Found Footage Film History

America doesn't have a monopoly on found footage—Spanish horror flick REC is one of the creepiest flicks in recent memory. The movie follows a female TV reporter and her cameraman as they work on a show about the night shift firemen. Unfortunately, a simple call to rescue a woman trapped in her apartment quickly changes into an all-out zombie apocalypse, as the residents of the apartment building are infected by a mysterious illness that causes them to turn into vicious cannibals.

While most found footage movies are resolutely low-budget affairs, J.J. Abrams's Cloverfield spent some bank. The blockbuster movie, which tells the tale of a gigantic Godzilla-esque creature ravaging New York City, was shot entirely on a video camera belonging to one of the characters. Interestingly enough, actor T.J. Miller, who plays Hud in the flick, claims that nearly a third of the footage in the actual movie was filmed by him! It's an incredible achievement and one of the most realistic found footage films ever made.

Let's take a little break from the world of horror and travel with enfant terrible Harmony Korine into the world of... Trash Humpers. The tale of a gang of losers and freaks that roam the darkened streets of Nashville, Tennessee, Trash Humpers is filmed using the grottiest VHS equipment imaginable, with artifacting and chaos everywhere. That perfectly mimics the narrative of the film—such as it is—as the geriatric garbage fetishists wander through a desolate landscape with no end in sight.

Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, the writers of The Last Exorcism, have a solid background in blurring the borders of reality and fiction. Their debut feature, Mail Order Wife, was a faux-documentary about a slovenly oaf who purchases a wife from abroad. German director Daniel Stamm had also made found footage films, so putting them all together resulted in a remarkably scary little number. When a young farm girl requests an exorcism from a priest losing his faith, all Hell breaks loose—quite literally.