Dr Pete Turner

This book adopts a cognitive theoretical framework in order to address the mental processes that are elicited and triggered by found footage horror films. Through analysis of key films, the book explores the effects that the diegetic camera technique used in such films can have on the cognition of viewers. It further examines the way in which mediated realism is constructed in the films in order to attempt to make audiences either (mis)read the footage as non-fiction, or more commonly to imagine that the footage is non-fiction. Films studied include The Blair Witch Project, Rec, Paranormal Activity, Exhibit A, Cloverfield, Man Bites Dog, The Last Horror Movie,Noroi: The Curse, Autohead and Zero Day. This book will be of key interest to Film Studies scholars with research interests in horror and genre studies, cognitive studies of the moving image, and those with interests in narration, realism and mimesis. It is an essential read for students undertaking courses with a focus on film theory, particularly those interested specifically in horror films and cognitive film theory.--Provided by publisher.

This chapter formulates a taxonomy to classify the different kinds of camera-operating victim characters in found footage horror films: amateurs, students and cinematographers. It considers some key theoretical notions, including priming, Mrray Smith's structure of sympathy and how off-screen space is articulated in found footage horror films. In order to develop the taxonomy, this chapter examines how viewers respond to camera-operating victims in several key examples, including Man Bites Dog (Belvaux et al., 1992), Hollow (Axelgaard, 2011), Grave Encounters 2 (Poliquin, 2012), The Asylum Tapes (Stone, 2012), Afflicted (Lee and Prowse, 2013), Devil's Due (Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett, 2014) and Blair Witch (Wingard, 2016). 

From capitalist greed and social media perfectionism to America’s extreme haunted attractions and fundamentalist Christian ‘Hell houses’, contemporary culture is marked by a shift towards excess. Horror films are a significant site of this excess, from bodily excesses to emotional excess, from torture porn to found footage horror. It is significant then that found footage horror films have begun to deal with cultural excesses found elsewhere in American society, such as extreme haunted attractions that open across America around the Halloween period.

The purpose of this essay is to show that the experience of found footage horror films evokes elements of cultural excess in terms of their form and their content. This chapter will compare notable texts including The Houses October Built (Bobby Roe, 2014) and Hell House LLC (Stephen Cognetti, 2015) that both feature characters with diegetic cameras entering haunted attractions. These films use the found footage narrational and aesthetic strategy to explore America’s culture of excess, particularly in terms of the country’s celebration of Halloween. Haunted attractions are becoming increasingly extreme with people attending these experiences in order to seek out a more terrifying experience than they would have when watching a horror film, playing a scary video game, or riding a rollercoaster. Like immersive theatre and cinema, virtual reality experiences and theme park Halloween nights, haunted attractions are designed for audiences that want a more participatory experience of horror culture. 

This essay explores the significance of found footage horror films to the culture of excess by examining and analysing these films in three contexts – the aesthetic, the narratological and the socio-political. In The Culture of Excess (Slosar, 2009), J.K. Slosar argues that reality today is ‘characterized by immediacy, illusionary expectations, inflated self-concepts, a demand for a perfect image, and loss of privacy and access to our inner world’ (p.47). Found footage horror films combine a far from ‘perfect’ aesthetic with narrative strategies that include characters with inflated self-concepts. The aforementioned films combine this with the immediate and illusionary cultural artefacts of haunted attractions in order to reveal that found footage films can visualise cultural excess, through the lens of modern recording technologies.