1999 found-footage horror, dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez,
Heather Donahue; IMDb /
allmovie. Three filmmakers
enter, no filmmakers leave.
This certainly wasn't the first film to use the conceit of film
found after the death or disappearance of the cast and crew; Shirley
Clarke's The Conversation came out in 1961 to admittedly small
audiences. and_Cannibal Holocaust_ made a thing of it as a substrate
for horror in 1980. (And in those days it was easier to start
plausible rumours that it was a snuff film, or that the director had
been charged with murder.)
But handheld video cameras had come along by 1999, and videotape can
be reused; so without the cost of film it's more plausible here that
there could be casual video recordings of any moments the crew feels
might be worth documenting, as well as the actual filmed material that
was supposedly to go into the documentary that's the film-within-film
excuse for all this to be happening..
Of course, it's also much cheaper to film this style than a "real"
film: get some first-time actors and dump them in front of the camera,
telling them to improvise round a minimal outline rather than a
fully-written script. No need to employ expensive cinematographers or
lighting techs! As with the slasher films that followed Halloween,
every low-budget filmmaker and his dog copied this in the next few
years, while not copying the behind-the-scenes effort that went into
making this, if not to my mind good, at least watchable. (Such as
giving the cast instructions for a day's filming only on that day, to
keep their reactions fairly naturalistic.)
Is this about a witch or about a serial killer? Nobody knows, and
nobody cares. It's horror glurge: creepy things happen, and if you
aren't impressed, don't worry, another creepy thing will happen in a
moment. This is to my mind one of the defining points of the strain in
horror fiction that I mentally label uninterested: nobody here is
curious to know what's actually going on, they just want to survive,
even though knowing what's going on might help them to survive.
But my goodness they are annoying. I never felt I'd got to know
anything about these people, or had any reason to care for them beyond
their being notional human beings. Heather's big confession should be
a dramatic and sad moment, the real climax of the film, but instead
it's just dull. Don't worry. someone's gonna die soon.
When my wife saw this at a student union film clib, someone called out
"just follow the river, idiots". But as we see it, they could just be
that incompetent; if they followed the river and still got back to
the same place, that would be a genuinely scary moment, but it would
also be real evidence of a supernatural happening.
What found footage also lets you do, of course, is have even less
narrative connection than film normally gets away with. This is
obviously deliberate; but I come to films for story and character, and
in both respects I felt cheated.
I talk about this film further on Ribbon of
Memes.