Twelve Angles on the Found Success of Found Footage: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity

If all horror is a revelation of subterranean fears and anxieties, the found-footage subgenre uses techniques of amateur documentary filmmaking to place you in a lateral reality and then dig below that surface to reveal something you are equally curious and afraid to see. In fact, curiosity is the simple premise of both films, the reason the characters have the camera in the first place. And this curiosity is stretched to it limits, drawing them past thresholds they will regret having crossed.

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The Blair Witch Project (1999) filmmakers used the earlier days of the internet to launch a marketing campaign that blurred the line between reality and fiction. The strategy included missing-persons leaflets featuring the three students. A website, as well as a grassroots message board campaign, utilized a more rudimentary internet to create the impression that the disappearances were legitimate. The marketing materials were made to look as shoddily produced as the film itself, as if there were no studio behind it but simply a gang of passionate fellow students and the families of the disappeared. The trailer was brief and the actors didn’t appear on talk shows. Any publicity that would work against the film’s verisimilitude was surrendered.

The goal was when audiences saw the film, the herky-jerky camera, the amateur framing, the absence of a visible monster, and the poor lighting, the filmmakers not only would be forgiven but would serve the audiences’ belief that what they were seeing was authentic. And while the film was financially successful – produced for $25,000, it made something like 10,000 times that amount at the box office – it was also successful by another measure: decades after the marketing, its terrifying verisimilitude holds up, even in an age of media saturation when audiences aren’t as naïve as they were in the nineties.

2

The trailer for Paranormal Activity (2007) featured packed movie audiences overcast in the green tint of the camera’s night-vision, capturing their shrieks and gasps. The first time I saw the film, my theater fit the bill, more rapt and involved from beginning to end than any audience I’d ever been part of.

When the lights came on, one of my companions, by no means a movie buff, asked a question that shouldn’t have surprised me: so was that real? I told her it wasn’t, it was just filmed to look that way. She nodded, unconvinced. Or maybe she knew I was right but still had trouble reversing what her senses told her, that Katie and Micah were a real couple who had reached, after of an encounter with a demon, a tragic end that didn’t sit well with her.

It didn’t sit well with me either. I was troubled for the characters but also personally, as though mourning some unnamable loss. I, like the characters, had crossed a line, done something wrong. It is the primary disconsolation of found-footage horror, the feeling that I had watched, and was altered by, something I was never meant to see.

3

If all horror is a revelation of subterranean fears and anxieties, the found-footage subgenre uses techniques of amateur documentary filmmaking to place you in a lateral reality and then dig below that surface to reveal something you are equally curious and afraid to see. In fact, curiosity is the simple premise of both films, the reason the characters have the camera in the first place. And this curiosity is stretched to it limits, drawing them past thresholds they will regret having crossed.

In The Blair Witch Project, the student filmmakers enter the woods to shoot key scenes in their documentary about a local legend. When they become lost, Heather, who spearheads the project, is adamant about keeping the cameras rolling, a point of contention between her and her companions as the situation grows dire. But even when they challenge her, beg her to put the camera down, Heather remains steadfast, intent on capturing all traces of whatever pursues them through the woods. Ultimately, the film enacts a direct punishment of Heather’s curiosity, delivering the witch she came in search of.

Paranormal Activity is also a parable about curiosity. Micah uses the camera to identify the source of the noises he and his girlfriend hear each night. He can’t be deterred, even when Katie pleads with him to stop, even when the psychic predicts the camera will empower the demon, making things worse. This implies that not only would we never see the horror were the camera not there, but the horror wouldn’t be there at all, not to this degree, without it. We are therefore made culpable, our own curiosity and inability to turn away implicated in the devastation.

We watch against our better judgment. And by the end, when we’re screaming, when we leave the theater thoroughly unconsoled, what we’re doing is questioning – like Micah placing his nighttime camera, like Heather leading her team into the woods – our own choices now that we’ve seen their repercussions.

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For the effort and performances of the actors, for the technical skill of the writers and directors, for the incredible achievement of blurring reality, none of the people in either film graduate to the type of movie careers promised by these early efforts.

Success in found footage is largely found success. Both films have a number of sequels, none of which capture the magic of their first installments. Both signaled a wave of copycats that only proved most found-footage cinema is awful. The justification of the camera and stilted camaraderie between characters come across as flat; the claim that this is real only underscores the film’s contrivances.

Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project avoid the typical traps. There are a number of technical achievements and organic storytelling elements to point to. What is most important, however, is that the characters come across as real people. The relationships between them does not read as simulated. And this authentic-seeming intimacy allows us to believe anything, no matter how supernatural, that interacts with it.

5

In both movies, all five main actors use their real names. Heather Donahue calls the decision to do so in The Blair Witch Project her “biggest life regret to this day.” In a 2016 interview with GQ Magazine, on the occasion of a sequel’s release, Donahue says that when she first heard about the new film (called simply Blair Witch), she was “filled with a [b]ig, vast, nameless dread.”1

She goes on to explain why, when a producer for the sequel asked if she’d like to be part of it, she surprised him by not only saying no but requesting her name be kept out entirely, saying that her experience of the film’s release – her association with an unexpected phenomenon, the ascension and breathtaking drop from fame, the endless parodies of her snot-filled apology scene – was like surviving a terminal disease:

It has informed my entire adult life. I don’t know my life without it. . . . I don’t know my own name without it. . . . It’s quite a thing to crawl out from under: To have your obituary written when you’re 24, in both literal and figurative ways. Like, what am I going to do to surpass that? That will always be the first line in my obituary, no matter what else I do.

