As seen on Indiewire.com.
Almost 15 years since “The Blair Witch Project” pretended to document an ill-fated journey into the woods, its impact is felt more deeply than ever.
Almost 15 years since “The Blair Witch Project” pretended to document an ill-fated journey into the woods, its impact is felt more deeply than ever. The found footage horror genre technically pre-dated the digital filmmaking boom by nearly two decades (with 1980’s “Cannibal Holocaust”) but the age of user-generated footage, when everyone with a smartphone has one trigger finger ready to hit record, has made the device too ubiquitous for its own good. The all-too-easy visceral jolt known as the jump scare populates countless tales of hapless protagonists making dumb decisions that usually culminate in their doom (and also crops up in countless YouTube pranks). At best, the economical storytelling device catches viewers off-guard by sneaking shock value into an innocuous storytelling device; at worst, it’s a lazy fallback used to rejuvenate formulaic narrative.
But “Afflicted” is moderately better than that. An uneven but effectively unnerving found footage horror entry opening this week about a pair of fun-loving vacationers who encounter dangerous, otherworldly forces, it illustrates the full cycle of evolution that the genre has endured since it first creeped us out.
Despite the breakout success of “Blair Witch,” it wasn’t until 2008 that found footage horror became fully co-opted by the mainstream. That year, the first “Paranormal Activity” movie screened at the Slamdance Film Festival and promptly secured a lucrative distribution deal with DreamWorks, immediately launching a franchise that has seen five instalments to date; the very same week that “Paranormal Activity” screened, Matt Reeves’ found footage monster movie “Cloverfield” dominated the box office. Both movies contained the usual blend of mockumentary ingredients with special effects that enhanced the dread predominantly because they looked so out of place in the shaky cam, homemade techniques.
Since then, the sequels to “Paranormal Activity” and the action-horror instalment “Chronicle” have continued to capitalize on the prospects of using CGI in the context of found footage. This has led to a noticeable shift from the “Blair Witch” tactic of leaving the darkest events up to our imaginations. Continue reading article here.