Feel­ing Seen: On the pos­si­bil­i­ties of found footage horror

Some­times, I wish there had been a tiny cam­era attached to the side of my head. If there was then I wouldn’t need to strug­gle with the fick­le nature of mem­o­ry, I could sim­ply just scrub through all the footage, speed­ing through the parts that don’t mat­ter and slow­ing down to one frame per sec­ond for the impor­tant sec­tions. I could even solve the lin­ear nature of time. I could move back and forth between then and now as much as I pleased. But of course, the nature of record­ed footage is that it isn’t an objec­tive viewpoint.

What makes the nature of the found footage hor­ror form appeal­ing to film­mak­ers is that it means they can get away with shoot­ing around the things that a nor­mal hor­ror film would show. The Blair Witch her­self nev­er appears in The Blair Witch Project (part­ly by acci­dent, true, but if their plan to show her had gone through the film might very well have lost its uncan­ny impact). In Adam Wingard’s Blair Witch from 2016, we do see the Blair Witch, and the film ends up feel­ing com­par­a­tive­ly limp. In that film, the char­ac­ters lost in the wood have high def­i­n­i­tion cam­eras and drone cov­er­age. That could be viewed as the end point of a cer­tain trend for the genre, the post-Para­nor­mal Activ­i­ty boom of stu­dio found footage hor­ror films that gen­er­al­ly used the for­mat because it made mon­ey, rather than as a lim­it­ing exper­i­ment.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
There are moments in Blair Witch that are effec­tive – a great moment of sud­den, gnarly body hor­ror, for exam­ple, shat­ters through an already chaot­ic sequence – but noth­ing in there feels like it needs to be shot in the found footage man­ner beyond the sim­ple fact that that’s how the orig­i­nal was shot. The film sim­ply ignores the pres­ence of the under­rat­ed pre­vi­ous sequel, Book of Shad­ows, which was more or less a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive fea­ture. When Blair Witch came out to shrugs from the audi­ence, it real­ly did feel like found footage hor­ror was over. Maybe the ​‘screen life’ genre of Unfriend­ed would fill its niche, but found footage itself seemed unlike­ly to con­tin­ue on any scale.

That was, it turned out, a good thing. Obvi­ous­ly found footage films didn’t cease to be made. Rather appro­pri­ate­ly, this is a nar­ra­tive that I have con­struct­ed or pro­ject­ed look­ing back on the peri­od – but com­par­ing recent entries such as The Out­wa­ters and Incan­ta­tion, it does feel like peo­ple are approach­ing with dif­fer­ent things in mind. The organ­ic indie hit Ski­na­marink isn’t even tech­ni­cal­ly a found footage film, but it’s impos­si­ble to talk about with­out invok­ing the genre.

All three of these films break very dis­tinct rules, and both The Out­wa­ters and Ski­na­marink are the first fea­tures of young, queer film­mak­ers. There’s a long run­ning joke-slash-crit­i­cism of these sorts of films that asks why peo­ple don’t sim­ply stop film­ing. The Out­wa­ters leans into that specif­i­cal­ly. Incan­ta­tion breaks the log­i­cal for­mu­la, con­struct­ing a nar­ra­tive that we the audi­ence can­not pos­si­bly be see­ing. Ski­na­marink, of course, is a found footage film with­out cam­eras. Instead, the shots take the form of cov­er­age and char­ac­ter POV, with the action fre­quent­ly hap­pen­ing around the edges of the images.

All three films cen­tre on vio­lence inflict­ed on chil­dren; Incan­ta­tion gen­er­al­ly being from the POV of the moth­er of a young girl who final­ly comes to live with her, Ski­na­marink being direct­ly cen­tred on a child’s view of the world and The Out­wa­ters tak­ing an adult man with a com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship to his moth­er on a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry trip back to the route of his child­hood. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing way of telling a sto­ry that, tex­tu­al­ly, is clos­er to a Xavier Dolan film than a straight­for­ward hor­ror film, and it still makes time for tru­ly night­mar­ish, gut churn­ing vio­lence. The film­mak­ing tech­nique both enhances and obscures the queer­ness at the cen­tre of the sto­ry, but the fact is that going home does feel like being slow­ly pulled apart sometimes.

Ski­na­marink takes a sim­i­lar dif­fi­cult child­hood and stretch­es it out – in that film, time becomes almost unbear­ably slow mov­ing. It led to audi­ence reac­tions that the film’s sec­ond half was sim­ply too much. Not that it dragged exact­ly, more that at a cer­tain point it became over­whelm­ing. There was no for­ward momen­tum to the plot, only end­less abstract­ed images and mut­tered words and the sounds of chil­dren cry­ing. Which is, obvi­ous­ly, the real point of Ski­na­marink. It’s a machine entire­ly made to pro­duce the hor­ri­ble feel­ing of being a pow­er­less child in a world that is at best ambiva­lent to you, and at worst active­ly antagonistic.

The con­cept of the queer child is a polit­i­cal­ly volatile idea right now. It always has been, but espe­cial­ly in the last cou­ple years, the right wing imag­i­nar­i­um has set­tled on a dan­ger­ous cam­paign against queer peo­ple under the thin guise of pro­tect­ing chil­dren from groom­ing (that is, being able to exist on their own terms). It’s fas­ci­nat­ing then, that both The Out­wa­ters and Ski­na­marink, two hor­ror films inter­est­ed in explor­ing the ter­ror that is expe­ri­enced by that child, would coin­ci­den­tal­ly arrive right now.

I don’t remem­ber a lot of my child­hood. Not that it was unhap­py – at least, not all the time. I was an unhap­py teen, cer­tain­ly, but as a child I was fair­ly igno­rant of my own iden­ti­ty. But I don’t real­ly remem­ber that time, and I feel estranged from it. Every now and then images or expe­ri­ences will bub­ble up for me out of the past, but work­ing out what is real and what was a dream can be dif­fi­cult. Some­times those expe­ri­ences will be har­row­ing, like some­thing out of one of these films. Some­times they will be crush­ing­ly mun­dane. I wish I’d had a cam­era implant­ed in my lit­tle skull so I could know for sure. But as it is, I’ll just have to try to expe­ri­ence time as lin­ear­ly, as most do. Going for­wards, not look­ing back, not dar­ing to.