Found footage vs. the aesthetic of found footage

I used to whinge about found footage all the time on this blog, the whingeing that can only be born of loving something and then living long enough to see it become corrupted and sapped of its essential life force. (And "to whinge" is the British/Australian equivalent of "to whine," only used in a more dismissive and crueler fashion.)

But I haven't had a lot of occasion to talk about it lately, as found footage has, without me even really noticing it, seemed to have sort of had its moment and gone away. Surely we are not far removed from the last major found footage film that's been released, but the fact that I can't remember what that would be is certainly telling.

So it seems like a good time for me to be confronted with a movie that does the genre, if you want to call it a genre, correctly. A movie that, in fact, helps clarify my own conflicted opinion on found footage movies.

That movie is Matt Johnson's The Dirties, a movie I thought was connected with Kevin Smith in some way, but I'm having a very hard time determining what that way is. (Wait, just found it -- he helped distribute it.)

Because of the Smith connection, and because I've turned on Smith a bit lately (only since Yoga Hosers, but that was enough), I hadn't really prioritized The Dirties when it came out a few years ago, having heard middling things about it (though I don't remember what exactly). But then I saw it at the library the other day and said "Huh, I was always curious about that."

With good reason. It helped me relocate those positive feelings toward found footage.

It helped me do that because it's a found footage movie in aesthetic only.

If you think about it, found footage has two defining characteristics: 1) A herky jerky, hyper-realistic style that's supposed to come from the fact that it's actually being shot by the real people involved with the story, and 2) The fact that it is meant literally to be footage found from their video camera, in its purest form because the people who shot it are missing, dead or otherwise indisposed.

I like one of these two defining characteristics.

I used to like both, I think. I mean, if you go back to The Blair Witch Project, it was all about the fact that this was actually the footage they had abandoned. I mean, it wasn't, and we knew it wasn't. But it was easy to dream ourselves away into that narrative, and there was just that small smidgen of doubt that it wasn't real.

But over time, I became hyper critical of the way the found footage genre got bastardized. Although pretty much all the footage in a film like Blair Witch could genuinely have been shot by the three intrepid/stupid filmmakers that trundled off into the Maryland woods, that standard quickly evaporated from the genre. Pretty soon found footage movies that wanted to capitalize on the popularity of Blair Witch -- as in, pretend it could have all been really shot with one camera that was recovered after some horrible event -- began playing fast and loose with the rules. How physically someone could have shot something, how it all could have been shot with one camera, how they would have known to have the camera on at some certain particular time, how they would be able to maintain battery life for the duration ... all these practical considerations that were considered in a movie like Blair Witch were tossed out the window. Who cares as long as it looks right.

That's fine. But then just don't pretend it's actually someone's found footage.

That's what I like about The Dirties. It doesn't go out of its way to call attention to the fact that there's a camera following around these two disaffected high school students, who are even aware of the camera and occasionally make reference to it. There's something artificial about the construct, but artificial in the way that any film is artificial -- it's a recreation of life being captured. The Dirties doesn't want us to believe that "this is the last testimony of so and so" or "we caught it all on film when x happened." It just wants to capture a compelling story in the highly realistic style of a found footage movie, a style which itself confers a certain truth and believability on the proceedings.

I should probably give you a little insight into what that compelling story is at this point. The Dirties follows Matt Johnson (also the film's director) and Owen Williams, actors playing high school characters named Matt Johnson and Owen Williams, as they shoot a short film for a class project. In this stylized project they imagine they are badasses coming to rid the school of its criminal element, also played by them, but highly analogous to a real scourge of bullies at their school, who regularly target the two. Matt, the idealogue, is constantly imagining his real life as scenes from movies he either knows or is imagining filming, while Owen, who was once a willing conspirator, has started to drift toward the non-bullied mainstream, through no real fault of anything but his own maturation. As the bullying toward Matt continues, he humorously develops plans to "really" shoot the bullies at the school, though this too he frames as a bit of ironic, self-reflexive text with a big pair of quotation marks around it. But he might not just be being ironic.

