Being a space fan I'm currently watching the film Apollo 18. Despite enjoying this particular feature, the modern genre in which it fits is, for me, tiresome in the extreme, dumbed-down, unwelcome, unwatchable and dead. I am of course talking about 'found footage'.
'Found footage' films involve either the recovery of home-made video movies or the filming of the entire feature by cast-members using home video cameras. The genre has a long heritage going back appropriately to the dawn of the home video age in the late 1970’s with Cannibal Holocaust. Prior to Betamax and ultimately VHS video cassettes, home recording technology had centred on cine-film projector formats like Super 8. VHS and VCR’s [video cassette recorders] allowed mass recording and playback of home movies and feature films like never before with virtually all households owning the technology.
The “found footage” genre reached its popular peak in 1999 with the independent US flick The Blair Witch Project, one of the most successful independent films of all time. Tellingly, this coincided with the onset of DVD as the dominant video format for home cinema and the beginning of the end for VHS tapes and VCR’s.
Alas, if only the genre had stopped there. Regrettably it didn’t. From these small, revolutionary beginnings the device infiltrated mainstream cinema and infested Hollywood. Otherwise excellent films like Cloverfield became shaky-handheld-camera ordeals capable of inducing migraine in the hardiest of cinephiles.
The next wave of the genre came with the utterly atrocious but till-filling Paranormal Activity in 2007. This coincided with the exponential growth of mobile phones across the globe and the ubiquity of social media. Facebook was launched in 2004. Paranormal Activity is by some estimates the most profitable film of all time, netting $193 million worldwide. It’s budget was a paltry $15,000 and it shows.
I had the distinct misfortune of seeing the latest and fifth offering in the Paranormal Activity franchise this month, the Marked Ones. Boring, tedious, dumb, juvenile all describe this film but most of all I think of the word cynical. It has become a commercial artless bandwagon and like any runaway gravy train it has lost all direction and any noteworthy production values. The Marked Ones is easily one of the worst films I have ever seen.
Infuriatingly I also saw Devil’s Due this week. I should have checked first because, amazingly, it was equally as awful as the Marked Ones, as it plumbed even greater depths of headache-inducing shaky camerawork filming non-actors running and screaming round cheapskate urban sets. My friend and I should have simply walked out.
I would like to think that Devil’s Due spells the end for found footage films but I fear not. The shaky nightmare will go on.
Next time I’ll talk about what I reckon is a much more effective format, the similar but different genre of films within films.
