fourth page of ‘Customers Also Watched” on Amazon, or that might turn up when digging through foreign films or looking deep into a director’s filmography. Don’t even expect minor releases like Bobcat Goldthwait’s Willow Creek, John Erick Dowdle’s As Above, So Below or Ti West’s The Sacrament. Don’t expect major releases like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity to show up here. This list is meant to celebrate those releases, and similarly overlooked found footage films that deserve your attention. In some cases, this might be a fair take, but it also leads to a lot of gems being overlooked, especially in the aforementioned bulk of straight to Amazon films. This dichotomy leads many horror fans to deride the genre as a matter of course, to the point where reviews of found footage films often start with a disclaimer where the reviewer states as much. It doesn’t help that many of these entries are low effort trash that’s tedious at best, and offensively terrible at worst. So many found footage films get made that they flood Amazon Prime, and can easily overwhelm a casual viewer. Because it has one of the lowest barriers-to-entry of any type of narrative feature filmmaking, hundreds of found footage films get pumped out by indie filmmakers every year. What better way to do that than by watching a bunch of found footage horror? When you can’t go outside and grab life by the reins, you might as well watch someone else grab it by the camcorder and experience it for you in all its blurry, unsteady wonder.įound Footage can be an inscrutable subgenre. Given the state of things in the world, with horror fans around the globe stuck in quarantine and shelter-in-place, there couldn’t be a better time to step into someone else’s shoes.

Found footage movies