[For each of the
last couple years, I’ve featured a Halloween-inspired
series. It’s been spoooooky fun, so I figured I’d continue the tradition
this year, focusing specifically on scary movies. Share your thoughts, on these
or other AmericanSpookings, and I promise not to say boo!]
On the
longstanding appeal, and the limits, of faux-realism.
In this
very early post on Washington Irving’s History of New
York (1809), I noted how interestingly Irving’s book foreshadows (in
form, although clearly not in genre or tone) early 21st century found
footage texts such as The Blair Witch Project
(1999) and Mark
Danielewksi’s House of Leaves
(2000). There are obviously just universal and longstanding appeals of such
works, among which I would include the possibility that we are encountering
something genuine (always a challenge to find anywhere, including in creative art),
the blurring of boundaries
between fact and fiction (and the resulting discomfort, in the most
provocative sense of the term, that such blurring produces), and the undeniable
thrill of following along in the processes of making and finding such texts
(ie, of putting ourselves in the shoes of both those who filmed and those who “found”
Blair Witch’s footage, of both House’s creators and its initial readers,
and so on).
If found footage
has been an artistic element for centuries, though, it has nonetheless reached new
levels of popularity and ubiquity in recent years. In film alone we have
seen found footage monster
movies, found footage superhero
films, found footage alien
invasion dramas, and, most consistently and most relevantly for this week’s
series, the exploding genre of found
footage horror films. The latter category includes, to name only a fraction
of the entrants (and only some of those that have thus far spawned sequels),
the Paranormal
Activity series, the [Rec] series, the Grave Encounters
series, and the Last Exorcism series. Each of
those series fits into a different sub-genre or niche within the horror genre,
but all rely on the same found footage trope, and thus all to my mind tap into
some of those same aforementioned appeals. (With, perhaps, the added bonus of
being able to yell
at stupid horror movie characters whom we can imagine are actual people.)
When it’s done
well, as I would argue it most definitely was in Blair Witch, found footage undoubtedly and potently taps into all
those appealing qualities. But I think it has a significant limitation, and not
just that it’s become far too frequently used (and certainly not the blurring
of fact and fiction, for
which I’m entirely on board). To me, the central problem with found footage
works of art is that they too often tend, by design, to eschew artistic choices
and complexity—after all, their amateur filmmaker characters likely weren’t
concerned with such artistic elements (especially not once the crap started hitting the fan), and so their actual filmmakers often seem not to be either. But
while we might well look to works of art for the kinds of appealing elements
that found footage features, we also look to them to be artistic, to be
carefully and effectively designed as something more than—or at least something
other than—the reality with which we’re surrounded. Great found footage works,
that is, help us escape into their artistic alternate reality—they don’t simply
remind us of our own.
Next
AmericanSpooking tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Spooky films (or other texts) you’d highlight?
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