The Dirties is found footage in the way that The Office was found footage. The conceit of The Office is, of course, that a documentary crew is capturing the day-to-day happenings at a paper company, and it took pains to maintain that conceit for a while. But the showrunners quickly realized that to remain enslaved to that concept would either severely limit what they could do, or severely limit their ability to remain faithful to it. They smartly realized that they had really good characters that we wanted to watch and get to know better, and that was much more important. The style they had established was part of the aesthetic now, but we liked it because the hyper-real nature of it gave us the impression we were eavesdropping on the lives of real people, not sitcom creations. They still made occasional references to the existence of a camera crew, and the characters continued to give the testimonials that are now a staple of reality television, but they knew that the more often they reminded us of the original conceit, the more we'd be likely to pick away at it. So the original conceit just happily faded into the background.

The Dirties does basically the same thing, as the characters sometimes ask something of the cameraperson or make some other acknowledgement that they are being filmed. But the person doing the filming is not a character in the story, and in fact, is present in situations where he (or she, I suppose) never would be. In found footage as it was originally envisioned, this would be a cardinal sin. But The Dirties is not trying to follow those rules; it doesn't even pretend to. It says "The aesthetic is what we really like about found footage, and that's something we can give you while still telling the story we want to tell in the way we want to tell it."

There are meta elements to The Dirties that kind of confuse the whole thing, but in a good way. As Matt is always imagining his life as a movie -- a specific bone of contention between them as Owen starts to withdraw -- indeed that's kind of what's actually going on here. Matt's life is a movie -- someone is actually filming it. And because the movie also openly questions whether Matt might be a psychopath -- he's actually the one that poses the question -- it could be that only Matt is aware of this camera, and that indeed the whole thing is in his head.

So while we don't believe this movie could be "found footage" in the traditional sense, we do believe it could be real life. We do believe that the found footage conceit could be revealing something true about the fragile psyche of a guy who has been hiding his own pain behind a veil of humor, but is steadily detaching from reality.

This is what I want found footage to do. This is what I want any film to do.

I was concerned it might not have been appreciated, but it turns out, it sort of was. The film has a very respectable 65 on Metacritic, including one score of 100 and three others in the 90s. We won't worry too much about the two 20 Metascores.

And it turns out Matt Johnson has gotten to make another film in presumably the same style, as it also stars him and Owen Williams as guys named Matt Johnson and Owen Williams. This seems a bit more high concept as it involves the possible faking of the moon landing, but after The Dirties I'm giving Johnson the benefit of the doubt that he pulled it off. It's called Operation Avalanche and it came out in 2016. I'll be on the lookout for it.

When I knew I was solid on that 4.5-star rating was when the film ended, probably five minutes shy of what you would think it's actual conclusion would be, but all the better for that fact. It ends on a perfect note, actually, one that underscores the intermingling of comedy and possible tragedy that underpins the whole movie. The ending is also just ambiguous enough to have several possible interpretations, which is always a good thing. Most importantly of all, it's not heavy handed, allowing us to take in many implied messages while not being suffocated by any direct ones.

I guess because of its title, and because I know the way Kevin Smith's mind works sometimes, I thought this would be a movie with a lot of unsophisticated stoner or bro humor, with possibly a touch of homophobia and a decent amount of scatalogy. This is not to suggest that Smith is homophobic -- I think he's probably just the opposite. However, I also think that his comedy sometimes has an "anything for a laugh" quality to it that clouds his judgments.

But The Dirties has not only redeemed found footage for me, it's reminded me of the sound judgments Smith is also capable of making.

The Dirties is sound, and then some.

Found is sound. Who knew.

Witches aren't scary - except when they are

Witches are just as prominent in the coterie of Halloween baddies as ghosts, goblins, vampires, mummies and zombies. But their union has not been doing a great job with PR. While many of those others can be quite frightening, witches are often consigned to the category of "funny" monsters. They may cackle and they may have green skin, but we can usually laugh them off. They're harmless.

Given this perception, it sometimes surprises me how many truly chilling movies there are where witches are the primary villains.

In each case that I have acknowledged this, I've written it off as an exception to the rule. But how many exceptions can you have before you start re-thinking the rule?

