edward anderson - scholarship - if you're seeing this, i'm probably dead

‘If You’re Seeing This, I’m Probably Dead’: Poe, Lovecraft, and the Literary Heritage of

Found Footage Horror

Edward Anderson

Portions delivered at South Atlantic Modern Language Association 2012 Convention

It has been said that horror turns on the absence of something essential or the presence of

something unexpected. Sometimes, both are true. The definitions and consequences of the

horrific can be affected just as profoundly by the structure of a narrative as by its elements.

What I will here refer to as ‘recovered manuscript fiction’ could be considered a subcategory of

epistolary fiction, but possessing a distinct and identifiable set of characteristics which render it

decidedly different than what we would expect of more widelyregarded works like

Dostoevysky’s Poor Folk or Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, or even another example from

horror, such as Dracula. The horror of recovered manuscript fiction is alluded to in its own

label; it is the found chronicle of some adventure—or misadventure—told by the very figure who

has undergone the experience has not returned to tell the tale in the flesh. What is not so

selfevident is the degree to which interactions and connections are made possible by this

narrative situation, developments that other narrative types might preclude, such as peculiar

engagement strategies and uniquelyfunctioning plot constructions. The body of film which has

developed as a crossmedia descendant of recovered manuscript literature displays equivalent

hallmarks, though technological evolution has allowed for radical approaches to this particular

storytelling practice.

Anderson ‘If You’re Seeing This, I’m Probably Dead’ 2

There is something psychoanalytically engaging about the entire premise of the recovered

manuscript narrative: within the context of its own fiction, it is the product of direct and

desperate reaction to an extant situational trauma, but also an act that fulfills the maternal

imperative to mean by standing, itself, as a testament to the meaning made by the subjects of the

narrative. At some level, we are meant to invest in the idea that they made this message, this

meaning. Ironic, then, that the imperative to mean is so closely bound to the mother and the

mirror stage, for the recovered manuscript narrative is often a rather reflective one—as reflective

as the author imagines humans might get at the realization of their own doom—while also being

a final fulfilment of the maternal command, perhaps even a symbolic appeal to the mercy and

comfort of the mother. She is, after all, a foundational icon of both power and salvation, often

referred to in narrative and appealed to colloquially (“Go cry to your momma.”) even as religion

itself, along with whatever other metaphysical beliefs might be relevant, have been undermined

by the hopelessness of the situation. But an overt appeals for salvation are made in vain, for the

document itself is meant to stand as the only artifact to have escaped the adventure intact, to have

made it to the reader’s hands.

The central action of the recovered manuscript is the chronicling not of adventure or

other enriching experience—such as is common in travel narratives and more traditional

epistolary—but of tragic misadventure and isolation. Generally, by the time the chronicle has

begun, its outcome is already inevitable; the narrator has been presented with an obstacle or

antagonist which he has little confidence he will be able to overcome or escape, thereby

prompting him to record the events that have lead him to his fate in hopes that his record will

somehow find its way to the outside world; not to serve as an S.O.S., but rather as a warning.


This situation—the necessity of discovering the recovered manuscript—is what makes, and the

particular tale we’ll be examining, different from Defoe’s similarlythemed Robinson Crusoe;

there, it is strongly implied that the titular character writes about his adventures rather strictly in

hindsight, while the last line confirms his intention—and capacity—to continue the narrative in a

later volume. In fact, if narratives such as Crusoe established new inroads for narrative realism,

the recovered manuscript narrative pushes that edge, that tarrying with material reality beyond

the materially possible. As the nature of the recovered manuscript plots is often supernatural, the

manifestation of the nemesis is so alien as to be not entirely comprehensible to the narrator. Yet,

whether natural or supernatural, it is ultimately the inclusion of the fatally undefeatable that

allows recovered manuscript fiction to explore different, darker psychological and social territory

than its antecedent forms; the perspective the of individual living the illfated event is different

than that of the one who has lived it, and especially different from the one who has lived some

time after surviving it. Though the body of work comprising textbased recovered manuscript

fiction is rather slight, the application of the narrative strategy has expanded into film in the

genre of found footage horror, and the parameters of the crossmedia form—an admittedly

derridean feeling out of an amorphous situation that evolves along with the expanding

parameters of communications technology—can be traced out (momentarily, at least) from the

examples explored herein.