She also notes her pride in the performance, saying, “I gave that role 110%.”2

Her character’s trauma, the pitch of her screams, echoes off the edges of each frame, harbingers of a career derailed by the film’s verisimilitude. It was so real-seeming that people no longer wanted to hire her as an actor, because they didn’t see, the film wouldn’t allow them to see the acting. In other words, the more successfully real the performance, the less inclined people will be to hire you to pretend.

Since that interview Heather Donahue has become Rei Hance, distancing her from the role that took her name, and laid it to rest.

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Too much found footage relies on one particular expression of vulnerability, the camera showing the audience scary things that the characters are unaware of. But The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity explore a deeper vulnerability, that of the characters themselves and the raw, painful things they reveal to us, making us voyeurs to their undoings.

Micah doesn’t respect Katie’s wishes to stop filming or against bringing a Ouija board into the house. He forbids her from calling a demonologist. At key moments he acts out. When she is disturbed, he teases her. Once, as she retreats upstairs, he calls out, telling her to have fun with her friend, the demon who has tormented them every night since they began filming. He is cruel in a believably immature way.

But also believable are his moments of tenderness, holding Katie when she cries, consoling her after a scare. He is a flawed character who doesn’t present his best self to the camera, as if he, the one responsible for its presence, is the most unaware of it. What we see is a real-seeming person hiding nothing from us. He hides only one thing, and from himself: all attempts at capture are actually attempts at proving he is in control, that he has the ability to secure his home and protect his girlfriend. If Micah is toxically masculine, it is with a realistic undercurrent of sweetness.

There is also something authentic about the character and gender dynamics in The Blair Witch Project. Heather’s curiosity compels the continued filming. She also claims to know the woods best. And while the film doesn’t rely on the gender stereotypes rampant in horror, something rings true when the two men gang up on her and she fakes her confidence in order to withstand it.

As they become further lost, it’s compelling to watch these characters break down, screaming into the void, taunting each other, cracking. However, a lesser movie would have them turn on one other. But the film balances these outbursts with moments of compassion, each taking turns dispelling the tension to keep the group together. (“We have to take care of each other,” Mike says, as Josh is at a distance, crying.)

Both films account for the full spectrum of emotion – anger, love, hopelessness, and vulnerability – that creates the alchemy of fear. If the filmmakers are telling us this is real, then in these stressful situations, we need to recognize ourselves, recognize exactly how it would be in real life: no one looks good, and there is no one you don’t pity.

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The Blair Witch Project filmmakers were aware of what they would ask of their actors, as well as their limitations on a micro budget. During the audition they taped this note to the wall:

You are about to read for the most demanding and unpleasant project of your career. If you are cast, we’re going to drag you into the woods for seven days of hell. One hundred and sixty-eight hours of real time improvisational torment. We’re not kidding. So if you’re not serious about your craft, then you’re wasting your time and ours.3

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Found-footage horror doesn’t scale well, and in the sequels to both movies, the filmmakers attempt to do just that – more cameras, better technology, more characters. In Blair Witch three couples go in search of the lead’s sister (the Heather Donahue from the first film, though in agreement with the producer, she is never named). They have multiple tents and cameras, which means we have scenes between characters in which others are unaccounted for. This allows the movie to incorporate more traditional storytelling techniques.

However, the viewer, recognizing maneuvers of traditional films, loses the verisimilitude. There is no intimacy; there is, in the cutaways, a sense of an organizing mind (an editor) that makes the audience wonder about this unknown’s agenda. The suspicion dooms the effect of authenticity, turning a found-footage standout into a shaky-cam version of any horror film.

A similar thing occurs in Paranormal Activity 2. The family experiences a break-in, which compels them to hire a security company to set cameras throughout their home. The film uses these feeds to isolate characters and show what happens when no one is looking. It upscales the film, broadens the scope and cast of characters – a husband and wife, a daughter, a newborn son, a housekeeper, and, because it is a prequel, Katie and Micah. There are many characters to account for, many different dynamics that detract from the core authenticity that grounded the first film.

These films work best when they reveal transfigured pockets of reality, pockets that would believably exist without the eyes of society on them. Here is what happens behind a couple’s closed doors. Here is what happens in the deep, untrod woods. This could happen, could be happening now. In fact, it is. And here is proof.

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Not all the actors have as troubled a relationship to their film as does Rei Hance.