Here are five such movies, starting with the one I re-watched on Sunday night for the first time since 2006:

1) Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento) - I have to admit, the first two times I watched Suspiria, I thought the opening 15 minutes so terrifying that the rest of the movie inevitably paled by comparison. However, that opening is terrific enough that I went ahead and bought the movie on the strength of those 15 minutes alone. (The Goblins score certainly helped grease the transaction.) In thinking about Suspiria, I would sometimes tell myself that witches being the villains are a primary example of why the rest of the movie doesn't live up to that opening, when the identity of those antagonists has yet to be established. This time, though, the whole movie filled me with dread, and I appreciated certain things that maybe didn't land as effectively on previous viewings: like the supernatural, undead snoring of the witch Helena Markos, or that mysterious room in the top floor of the dance academy where the witches go to perform their rituals at night. The witches discomfited me enough on this viewing to inspire this post.

2) The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez) - It's right there in the title, but I bet people don't often consider the fact that what they're afraid of in this movie is witches. Or, one witch in particular. But as with Suspiria, it's scary as hell, and some people consider this one of the most frightening movies they've ever seen. Perhaps the key is that you really don't know what you're afraid of in this movie -- you know they're looking for a witch, but all you actually see is inconclusive evidence of evil, all you hear are noises that your imagination conflates into whatever terrorizes it the most. But when you come right down to it, it's a witch that's giving us the spooks when we watch this, the granddaddy of the modern found footage movement.

3) Paranormal Activity (2009, Oren Peli) - I'm just now realizing that both of the most successful found footage horror movies of recent years use witches as their monsters. You find this out to a greater extent in the sequels to Paranormal Activity as the mythology becomes better developed, but it's a coven of witches at the center of all the spooky happenings in these movies. You get frightening flashes of them from time to time, and they are ghastly creatures indeed.

4) Rosemary's Baby (1968, Roman Polanski) - Yes, even Rosemary's Baby features witches -- witches in cahoots with the devil. Witches are the devil's servants, and never has that been more evident than when they ensnare a woman for the devil to impregnate. So again, as in Blair Witch, it's not what we see of the witch that scares us so much -- it's what we don't see. Minnie and Roman Castavet look and usually act like harmless old New York busybodies ... until we see what they are really like, through glimpses of a drugged haze, and near the end when the jig is finally up. Everything that's unholy and unsavory about Rosemary's Baby is tied to their status as these practitioners of the occult.

5) The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming) - And why not? Although Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West is in many ways the template for our modern green-skinned Halloween witch, she does not soft pedal the role in the least. And though she may not be terrifying to a lot of adults, her shrieking intensity has some real balls to it, and could scare the pants off plenty a little kid. I'm sure she scared me when I was young enough ... though I think the flying monkeys were slightly more traumatizing in that regard.

And Hollywood knows we're still secretly horrified by witches. Next up is this year's The Witch, which won the directing award at Sundance.

It may just be the next one to turn our skin green.

The scariest movie of 1999

Warning: Willow Creek spoilers ahead.

Question: How did Bobcat Goldthwait celebrate the 15th anniversary of The Blair Witch Project?

Answer: He remade it.

Except, you know, not nearly as good.

I had been trying not to hear very much about Willow Creek, the latest from the iconoclastic director who brought us such movies as Shakes the Clown, Sleeping Dogs Lie, World's Greatest Dad and God Bless America (actually, I think that's all the movies he's brought us). What I had heard was that I shouldn't hear any more. I knew it was a found footage movie and I knew it was about Bigfoot (the poster tells you as much), but beyond that I didn't know anything.

From the tones in which it was vaguely referenced on various podcasts, I had a sense it took brave risks that didn't pay off, which suggested to me a kind of formal daring of which Goldthwait is certainly capable. I thought it might start out as a found footage movie, then break down the fourth wall and show the actors involved in the task of making the found footage movie. For example.

Uh uh. It's just The Blair Witch Project with Sasquatch.