There exists within recovered manuscript tales a necessary concern with narrative

temporality, and not simply for the sake of typical authorial considerations such as plot and

pacing. The fictional author/narrator is evermindful of the construction of his document and,

given that writing is a timeconsuming activity, he must plan so that the account might be


updated or finished before he meets his end. The fact that he often does so ‘out loud’, with

references made to the planning of the text in the text itself, is a strategy of authenticating the

narrative, of better equipping the reader to believe that the account is happening—has

happened—within their own physical realm. This all has an obvious and profound effect on 1

content, as, barring aforementioned philosophical and redemptive reflections, the authors of the

examples we shall study here dedicate little space to any detail that does not contribute to the

reader’s understanding of the situation. This results in a cast of characters who are exceptionally

transient, often devoid even of name and disappearing from the narrative as soon as the function

of their presence is fulfilled. The state of such characters should not be mistaken as being

indicative of a lack of dimensionality of the recovered manuscript story, however, as those

figures, by virtue of their nearfacelessness, significantly enrich the reader’s understanding of the

situation, even if only by our reaction to them. Thus, such characters attain a unique type of

realism that we see just as often in the films that the recovered manuscript form has spun off.

So many discursive concerns and engaging structural considerations thus identified, we

can thus turn to a specific example of the form. Here, we will focus our attentions on one of

Edgar Allen Poe’s tales as a prototypical. It would, initially, seem an obvious choice to examine

his only novel, the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, an epistolary of diary entries

from the misadventures of a deceased sailor. But, as with Defoe, this is where the previous

description of the recovered manuscript form becomes relevant; Arthur Gordon Pym does not

qualify as recovered manuscript because, narrativelyspeaking, Pym died after the piece was

passed on to the next link in the chain of delivery (a narrative device which will be examined

1 Tangentially: this raises the question of how prudent it would be, regardless of modern writing conventions, to refer to the action of a given recovered manuscript in past tense.


later); the recovered part of the ‘recovered manuscript’ moniker distinguishes Pym as something

different in its nature.

But Pym, though being unique for its length amongst Poe’s work, is not the first of its

kind thematically, and its antecedent proves a more successful example of the narrative type we

are concerning ourselves with. Just as Poe would write his dead women and premature burial

tales, so the sea and the idea of a record, what’s found of the otherwise lost, had called to him

half a decade before, in ‘Ms. Found In a Bottle’ (1833). A relatively obscure entry within Poe’s

omnibus, the story nevertheless provides us with all the structural requirements heretofore

identified; we are quickly introduced to the journal of the unnamed narrator, a chronically

restless and ironically directionless sailor who finds himself in the midst of a gale. He is hurled

from his own ship and lands, seemingly undetected, on the deck of a mysterious vessel bound for

the South Pole. In his journal, the presented record of the tale, it is made clear that such a

destination can only mean death. As he tries to find a means to preserve himself aboard while

simultaneously grasping for a safe exit, he takes desperate notes about the ineffable crew of the

ghost ship;

A man passed by my place of concealment…. He muttered to himself, in a low broken tone, some words of a language which I could not understand, and groped in a corner among a pile of singularlooking instruments…. His manner was a wild mixture of the peevishness of second childhood, and the solemn dignity of a God. He at length went on deck, and I saw him no more. (111)

The transience of this figure could be chalked up to the compactness of short story as a form. By

its nature as a literature of panic, however, written under the constant threat of mortal danger,

recovered manuscript fiction alters the valuation of such an appearance, imbuing it with that

same air of inescapability that so hangs over the entire presentation of the tale.


Meanwhile, although the established conditions seem inhospitable to reflection, quite the

contrary is true. Rightly or wrongly, products of the horror genre are often maligned for their

lack of psychological depth in favor of salacious and visceral thrills, but good literature is often

defined by some degree of emotional development. Horror, as a larger genre, is by no means

barred from such heights, while our example from Poe shows how the deliberate inclusion of

moral and philosophical reflection would come to be a staple of the genre. In an otherwise

unprefaced passage, the narrator shares an emerging sense of his own fate:

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul —a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never—I know that I shall never—be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense—a new entity is added to my soul (112).

This sense of dread is an evolving one, however, and, as he considers it, the narrator can

distinguish the peculiar tortuousness of time, of a period that closes in on fate, but has some

duration still set aside to intimidate, to subsequently, ironically drive the narrator’s reflections.

I have just left the deck, where I find it impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of Eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy seagull; and the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the deep, but like demons confined to simple threats and forbidden to destroy (11314).

