Found footage horror movies: from a $248 million hit to a $1,500 film

Found footage is a kind of film presented as video recorded by the characters in the story, then "found" and shown to the audience. There is no polished camera work to hide behind. The shaky picture and the wobbling frame are the point, because they make an invented story look like evidence.

The form matters because it let tiny productions look real. The Blair Witch Project (1999), directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, brought it into the mainstream and grossed about $248 million worldwide. Its marketing presented the actors as missing or dead, with a website of fabricated police reports and missing-person flyers that fueled debate about whether the footage was real.

Critics often trace the form back further, to Cannibal Holocaust (1980), an Italian film by Ruggero Deodato about a documentary crew who vanish in the Amazon and whose footage is later recovered. Then came Paranormal Activity, which Oren Peli, who wrote, directed, photographed and edited it, shot with a home video camera for $15,000. It grossed about $194 million after its 2009 wide release, and critics credit its low cost and easy-to-copy style with starting a horror trend that ran for years.

Relay lists 277 found footage films. This guide picks 8 of them, made between 2015 and 2024, with a story behind each: a legend invented on eBay, a game built from scratch, a ritual a director says was real.

What makes a found footage film

• Someone is holding the camera. The film has to explain why the characters keep filming, which is why so many of them are vloggers, students and documentary crews.
• A claim of truth. Some open with a caption saying the footage was recovered, and some insist it is real.
• A cheap look that helps. Reviewers note that a rough, amateur-video look can make images seem authentic, which suits low budgets.
• Screenlife, sometimes. Screenlife is a film that plays out on screens, such as video calls and desktops. It is the same idea applied to the internet.

8 found footage horror movies to watch

Dybbuk Box: The Story of Chris Chambers (2019)

In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malicious possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person. The film follows Chris Chambers, a Texas man who buys a dybbuk box online and films himself opening it, and it is presented as footage released by his parents. It opens with a caption saying the footage is real. That is the film's own claim.

The box itself has a stranger origin. In 2003 Kevin Mannis, a writer and furniture refinisher, listed a wine cabinet on eBay with an invented backstory about a Holocaust survivor and a dybbuk. In 2021 he told Input magazine the story was entirely fictional. Hollywood still made The Possession (2012) from it.

Horror

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Deadware (2021)

Writer-director Isaac Rodriguez sets this one in 1999. Two friends talk over webcams and share a desktop to play a browser game called House of Hunger, a point-and-click adventure in which the dead are driven by hunger over wrongs done in life. One reviewer compared its look to games hosted on 1990s sites such as Newgrounds.

The whole film plays on the video call, so it is also screenlife. It screened at the Unnamed Footage Festival in 2022. One reviewer said it works because of its smaller budget, not despite it.

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Mister Creep (2022)

Rodriguez's second film here finds three college students and their cameraman watching a lost television broadcast from a dead serial killer in a clown face, and setting out to find where it came from. Their search leads to an abandoned police station and a cover-up.

It was shot in Texas at real locations, including the old Lavaca County Jail in Hallettsville, which a reviewer describes as haunted. The effects were practical, meaning made on set rather than by computer. Reviewers split on whether found footage helps it: one said the form limits Rodriguez, another that it builds an unpleasant atmosphere where anything is possible.

Horror

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Livescream (2020)

Michelle Iannantuono, an indie filmmaker, wrote and directed this story of a game streamer named Scott who plays an indie horror game sent by an anonymous fan. The game starts killing his viewers. The film never leaves one person at a webcam.

She has said the out-of-pocket cost was only $1,500, and a few thousand dollars once marketing and festival fees were added. She built the in-film game from scratch in Unreal, a game engine she was using for the first time in 2018, with each level a homage to a different game. The film won her Best Director at the Nightmares Film Festival in 2018. A sequel, Livescreamers, followed in 2023.

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Obayifo Project (2024)

The obayifo is a vampire-like creature from the folklore of the Akan people of West Africa, said to take over the bodies of men and women and drink the blood of victims, often children. In the story, Ghanaian film students in 2003 try to invoke one as their own version of The Blair Witch Project, and it ends in a massacre. In 2023 a new group tries to repeat it on camera.

Paco Arasanz, a Spanish filmmaker, wrote and directed it and filmed in Almeria, Spain. He has said he wanted an experimental, as-real-as-possible film, and that the shaman ritual he staged with an actor who has real shamanic experience was real. El Universal reports that as his account.

Horror

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Himalaya (2024)

Writer-director Brandon Walker frames this one as a live paranormal broadcast hunting a reported Yeti. Several cameras, some with no operator, cut between the field team and talking heads: the host, a scientist's wife and a skeptic. A scientist treks to the site, finds bones and the bodies of earlier visitors in a cave, then becomes trapped and has to escape the cold.

One reviewer said it does not look like it needed a high budget but does not feel cheap, and that the cutting keeps viewers invested in the mystery.

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La Entidad (2015)

Eduardo Schuldt, whose earlier work was family-friendly animation, wrote, directed and produced this Peruvian film. Film students make reaction videos of people watching disturbing footage, and one clip leads them to Santiago, the older brother of a boy in it, who tells them what happened. They are led on to an old film hidden in a cemetery's archive room.

It opens with a deep web legend about a creature that appears in people's footage. A reviewer called it "a blend of frustratingly formulaic and frustratingly promising moments", and praised its locations, make-up effects and performances.

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Chest (2022)

Aaron Irons grew up in the Appalachian mountains of East Tennessee and spent his childhood searching for a cave tied to local legends about Jeffrey's Hell. The place is real, a rugged area near the Cherohala Skyway named for Ebenezer Jeffrey, a hunter said to have vanished while searching for his dogs.

Chest is Irons's first feature. Amateur documentary filmmakers try to uncover the truth about a mysterious box said to be hidden in a cave there. He followed it with Jeffrey's Hell (2024), a found footage film in which Chest cast and crew play themselves. It played Panic Fest in 2024.

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Where to go next

• Folk horror movies
• Mockumentary movies