Like, it's shockingly derivative of The Blair Witch Project. It's like Bob Goldthwait didn't ever see The Blair Witch Project, and wanted to blow our minds with the landmark idea of a movie where a small group of people gets lost in the woods while making a documentary about a creature from local folklore. Except, he had to have seen it, else he could not have copied its details so exactly.

Now, there's a compliment embedded in my accusation of theft, because Willow Creek is indeed scary at times. There's a long take at about the film's three-quarter mark where the tension and fear build to an almost unbearable crescendo, based only on some unusual noises outside a tent.

But the terror of unplaceable sounds in the woods was one of the key elements that made Blair Witch so unbearable. Goldthwait's approach is nothing new, or if so, it's only new in the sense that the movie's most squirm-inducing shot goes on for something like ten minutes. That actual tingle of fear over the sound of the unknown? That's all Blair Witch.

And the climax of the film? It's so Blair Witch that it hurts. You get a momentary glimpse of something shocking/new, then the camera ceases to have a living operator. And then the credits roll.

What's so irritating about Willow Creek, though, is that its half-hour plus of setup is so frightfully dull that it seems like an intentional choice by Goldthwait. You get our protagonists interviewing some locals to set the scene, and you get some warnings by other locals not to stick their nose in where it doesn't belong, all shot at an amateur distance of more than 15 feet way, enhancing the idea that these people are not professionals (but decreasing the tension). Pretty typical stuff, but it's so incredibly bland that it felt willful, almost spiteful. More generously, it felt like a necessary anti build-up that would make Goldthwait''s eventual act of pulling the rug out from under us all the more shocking.

Nope. It's just bad technique. It's just bad filmmaking.

The idea of someone copying Blair Witch, of maybe introducing it to a new generation of teenagers, doesn't surprise me in the least. When nearly everything is getting remade these days, a movie that only steals the same basic premise of another movie seems fair game.

No, the shocking part is that it's this director doing this. Shall we examine some of the movies he's made previously? (Warning: Bob Goldthwait career spoilers to follow.)

Shakes the Clown is about an alcoholic clown framed for murder.

Sleeping Dogs Lie is about a woman dealing with the aftermath of an impulsive act of bestiality.

World's Greatest Dad is about a father who ghost writes his son's suicide note and other material after his son dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation.

God Bless America is about a middle-aged man and a teenage girl who go on a killing spree of people who behave annoyingly.

In short, Bobcat Goldthwait does not have a conventional bone in his body. So where did this act of utter conventionality come from?

One can only guess.

Willow Creek is not an inept movie. It has moments that will send chills up your spine, and it knows how to milk those moments into a string of moments, even a sustained period of dread. Not just any hack can do that.

And Willow Creek might in fact have been the most frightening time at the movies in 1999, if it had come out a few months before Blair Witch and stolen that movie's thunder. But Willow Creek arrived at a time when found footage is a completely moribund genre, especially those movies where documentary filmmakers go missing during the course of their own investigations.

Bobcat Goldthwait usually feels 15 years ahead of his time. Then how did he get so far behind?

How much footage is there left to find?

I have been excited to see Apollo 18 ever since I first got a glimpse of this poster and first got a hint what it was about.

This, despite the fact that the found footage genre has steadily been wearing thin with me, to the point that it culminated in a really disappointing experience earlier this week.

In order to account for how I went from excitement to wariness regarding found footage, let's start at the beginning. Not the beginning of the genre -- if I'm not careful, someone will tell me in my comments section about how the first found footage movie was made in 1959. The beginning for me, which was about a dozen years ago. (And thank goodness wikipedia has a comprehensive page on the found footage genre, which should make this easy for me.) Since we're starting at the beginning for me, these films are not listed in the order of their release, but rather, the order that I saw them -- which makes more sense as a way of documenting my own personal experiences with found footage.

