Found footage horror is the art of making a film look as if nobody made it. It began with a reel from the Amazon in 1980, broke through with three students lost in a Maryland forest in 1999, and now plays out on Zoom calls and in the yellow corridors of the Backrooms.
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This guide tells that story, then gives you eight films to watch this Halloween.
Where found footage horror came from
Found footage horror pretends that nobody made it. The film arrives as tapes, reels or recordings that someone left behind, and you watch them as evidence rather than as a story. IndieWire’s critics put it plainly in their 2025 ranking: the technique is now so common in horror that the style and the fear are almost impossible to pull apart.
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The phrase itself is older than the genre. In art cinema, a found footage film is one built from somebody else’s reels. Bill Morrison made Decasia from decaying archive film, and he told MovieMaker that viewers read it as horror, a reading he welcomes. In his eyes, decaying nitrate carries a sense of the spirit world. Horror took the name and turned the idea around. The footage is new, but the film swears it was found.
The reels from the Amazon
The usual starting point is Italy in 1980. Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust sends an anthropologist into the Amazon to look for three young documentary makers who never came back. Much of its second half is the footage the missing crew left behind. IndieWire noted in 2014 that, with Cannibal Holocaust, the found footage horror genre predated the digital filmmaking boom by close to twenty years. GamesRadar+ credits the same film with popularising the form.
The claim to be first is not settled. Murawski, who worked on the 2026 Grindhouse Releasing restoration of Cannibal Holocaust, says Orson Welles got there almost ten years earlier. Welles’s unfinished The Other Side of the Wind mixes 16mm and Super 8 “documentary” footage of an ageing director’s birthday party with the 35mm film that director is making.
Broadcasts that fooled people
The 1990s added television to the trick. On Halloween night in 1992, BBC1 aired Ghostwatch, a pseudo-documentary written by Stephen Volk and directed by Lesley Manning. It used real presenters, among them Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene and Craig Charles, and it looked so much like a live news programme that it caused real alarm across the UK. The same year, the mockumentary Man Bites Dog followed a camera crew who slowly become accomplices to the serial killer they are filming.
Then came two films about the woods. The Last Broadcast reached audiences in 1998, a year before The Blair Witch Project, and IndieWire says it has stood in that bigger film’s shadow ever since. According to Little White Lies, the two were made in complete independence, and their likeness came from coincidence rather than theft. Both sent a doomed expedition into the deep woods with portable cameras, and both helped start a movement that took off in the mid 2000s.
The Blair Witch Project arrived in 1999. IndieWire is careful to say it was not the first found footage film, and perhaps not even the first in horror, but it calls it the one that changed everything. Its campaign ran online in the early days of the popular internet, and nothing since has pushed the “this is real” angle as hard. GamesRadar+ recalls missing posters convincing enough that people truly worried whether the three actors were still alive.
The people who first picked up the camera
The pioneers of found footage were mostly people with no money and a good idea about where fear comes from. Several of them went on to help the people who came after.
Ruggero Deodato and his restorer
Deodato’s film is the hardest to love on this list, and its champions say so. IndieWire’s Cannibal Holocaust feature calls it a pioneering found footage film that did much of what The Blair Witch Project later did, and did it better. The same piece is blunt that the animal killings in it were real, and calls that morally indefensible. It argues that the footage conditions viewers to accept everything as real, which makes the staged horror later in the film almost unbearable. IndieWire’s 2025 ranking calls it the Salo of found footage horror films.
The film’s most devoted fan may be Murawski, the man behind that restoration. He first read about it around 1988, in a Chas Balun article in Deep Red Magazine, and saw it a couple of years later on a bootleg VHS copied from a Japanese laserdisc. More than 30 years on, he helped bring it back in 4K. He persuaded the producers to move the original elements from a lab in Rome to one in Bologna, and he says they are very reluctant to ship originals anywhere.
The first film shot on consumer digital
Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler made The Last Broadcast on the cheapest kit they could find. Little White Lies reports it was the first feature ever shot and edited entirely on consumer-level digital equipment. Most of its cast were non-professionals in their only screen role, which gives its opening caption, “The following people are not actors”, a double meaning. The directors also played the two murdered television hosts at the centre of the story. IndieWire notes that Weiler went on to become a major figure in transmedia storytelling.
The Blair Witch team, then and now
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez worked from a screenplay of only 35 pages, which left the actors plenty of room to improvise. The cast played characters who shared their real names, which blurred fiction and reality further. Those names were Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams.
Decades later, Sánchez and producer Gregg Hale returned to the form. Danish director Mike Nybroe had a proof of concept for The Influencer Project that the Danish industry kept turning down. When it reached the new horror label Hades Films, its founders brought in Sánchez and Hale. The pair helped develop his approach, sharing the improvisation methods they had used on their own film. “This is how you do ‘Blair Witch’ now,” they told Hades Films co-founder Alex Hertzberg.
