If the atomic-age monster movie was the premier horror mode of the 1950s and the teen-sex slasher flick dominated the Reagan years, found footage was the horror movement of the 2010s. This strain – defined by handheld cameras, improvised dialogue and barely seen ghosts and monsters – had its big bang in 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project,” but didn’t really come into its own as a genre until the late 2000s, just as cellphones and social media were turning us all into compulsive self-recorders. Beginning Thursday, The Brattle Theatre has programmed more than a dozen features into a series dubbed the “Found Footage Freakout,” demonstrating the range and versatility of a sometimes derided subgenre.
The centerpiece of the series is the area premiere of “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” (2023), which runs Friday through Tuesday. An impressively scrappy and lived-in feature, “Better” tells the story of three filmmaker friends (played by the filmmakers themselves) who buy a clearly haunted duplex in a bad part of town as the setting for their next horror movie, only to be plagued by local cultists and supernatural goings-on. If this sounds appealing to you, please note that the filmmakers have no plans to release their film online, making this perhaps your only chance for some time to find out what, exactly, is going on in that attic.
But this is far from the only top-shelf footage to be found on The Brattle’s screen. The series kicks off Thursday with a 10th anniversary screening of Michael Rousselet and Tomm Jacobsen’s faux-VHS slasher spoof “Dude Bro Party Massacre III” (2015), complete with filmmakers in attendance. Similarly nutty is the beloved Japanese zombie comedy “One Cut of the Dead” (2017), screening Friday and Saturday, which contains a plot twist so ingenious it would be criminal to spoil here. On the opposite end of the tonal spectrum is the Australian chiller “Lake Mungo” (2009), which frames its tragic ghost story as a “Dateline”-style true crime special; that one screens Sunday, with a special introduction by bestselling local horror author Paul Tremblay.
Appropriately for a genre built on unseen footage, the series features a handful of rarely screened gems. Sunday sees a free screening of “Ghostwatch” (1992), a staged ghost-hunter special that caused a “War of the Worlds”-style panic when it originally aired on the BBC, causing it to sit for decades in the Beeb’s vault until its recent restoration. Going back even further is the truly remarkable “The McPherson Tape” (1989), which purports to capture a child’s birthday party interrupted by an alien home invasion. Found footage has become such a well-known trope, in horror and in daily life, that it’s fascinating to see an example that was actually shot in the 1980s on contemporaneous consumer equipment, as if we really are viewing something we were never meant to see.
Since found footage didn’t really take off until the 21st century, The Brattle’s program features its share of modern classics. The latter-day found footage boom arguably kicked off with Matt Reeves’ digicam kaiju blockbuster “Cloverfield” (2008), which caps the series next Sept. 25, its Manhattan-leveling monster clearly intended to evoke 9/11 just as surely as Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for the atomic bomb. Other 2010s highlights include Ti West’s “The Sacrament” (2013, screening Sunday), which documents a Jonestown-style cult in the milieu of a Vice-style viral expose; Bobcat Goldthwait’s surprisingly noncomedic bigfoot mock-doc “Willow Creek” (2013, screening Saturday in a double feature with André Øvredal’s bonkers 2010 Norwegian import “Troll Hunter”); and Stephen Cognetti’s “Hell House LLC” (2015, screening Friday), in which a crew of entrepreneurs inadvertently choose for their Halloween tourist attraction an actual haunted house. And no roundup of modern found footage would be complete without the durable “V/H/S” franchise of anthology films, each of which gathers a murder’s row of horror filmmakers to dabble in the form. In “V/H/S/2” (2013), which screens Wednesday, the lineup includes such luminaries as Adam Wingard (“You’re Next”), Gareth Evans (“The Raid: Redemption”) and none other than Eduardo Sánchez, who got this whole party started as co-director of “The Blair Witch Project.”
There is, of course, more to the series than can fit in this column (see The Brattle’s site for the full schedule), and even more found footage out there than could fit into this particular freakout. What makes this framework so durable? Perhaps it’s the uncanniness of its mundane trappings, of seeing the horrific and supernatural intruding into what could be mistaken for an everyday home movie or cellphone selfie. Or perhaps it’s simply the primal terror of something eerie and unexpected jumping out and going “Boo!” Whatever the reason, it may make you think twice about picking up that camcorder – or inspire you to use it to craft your own lo-res nightmare.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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