The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick & Edward Sanchez). How you reacted to Blair Witch was a function of when you saw it within the hype cycle. Since I saw it more than a week before its release date, you better bet I was trumpeting its greatness to the skies. I clearly remember, as we left the theater, my friend saying to me "That's the scariest movie I've ever seen." I wasn't willing to go that far, though it had definitely disturbed me -- in part because it felt so fresh. I loved the conceit that a video camera had just been found containing this footage. I don't think they went so far as to say that the people in it hadn't been identified -- but that wasn't necessary. The people had been identified, they were missing, and this is the only footage that gave any clue what happened to them. And it ends when the last person is no longer able to push the record button on the camera. Simple, beautiful, frightening. And a seemingly insatiable appetite for found footage is born.

The Last Broadcast (1998, Lance Weiler & Stefan Avalos). While I was still in the dizzy spell of Blair Witch, I saw a movie directed by a couple guys who claimed that Blair Witch had ripped them off. I know this not only because of what they said publicly, but because I interviewed Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos (actually, just one of them, but I can't remember which -- I think it was Weiler) for a piece I wrote in Time Out New York. Their story involves filmmakers getting lost in the New Jersey Pine Barrens while searching for the Jersey Devil. There are similarities to Blair Witch, sure, but the main reason I'm including it here is because wikipedia's found footage page reminded me of its existence. It's not strictly a found footage film because it also includes interviews taped after the fact, giving it the structure of a more traditional documentary (albeit a fake one). Also, it's not very good -- the main reason I didn't buy it when these guys said Blair Witch ripped them off. It's kind of like those persistent accusations that J.K. Rowling ripped off the idea for Harry Potter. Okay, but who came through with the execution to make it a worldwide phenomenon?

Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves). Given the phenomenal success of Blair Witch, it's kind of hard to believe that found footage kind of went into hibernation for almost a decade. According to wikipedia, there were movies made in this genre, but you tell me if you've heard of any of them: The St. Francisville Experiment (2000), The Collingswood Story (2002), August Underground's Mordum (2003), September Tapes (2004), The Zombie Diaries (2006). No? Me neither. But found footage came roaring back, somewhat literally, with Cloverfield in 2008. What I appreciated so much about Cloverfield was not only that it did what Blair Witch did -- giving us a bunch of footage that, while amazing, seemed like something somebody could have actually shot with one video camera -- but it seamlessly introduced special effects into the equation, giving the monster an undeniable verisimilitude. I loved it so much that I saw it twice in the theater -- which I also did for Blair Witch.

Quarantine (2008, John Erick Dowdle). I was still high on Cloverfield when I saw Quarantine, and liked it so much that I wasn't sure, while I was watching it, which film was better. Since then it has become crystal clear, as I've seen Cloverfield a third time and given Quarantine less and less of a thought with each passing year. Still, the found footage genre was honored quite well with this entry, which I didn't even know at the time was a remake of the Spanish film REC. To my great shame, I still have not seen REC or its sequel, otherwise those would certainly be discussed here. (Wikipedia actually shows REC as having two more sequels scheduled for the future, so you could probably write a diminishing returns post about just the REC series.) Anyway, I thought the zombie movie was a good next place to go with the found footage genre ... even though it had already been there with several entries that I hadn't seen.

Diary of the Dead (2008, George A. Romero). Such as Diary of the Dead, George Romero's requisite dalliance with found footage, released earlier in the year and seen by me a couple months after Quarantine. This film was an almost unqualified disappointment for me. A key ingredient in selling us a found footage film is that the actors can make us believe they are real people -- the video camera medium has an extremely exacting standard when it comes to acting. The actors just didn't pull it off here, and moreover, I found the zombie stuff to be unexciting. Diary of the Dead is not terrible, but neither is it worthy.

Paranormal Activity (2009, Oren Peli). Remember what I said about the Blair Witch hype cycle? I saw Paranormal Activity after it had been the theaters for a couple weeks, and after they'd already started showing footage of Micah Sloat's body being hurled at the camera in the TV commercials. (Talk about spoiling a movie in the ads -- that's one of the last things to happen in the narrative.) I was occasionally impressed and a bit scared, but ultimately disappointed in Paranormal Activity. I wouldn't say that my wariness with found footage was increasing, although it could have been ... but my next two experiences were quite good ones.

