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5 Of The Best And Worst Recent Found Footage Movies

With the release of Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones recently behind us, and with upcoming found footage movies like Devil's Due and Paranormal Activity 5 on the horizon, there seems to be no end for this subgenre in sight. From a studio standpoint, why should there be? Found footage movies are often cheaper to make, they can be tremendous financial successes, and the gamble factor is much lower - but for ever properly executed first-person POV film cranked out The Blair Witch style, there's ten other films made by a group of ill-advised get-rich-quick filmmakers who brought a handheld camera into the woods. Hollywood - if you're going to keep making found footage movies, can you at least do it right?

Worst – Area 407

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Area 407 is an inexcusably lazy horror movie, relying on nothing but your own imagination for entertainment. I might be wrong, but isn’t that the filmmaker’s job? To bring our dreams to life? To conjure up some fantastical world through the magic of cinema? Nope, not Area 407! Here’s the gist – a plane crashes in the middle of nowhere, there are survivors, one has a video camera, and the camera is left running while an escape (from wherever they are) is attempted. Here’s where a monster enters, and people start dying one by one. Don’t get excited – an almost entirely improvised production comes off as wooden, hammy, unfocused, chaotic, and most of all, unwatchable.

Again, glaring cinematic flubs aside, there’s a very specific reason why Area 407 is on the tail end of this list, and that’s because found footage filmmaking is used as a cheap ploy to mask their small budget. Don’t get me wrong, some indie films are able to mask low-budgets through creativity and pure talent, but all Area 407 does is turn the camera away from anything that would require special effects, taking the term “out of sight, out of mind” far too literal. Character deaths are reduced to nothing but disappearing acts, as anything worth value happens off screen – mostly involving the “monster” (inexplicably a dinosaur).

Proper found footage films display even the more gruesome, unbelievable moments on camera as to further the story and build a universe where people have superpowers, zombies run amok, dinosaurs chase people – etc.

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