Oren Peli and the bedroom camera
Oren Peli made Paranormal Activity in just a week, on a tiny budget with a minimal crew, and the camera barely moves for much of it. Its two leads, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, play a young couple in a San Diego house. GamesRadar+ singles out Peli’s choice to repeat the same night-time shot until viewers dread sunset.
The do-it-yourself spirit lives on
That spirit of making do still runs through the genre. British director Joby Stephens paid for his found footage horror film Abandoned entirely himself. To keep costs down, the whole crew lived on location in a disused prison and turned the cells into bedrooms. The first block of the interior was shot in takes of about 38 minutes each, with one hidden cut in the whole film. Because found footage cannot lean on a conventional score, Stephens built the sound around the building itself, which he described to British Cinematographer as “a heartbeat that breaks”.
The films that set the rules
A handful of films taught audiences how to watch this kind of horror. Each one added a rule that later films borrowed.
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What you do not see
The Blair Witch Project made absence the main event. The witch herself never appears, and Little White Lies points out that this was partly an accident. Had the plan to show her gone ahead, the critic argues, the film might have lost its uncanny power. IndieWire makes a similar point about the final basement scene, where the film hides things that were never there at all.
The marketing mattered as much as the camera. IndieWire credits an ingenious campaign, run in the early days of the popular internet, for the film’s success. GamesRadar+ ranks it first among found footage horror films, and so does IndieWire.
The camera at the foot of the bed
Paranormal Activity turned a bedroom into the scariest set in the genre. GamesRadar+ ranks it third and praises how its pacing makes you search every corner of the frame. IndieWire reports that it was first expected to be remade for a bigger studio, but the original went out as it was and earned nearly $200 million. The 2014 IndieWire piece on the genre dates the mainstream takeover to 2008, when the film screened at Slamdance and won a deal with DreamWorks.
That same week, Matt Reeves’s monster film Cloverfield topped the box office. IndieWire calls Cloverfield one of the few found footage films planned as a blockbuster from the start.
Money changed what the camera could show. IndieWire’s 2014 survey notes that the Paranormal Activity sequels and the superhero film Chronicle used computer effects inside the found footage frame. Blair Witch had left its worst horrors to the imagination, and now a film with a budget could show everything. The critic argued that this move to the studios took away the jittery uncertainty that had made the form frightening. By then the trick had returned to independent films, among them Afflicted, a 2014 film by Clif Prowse and Derek Lee about a globe-trotting friendship that turns monstrous.
A building sealed with the camera inside
Spain’s REC, from 2007, follows a television reporter and her cameraman into an apartment block that the authorities then seal off. IndieWire singles out its silent soundtrack, which carries no music until the end. GamesRadar+ calls it simply terrifying and recommends the original over the American remake.
Tapes inside tapes
V/H/S premiered at Sundance in 2012, and IndieWire says some of the audience walked out. Brad Miska, a co-founder of the horror site Bloody Disgusting, created it, and its clip format built strong word of mouth. GamesRadar+ calls it the most meta found footage film, with a gang of burglars who find a dead man surrounded by videotapes. The series became a launch pad for filmmakers such as Simon Barrett and Scott Derrickson. IndieWire counts eight V/H/S instalments and two spinoff projects so far.
Footage that should not exist
A GamesRadar+ writer named The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Lake Mungo among the best films of the genre’s heyday in the early 2000s. IndieWire ranks Lake Mungo second of 25, praising Joel Anderson’s story of a brother who sets up cameras to catch his drowned sister’s ghost.
The rules still bend in new hands. In Infirmary, which premiered at Dances With Films New York, two actors wore real body cameras to capture the footage. Its director, Nicholas Pineda, said the score was the one rule they broke on authenticity. Nick Toti and Rachel Kempf went further with It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This, vowing never to release it online. That promise sold out screenings across the US with almost no marketing budget.
How the camera travelled
After Paranormal Activity, found footage went in two directions at once. Studios chased the money, while small filmmakers around the world kept finding new uses for the form.
The studio years, and the shrug
Little White Lies describes a post-Paranormal Activity boom of studio found footage films, made mostly because the format made money rather than as an experiment. Its critic saw the end of that run in Adam Wingard’s Blair Witch from 2016, where the characters carry high definition cameras and drones, and the witch finally appears. When that film met a shrug from audiences, the critic writes, it felt as though found footage horror was over.
It was not over. The same critic calls the slump a good thing, because later films such as The Outwaters and Incantation came at the form with different aims.
Screens, calls and live streams
The camera moved onto the laptop. IndieWire credits Unfriended, from 2014, with making genre audiences think about their laptops differently. In 2020, Rob Savage’s Host staged a séance over Zoom, and IndieWire calls it the definitive found footage film of the pandemic. Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Spree, from the same year, put the camera in a rideshare driver’s car as he chases fame as an influencer.