The Last Exorcism (2010, Daniel Stamm). Quite simply, I loved this movie. It didn't get lots of love from critics, but I loved the idea of a charlatan exorcist setting out to make a movie to debunk his own scam -- and then happening upon a real case of devil possession. The effects were very credible in this film, and it chilled me. Plus, Stamm gets a really charismatic lead performance from Patrick Fabian. I guess the ending left a little to be desired, but until then, this movie completely had me. Although the subject matter is somewhat similar to Paranormal Activity, the approach is entirely different and it worked a lot better for me.

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010, Tod Williams). Even though I'd been somewhat non-plussed by Paranormal Activity, I knew I would eventually be seeing its sequel, and that eventuality arrived sooner rather than later, only a couple months after it arrived on DVD. And for reasons I can't entirely articulate here, I liked it a lot better than the first. Maybe there was less hype and maybe they spoiled less in the ads, but I was really on board with this movie the whole time. And liked the way it ultimately tied into the narrative of the original. Doesn't mean I'm going to be lining up for PA3 this Halloween.

Trollhunter (2010, Andre Ovredal). I've seen this title also written as The Troll Hunter and Trollhunters, but I'm going with one word and singular. And I guess I might have been that much more excited about Apollo 18 if I hadn't just seen Trollhunter on Sunday and Monday nights. (We had to continue it to the next night because it was putting us to sleep). I feel very uncharitable saying this, because Trollhunter should have been great, and I really want to champion a little underdog Norwegian film that uses believable CG trolls to convince us of the authentic nature of the footage. But Trollhunter helped me recognize two other crucial elements of the found footage genre beyond those I've already discussed: 1) There has to be a story; 2) You have to care about the characters. It's kind of odd to say this, because in theory, a bunch of found video tape footage only contained whatever the cameraman happened to record during the days and weeks of time from the first bit of footage to the last. All the character development could be occurring off camera and we're just not seeing it. But found footage films need to be clever enough to get the character development on camera, as well as including enough of a narrative arc to make us want to know what happens next. As much as I enjoyed the idea of three intrepid film students following around a mysterious man who's posing as a bear poacher, but is actually killing trolls with giant concentrated beams of UV light, it just didn't play out on screen the way I wanted it to. We never got to know the characters any better and their interactions with the trolls were not building toward any kind of climax -- except for the fact that you know they have to disappear eventually, else their footage would not have been "found." I so wanted to like Trollhunter better -- instead it left me feeling a bit despondent about found footage as a genre.

And so that's where the release of Apollo 18 finds me. On the one hand, I'm excited to see a found footage movie set in space, because to my knowledge, that hasn't happened yet. (You could set a found footage movie in the future, but that would take away from its sense of immediacy, which is key to the effect it's supposed to have on us.) On the other, I'm freshly wary of this type of movie and sort of doubt that the surprises it contains will knock my socks off. In movies like this, it helps to see what the studio thinks of it -- and the fact that they're releasing it on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, the same day that the hilariously titled Shark Night 3D is also being released, gives me plenty of doubt. Besides, how was this footage "found," anyway -- did some other astronaut stumble across a video camera half-submerged in moon sand? (Kidding -- "found footage" is not quite so literal as that.)

In a way, it seems a little unkind to the found footage genre to have written this post. As I've gone through writing about the nine films mentioned above, I realize that I have quite positive things to say about five of those nine, and two of the last three. Not great proof of a downward trend, ultimately. However, it's not always possible to tell in advance when your saturation point will be reached on something. You may think you're fine with a particular cinematic trend, then one day you just decide you've had enough. Like, I didn't realize I was over Zooey Deschanel until I started seeing ads for her new Fox show, New Girl. Then I decided instantly that she was played out.

I'm probably going to see a movie this afternoon, after I've been on baby duty for a couple hours following my anticipated early release from work. I could see Apollo 18 -- I could easily see it. But maybe I'll wait. Maybe today I'll let a different "gimmick" -- although I hesitate to call it that -- get me in theater, as I see Circumstance, the drama about Iranian lesbians.

I'm worried they'll disappear at the end of the film for an entirely different reason -- one that's sadly based on the realities of our world, rather than fantasy.