The premiere of The Blair Witch Project was no less than incredible, and to this day the movie stands out as the most exciting "opening night" I've ever attended. Blair Witch was the first of its kind, the In Cold Blood of found-footage films...and the media hype that led up to its release was as carefully crafted as the film, itself. Nothing like it had been done before. It's marketers had so successfully blurred the production's backstory, that many in the audience actually believed the students' footage was real. I saw Blair Witch on opening weekend at Arizona Mills Mall in Tempe, Az - long before anyone knew how big the movie would get. But we all caught a glimpse of what was to come, for sure. The box office line grew so long/so fast that extra showings were added that night - and a single reel of celluloid was shared between two side-by-side theaters, so two audiences could watch the film at once. That certainly didn't happen at the premiere of Porky's...
By now everyone knows what happened after that. Blair Witch was a success, it's sequel was a disaster, and everyone with $500 and a camcorder set out to make the next great found footage film. Sure, there were a few good ones - Paranormal Activity, Rec, Quarantine, Atrocious, Cloverfield, Continuum - but most of the genre ended up looking like a first-year film student's weekend project (with far too many teenagers and far too many F-bombs). What made found footage movies great in the first place also turned out to be their greatest weakness: If your filmmakers have no talent, they can't hide behind a special effects budget. Sadly, both Netflix & YouTube offer many examples of this fact.
"What do you fuckin' mean I need to take direction?" Before I go any further, I must admit that I genuinely admire anyone who tackles the challenge of making their own movie. In many ways, producing an independent picture is like self-publishing a book: the proper tools are out there, if you've the means to use them. Filming a movie without consulting a competent editor is no different than writing a novel without pressing the spellcheck button. It's okay to make something on the cheap, but at least give us a product that we can all take seriously.
I have a buddy who's lived in LA for the past eight years. My friend is in his late 40s, an accountant by trade, and after an unusually strong midlife crisis, he packed up his life in New York and drove cross country to Hollywood - where he was only guy in film school with white hair. My buddy has shared many stories about the experience, especially those surrounding students' attempts at screenwriting. It's actually become a common joke among film teachers: every first year film student writes the same goddamn story. It always starts with two kids sitting in their dorm, when something "happens" that causes them to run off with their cameras. They leave their room, run down the hall and out onto campus - filming everything along the way. Their intention is to pass "stream of consciousness" as plot, but like writing a thesis without an initial outline, the result is often comically amateurish.
I have a buddy who's lived in LA for the past eight years. My friend is in his late 40s, an accountant by trade, and after an unusually strong midlife crisis, he packed up his life in New York and drove cross country to Hollywood - where he was only guy in film school with white hair. My buddy has shared many stories about the experience, especially those surrounding students' attempts at screenwriting. It's actually become a common joke among film teachers: every first year film student writes the same goddamn story. It always starts with two kids sitting in their dorm, when something "happens" that causes them to run off with their cameras. They leave their room, run down the hall and out onto campus - filming everything along the way. Their intention is to pass "stream of consciousness" as plot, but like writing a thesis without an initial outline, the result is often comically amateurish.
I'm not going to bitch about the quality of specific found footage films; I just did a Google search, and there are plenty of blogs on that subject. I will say though that if filmmakers insist on keeping this genre alive, an effort must be taken to use creativity to counterbalance these movies' inherently cheap nature. There are so many reeeeeeeally bad found footage films out there, and I often wonder if their participants realize that they're damaging their resumes by posting crappy movies on YouTube. I mean, unprofessional FaceBook posts/pictures have been known to cost people their jobs, so can't the same be said for bad movies? Especially if you got the idea after smoking a blunt in your dorm?
"Where Have All The People Gone" should be required viewing for all young horror directors today. It isn't a found footage film; it's actually a pretty effective made-for-TV movie that was shot on a shoestring budget in 1974. (You can watch it for free on YouTube.) This film clearly had no pot to piss in - and I suspect most of its budget went toward paying Peter Graves' salary (in the same way that Trog's budget went to cover Crawford's bar tab) - yet the director found a way to make a few sprinkles of talcum powder seem scary as hell. There is no shaky camera work in the movie, but it does have the same "general wandering" that frequently makes found footage films seem lazy. When you've got the same special effects budget as an episode of Love American Style, you need a script with tighter direction than "Run through the woods and do something cool for Netflix."
"Where Have All The People Gone" should be required viewing for all young horror directors today. It isn't a found footage film; it's actually a pretty effective made-for-TV movie that was shot on a shoestring budget in 1974. (You can watch it for free on YouTube.) This film clearly had no pot to piss in - and I suspect most of its budget went toward paying Peter Graves' salary (in the same way that Trog's budget went to cover Crawford's bar tab) - yet the director found a way to make a few sprinkles of talcum powder seem scary as hell. There is no shaky camera work in the movie, but it does have the same "general wandering" that frequently makes found footage films seem lazy. When you've got the same special effects budget as an episode of Love American Style, you need a script with tighter direction than "Run through the woods and do something cool for Netflix."
Ok...this blog is bordering on a movie rant, and as I am not the Simpson's "comic book guy," I'm going to bring it in for a landing. I'll close by saying that if by some act of God "I" were ever to direct a found footage movie, I'd totally do something that blows people's minds. For starters, I'd cast adults - rather than teenagers - and I'd steer far away from anything paranormal, extra-terrestrial, demonic, monster-related, or worst of all, Bell-Witchy. And as those topics pretty much sum up the entire genre, the shock at the end of the movie would be that there was no movie to begin with.
I might miss out on a Blair Witch-sized opening night, but at least I won't have anything embarrassing popping up on your Netflix cue.
I might miss out on a Blair Witch-sized opening night, but at least I won't have anything embarrassing popping up on your Netflix cue.