Our seventh special issue takes up found footage horror – and we have a real bumper crop of essays here, eighteen of them, along with the special issue introduction. We’ve made an point here of seeking to expand the canon of found footage horror, so you’re as likely to find unfamiliar as familiar names and titles: H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928); Shelley Jackson’s “dossier” novel, Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing Mouth Children (2018); Abel Gance’s World War I film, J’accuse (1919) and its 1938 reboot; the French TV program, Les Documents Interdits (1989-1991, 2010); The WNUF Halloween Special (2013); Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022); The Curse of Professor Zardonicus (2022); the first found footage horror tabletop role-playing game, The Devil in New Jersey (2022); What Happened to Crow 64? (2020), a collection of YouTube videos exploring a fictional video game; and the video game Immortality (2022).
But you’ll also find new readings of plenty of found footage favorites: The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Collingswood Story (2002); Lake Mungo (2008); The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), Savageland (2015), Butterfly Kisses (2018), As Above So Below (2014), The Pyramid (2014), Deadstream (2022), Host (2020), and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022).
Here is a taste from our introduction, written by Lauren Gilmore:
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. A handful of film students disappear in the woods and all we know about what happened to them is contained on recovered recordings. Or maybe you remember the one about a single mother searching for an antidote for the omen passed to her son from a cursed VHS. If not, then you’ve certainly heard about the father in the suburbs who installs security cameras, hoping to put his family’s fears to rest but ends up producing documentation of the inexplicable.
Across horror’s various subgenres and formal media, interactions with found artifacts are everywhere. The famous examples referenced above (The Blair Witch Project, 1999; Paranormal Activity, 2007; The Ring, 2002) point to the explosion of memorable manifestations in this direction in the past two decades. From traditional found footage to conventional films where unearthing material plays a pivotal role in the development of the story to new media explorations of complexly embodied online expression, horror is preoccupied with the archival.
As this edited collection reveals, this impulse begins in the genre’s very roots and continues through to cutting-edge narrative technologies. While the ‘found footage’ label that organizes this issue is a broad umbrella, the essays found here center on some common tensions: between authenticity and fabrication, intentional formal experimentation and an improvised aesthetic, narrative closure and the plotless nature of ‘reality.’ Even through this wide swath of books, movies, video games, and digital phenomenon, there is a sense that the topic—like the form—remains inexhaustible, inviting more and more rigorous study in exchange for richer and richer insights into our constantly mutating media landscape and its in/ability to contain what plagues us.
So, check out the rest of the introduction – and all 18 essays in one of our multiple formats – online, as a pdf, or as a flipbook.
