In today’s media landscape, questions of authenticity, truth, and manipulation of fact are more pertinent than ever. While journalists herald the dawning of a ‘post-truth’ era, and deepfakes bring to a boiling point the anxiety of online communication and documentation, the subgenre of found footage horror seems to encapsulate a terror that is both commonplace and elusive.
From the Unfriended films (2016, 2018) to Host (2020), recent years have heralded an uptick in digital iterations of the medium as an outlet for articulating our fraught relationship with new media technologies. But the concept isn’t new. If we consider Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film, Häxan—with its integration of truth claims and archived materials—as one of the earliest found footage horror films, then the legacy of the subgenre is approaching just over 100 years. Nor are the impulses of the medium confined to the screen. Foundational horror works like Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897), or found testimonies like Cotton Mather’s records of the Salem Witch trials (1693), all serve as precursors to ongoing experiments with the found footage subgenre.
While a wide variety of texts have been labeled ‘found footage,’ we are interested in efforts to identify the distinctive features of the subgenre, which include:
- The camera, or the author recording/compiling the story, becomes its own character within the text;
- The text was found, or recorded by the author, after the events of the text occurred;
- The text is invested in claims of truth, authenticity, and the question of proof when it comes to the supernatural;
- The text plays with, manipulates, or relies on new developments in technology.
We are also interested in the ways texts intersect or play with the tropes/‘rules’ of found footage, including interpretive claims about texts that should (or could) be read as found footage, a focus on mediums beyond novels and film, and the intersection between found footage horror and other genres or subgenres. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Found elements within traditional horror films
- Found footage & folk horror
- Genre intersections with the form
- Truth claims & media epistemology
- Settler colonialism & the supernatural
- Intersections with archival studies
- Text compilations
- Voyeurism, exploitation, violence
- Technology’s connection to horror
- Motives behind found footage
- Amateurism/democratization of production
- Studio adaption of found footage aesthetics
- Cultural memory
- International found footage films
- Trauma studies
Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words along with a brief bio to Dawn Keetley (dek7@lehigh.edu), Ellen Boyd (ejb321@lehigh.edu), and Lauren Gilmore (ltg221@lehigh.edu) by October 31st, 2022. We will select essays to include in the special issue within three weeks and notify everyone who submitted an abstract. Completed essays, which will be limited to 2,500 words, will be due by January 9th, 2023, and should be written for a general audience. We welcome all questions and inquiries!
If you want to read more about found footage horror, there is an abundance of great stuff out there:
Selected Bibliography:
Aldana Reyes, Xavier, Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic, and the Found Footage Phenomenon, I.B. Tauris, 2015.
Allan, Cameron, “Corporeal Frames: Found-Footage Horror and the Dislocated Image,” Visceral Screens: Mediation and Matter in Horror Films, Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2021.
Aloi, Peg, “Beyond the Blair Witch: A New Horror Aesthetic?” The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, edited by Geoff King, Intellect, 2005, pp. 187-200.
Benson-Allott, Caetlin, “Paranormal Spectatorship: Faux Footage Horror and the P2P Spectator,” Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing, Univ. of California Press, 2013, pp. 167-202.
Daniel, Adam, Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality, Univ. of Edinburgh Press, 2020.
Denson, Shane, “Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect,” Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, Reframe Books, 2016, https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/2-5-denson./
Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, McFarland, 2014.
Jackson, Kimberly, “The Image as Voracious Eye in The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and the Paranormal Activity Series,” Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in Twenty-first Century Horror, Palgrave 2013, pp. 55-84.
Leyda, Julia, “Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as Recessionary Post-Cinematic Allegory,” Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, Reframe Books, 2016, https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/4-1-julia-leyda/.
Leyda, Julia, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham, “Roundtable: The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2,” Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, Reframe Books, 2016, https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/7-1-grisham-leyda-rombes-shaviro/.
Lonergen, Meg D., “Real Scary /Scary Real: Consuming Simulated and Authentic Horrors in the Digital Era,” Horror Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2022, pp. 63-75.
McMurdo, Shellie, Blood on the Lens: Trauma and Anxiety in American Found Footage Horror, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-blood-on-the-lens.html.
Meeuf, Russell, “Surveilling Whiteness: The Horrific Technology Film,” White Terror: The Horror Film from Obama to Trump, Indiana Univ. Press, 2022, pp. 135-57.
Ondrak, Joe, “Spectres des Monstres: Post-modernisms, Hauntology, and Creepypasta Narratives as Digital Fiction,” Horror Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2018, pp. 161-78.
Sawczuk, Tomasz, “Taking Horror as You Find It: From Found Manuscripts to Found Footage Aesthetics,” Text Matters, vol. 10, 2020, pp. 223-35.
Sayad, Cecilia, “Found-Footage Horror and the Frame’s Undoing.” Cinema Journal, vol. 55, no. 2, 2016, pp. 43-66.
Southward, Daniel, “Frame Narratives and the Gothic Subject,” The Dark Arts Journal, vol. 1, 2015, pp. 45-53.
Turner, Peter, Found Footage Horror Films: A Cognitive Approach, Routledge, 2020.
Van Liew, Maria, “Going Viral in the Age of the Synchronous Remake: [REC] and Quarantine,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, vol. 22, 2018, pp. 269-89.
Zanini, Claudio Vescia, “Evil and the Subversion of Factual Discourse in Found Footage Films,” Piercing the Shroud: Destabilizations of “Evil,” edited by Rallie Murray, Brill, 2019, pp. 11-33.