Micah Sloat played the skeptical boyfriend in Paranormal Activity. However, according to his website, his skepticism couldn’t have been further from the truth: “I combined my master’s degree in Transpersonal Psychology with ancient spiritual traditions, such as Peruvian Shamanism, British Traditional Witchcraft, and Hawaiian Shamanism, to create a unique, trauma-informed approach to personal change that I call Spirit Work.”4

When you search Micah Sloat, his website is not the first thing to come up. Instead, there are suggestions and articles about his character’s fate in the film. Click on What happened to Micah Sloat? thinking it will be a rundown of his acting career, and you might be surprised by the answer that he was killed at the end of the first movie. The real person lives deeper in the results.

The blurriness, between character and person, agency and its lack, is accounted for on his homepage: “Be the author of your life story. . . . You are the main character, living inside of a story that is written by your brain. . . . Most people are living in a story that has been, to a large extent, written for them, by their family of origin and the environment in which they grew up. . . . The path to freedom lies in recognizing that you are the storyteller, and if there’s something about your story that you don’t like, you can change it.”5

In some ways, Sloat seems to have rewritten the narrative assigned him by his role in the film, becoming the exact type of person his on-screen persona mocks. It confuses one’s sense to see someone so associated with a particular worldview profess an entirely different one. Part of that disorientation boils down to the simple fact that Micah Sloat the character was so authentically human-seeming, while the real Micah Sloat might be described as a character.

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Both films deliver viscerally in their use of sleep and its lack to heighten tension.

Of the inspiration for Paranormal Activity, director Oren Peli says:

My girlfriend and I moved into a house in San Diego. And it was the first time I’d ever lived in an actual detached house. . . . When you live in quiet suburbia, it’s really, really quiet. So you become really aware of any little noise in the middle of the night. The house would creak and make noise. . . . My girlfriend would freak out, she’d be like there’s something in the house, I thought I heard voices – there’s something here. And I’m very skeptical; I don’t believe in that kind of stuff, so I thought there’s got to be a logical explanation. I thought if you really thought something was going on in your house, you could set up a video camera and just let it record . . . and review the footage and see if anything was going on while you were asleep. I never actually did that, but I thought how freaky would it be if you were watching footage of yourself sleeping, and then while you were sleeping, totally unaware of what’s going on, you saw even the tiniest evidence of something unusual, like the door moving a little bit, or something else moving in the house, indicating that there’s some invisible thing wandering around while you’re asleep.6

At night, going to sleep, a certain rawness surfaces. Scabs itch, fevers run high, regrets come to a mind suddenly overwhelmed by them. In bed is often when one knows exactly how they feel about their life. And to soothe those agitations, one depends on sleep to provide some necessary, oblivious cover.

But none of the characters in either film is allowed this blanking of the slate, this balm to soothe the blazing tips of their frayed nerves. The premise of Paranormal Activity has everything to do with disturbed sleep, with an infestation in one’s home that strips its inhabitants of the ability to close their eyes.

The torments of the Blair witch only come at night. Seeing the filmmakers groggy-eyed, lit only by the camera’s light as they wake in alarm at the cackling and screaming that closes in, is a horror perhaps more visceral than any act of violence. (“I’m scared to close my eyes,” Heather says in her apology scene, “scared to open them.”)

Sleep is dependent on our relationship to the world. If we trust our surroundings, we can perform this essential function of health and happiness. If we don’t, the world becomes terrifying, nightmarish, blurring the boundary between safe reality and the horrors of the imagination.

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The deaths in both films largely abide by the films’ stylistic minimalism. When a possessed Katie kills Micah by luring him downstairs with cries for help, the viewer is more disturbed by the fact that Micah runs to Katie thinking he is helping than when his body is telepathically slung at the camera.

Perhaps even more affecting than seeing Heather unwrap that bundle of sticks to find Josh’s bloody teeth is the fact that before the filming ends, the last image we have is of Mike standing in the corner with his back toward us. It is strange, his sudden stillness after just running up and down stairs, calling Josh’s name.

Part of the inherent scariness of found-footage horror is the sense that what the audience witnesses will change them irrevocably. Only the camera, the footage, survives, which means we will watch unsuspecting people ushered to death by their own actions and bad luck. It gives us a glimpse into the how of the inevitable, the how of our own ends. But as horrifying as that is, what really scares us is that the characters don’t see their ends coming, haunting us with the question of when.

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Even after all these years, after becoming the type of viewer who will cavalierly put on a horror movie when alone, even at night, I still feel nervous about starting either of these films.

What is most anomalous about each is how convincingly they place the viewer in the position of voyeur. We watch people who don’t know they are being watched. Yes, they are the ones running the cameras, keeping open this window into their lives, but they never expected other people to gather at those windows, never expected to not live to control the footage.

We watch these characters, these people in intimate moments, and see them as mirrors of our best and worst selves. We become Heather, hiding behind her camera. We are Katie and Micah, in love, navigating incompatibilities that are charming in good times but capable of breaking us in times of stress. The question compelled by each film’s verisimilitude is if under extreme agitation, in perilous circumstances that challenge our conception of reality, would we behave any differently?

We wouldn’t go into the woods. We wouldn’t tempt the demon. So why are we watching so curiously? We want to do both things, curious to see the consequences play out. We watch what even our own racing hearts tell us is forbidden, tell us is an experience from which we, like all five characters, will never emerge.

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All images are screenshots from the films.