Around the world
The form travelled well because it needs so little. IndieWire’s ranking reads like an atlas:
- André Øvredal’s Trollhunter, from Norway, opens like a cheap shaky-cam film and turns into a full creature feature.
- Adrian Țofei’s Be My Cat: A Film for Anne was shot in his Romanian hometown while he partly lived in character.
- Shin’ichirō Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead, from Japan, uses the form for a zombie comedy of errors.
- Kevin Ko’s Incantation, released on Netflix in 2022, is still the highest-grossing Taiwanese horror film ever made.
Some films used the format to make a point. IndieWire calls Savageland, set on the Arizona and Mexico border, the subgenre at its most politically fierce.
Influencers become the cast
The newest wave casts people who already live on camera. Shudder’s House on Eden stars Kris Collins and Celina Myers, who hunt ghosts in real life and keep their own names on screen. Collins has over 12 million YouTube subscribers as Kallmekris. The Influencer Project casts the TikTok creator Chiara King as a fictional version of herself, followed by a documentary crew in Copenhagen.
The internet also handed the genre a new kind of folklore. Kane Parsons built his YouTube series The Backrooms, first released in 2022, from a viral photo of an empty store’s back room that began circulating in 2019. What made the series eerie, GamesRadar+ says, was its low-quality camcorder footage.
Found footage this Halloween
This year the form has reached the multiplex, won over critics with a quiet ghost story, and brought its oldest provocation back to the cinema.
The Backrooms reach the multiplex
Kane Parsons turned his cult YouTube series into Backrooms, a 2026 feature starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. Filmmaker Magazine traces the lore to a photo of a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken in 2003 and posted to 4chan in 2019. The film opens on Blair Witch-style DV footage of the Backrooms’ impossible corridors before it settles into a more conventional story. Its cinematographer, Jeremy Cox, lit some 30,000 square feet of sets with tube lights and used Blender to bring the internet folklore to the screen.
A quieter kind of fear
Robbie Banfitch’s 2022 film The Outwaters divided viewers with its reality-bending excess. His follow-up, Tinsman Road, goes the other way. He shot it on old MiniDV, removed phones and computers from the story, and cast himself and his mother as versions of themselves. Slant Magazine’s Rocco T. Thompson says it recovers some of the lonely, pre-internet chill of The Blair Witch Project. He writes that Banfitch treats the subgenre with serious formal and artistic care.
Other directors are bringing history and new voices to the form. Aislinn Clarke, whom IndieWire reported as the first woman to direct a horror film in Northern Ireland, set The Devil’s Doorway in a 1960s Magdalene Laundry. She shot it on 16mm to look like the priests’ own home movies. “Horror’s the thing we use to learn about the world,” she told IndieWire. In 2025, IndieWire also noted Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks, a YouTube critic’s directing debut and a missing-person story told at least partly in found footage. That same year, Duplass Brothers Productions and the Transgender Film Center launched a fund for trans artists working in found footage.
The oldest film in a new print
The genre’s roots are back on the big screen too. Grindhouse Releasing’s 4K restoration of Cannibal Holocaust includes a Special Edition that shows the film-within-the-film in its original square 16mm frame for the first time. Murawski says this reveals about 50 percent more of the documentary image. The Special Edition screened at the Roxy Cinema in New York in July 2026.
And the new films keep coming. The Influencer Project, developed with the Blair Witch creators, was due in cinemas internationally on October 2. Its producers at Hades Films say they want to make horror for Gen Z without treating young fans as a market segment.
Starter guide
Eight films, in the order they were made. Each one appears on both IndieWire’s and GamesRadar+’s lists of the best found footage films. Start anywhere, but start after dark.
- The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999). Both IndieWire and GamesRadar+ put it first on their lists. GamesRadar+ calls it the 1999 classic. It was sold to the public as true through a website and a fake TV documentary.
- Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007). On both lists, and GamesRadar+ calls it “the original and best”, for one night-time shot repeated until you dread bedtime.
- REC (2007). A Spanish film in a sealed apartment block, on both lists. GamesRadar+ calls it one of the best zombie movies.
- V/H/S (Brad Miska and others, 2012). The anthology GamesRadar+ calls the most meta of found footage films, and the start of a series IndieWire lists among the best.
- Creep (Patrick Brice, 2014). Mark Duplass hires a videographer for one day’s work. IndieWire ranks it fifth, and GamesRadar+ calls it one of the top found footage horror movies.
- Hell House LLC (Stephen Cognetti, 2015). A haunted house attraction gone wrong, on both lists, and a hard watch if clowns frighten you.
- Host (Rob Savage, 2020). A séance over Zoom that IndieWire calls the definitive found footage film of the pandemic. GamesRadar+ also lists it among the best.
- Late Night with the Devil (Colin and Cameron Cairnes, 2023). A cursed 1977 Halloween talk show, on both lists, which GamesRadar+ praises for its eerily real television footage.