Dour though the forecast is, and even within the confines of the involuntary voyage—the cage of

a ship gaining on its destination, on finality itself—valuable room in this endemically

timebound narrative is set aside specifically for the act of chronicling. Indeed, the exploration

of deep emotions is truly endemic to the structure here, as the narrator of the recovered


manuscript is expected to engage in the sort of philosophical and moral reflection any actual

person might engage in upon such an event, thereby exposing, perhaps, the expectation of

realism even in the midst of a clearly fantastical situation. At some point, then, he reader comes

to suspend disbelief of the supernatural elements, the purely fictional points of the fiction, as the

realistic elements are introduced, come to be expected and, as such, allow for an adoption of the

tale as realistically feasible in respects that must still be explored.

To continue the exploration of that obscuring of the boundary between the situation of the

narrative and that of its delivery as narrative to the viewer, we can turn Lovecraft’s ‘Call of

Cthulhu’. Here, narrator Weyland Thurston records the progress of his research of a malevolent

pagan god and the cult that worships it. If, according to the categorical conventions of

epistolary, ‘Ms. Found in a Bottle’ is to be considered monologic—just the one narrator’s

tale—Cthulhu makes a neat feat out of being polylogic while still maintaining an authentic,

identifiable ‘recoveredness’ in its nature. Ostensible testimonies and notes of several chroniclers

are included, all having been recovered from the belongings of narrator Thurston’s deceased

uncle. As a reflection in his own notes, Thurston comes to realize that it is the very knowledge

of the existence of this supernatural evil that has already doomed him;

“… [This] record of mine… wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror…. As my uncle went… so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives. … Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose…. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men…. Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.”

Lovecraft heads ‘Call of Cthulhu’ with a note that, yet again, the story the reader is about to

embark on was recovered from a dead man’s papers: Thurston’s own. Assuming that disbelief


has been effectively suspended—as the greatest testimony to this fictional character’s death is his

selfsame absence for the reader—the solitary act of reading itself becomes host to a blending of

the real and fictional; the implication for the reader is that they themselves may suffer the same

fate as Thurston for committing the same act with the same text. And the very fact that this

confluence of the two dimensions finds its object in the reader themselves serves as a kind of

psychological stimulation, a subtle but effective strategy that cinema would eventually come to

replicate.

Indeed, to blur that distinction between the viewing experience and the narrative itself,

creative personalities such as William Castle and Arch Obler would eventually rig theater seats

and put movie house employees in costumes to pop out and scare patrons. Even our historical

(and current) ambivalence toward 3D technology is the result of an attempt at realism that Poe

and Lovecraft succeeded at perhaps more elegantly. Found footage horror, then, is a narrative

approach to obscuring that line, and on that has seen increasing success over the last few

decades. Traditionally, ’found footage’ (sans ‘horror’) has been used to identify cinematic

productions that are either partially or completely comprised of clips from discovered home 2

movies, travelogues, newsreels and other personal or documentary sources. These materials are

combined, reedited, or otherwise processed at some point after their original production, usually

by someone other than their creator, and rereleased, often for artistic more than commercial

purposes. As such, ‘found footage’ films often lack any cohesive narrative, a key possibility of

that form that separates it not only from found footage horror, but from most

recognizablynarrative forms of expression. Found footage horror, then—by virtue of the final

2 In a realistic sense: these are actual media products of our own realm, versus the fiction of a recovered narrative.


identifier, ‘horror'—is a commercial, narrative subgenre, the label of which is, with respect to

reality, a misnomer; all is fabricated, nothing is truly recovered, no previouslysynthesized

element is found in the development process. If the product is effective however, its subjective

status of fiction can, for the reader, become blurred or more easily ignored in much the same

manner as we’ve seen in the literary examples already discussed.

But, if the body of literature that qualifies as recovered manuscript fiction is slight, so

found footage horror, as one of the newest subgenres of horror and one of the most novel

storytelling styles currently being used in filmmaking, suffers from a reputation that might just

threaten to likewise curtail its development. As tolerance for horror chronically ebbs amongst

professional film critics, amateur bloggers and horrordedicated websites such as

BloodyDisgusting, Fangoria, and ShockTilYouDrop.com have taken over much of the serious

discussion about the benefits, liabilities, and curiosities of the form. Increasingly, the

demographic of the average horror movie reviewer approaches that of the average horror movie

fan, as well as the average found footage horror filmmaker; young to early middleaged, male,

and tech savvy , a characteristic that becomes important as we consider the reliance of the 3

narrative form on the availability and, anymore, pervasivity of consumer communications

technologies. The form is likewise overlooked within academia, perhaps due to assumptions of

its quality based on the proliferation of those blevel entries that, as with the rest of horror,

discursively detract from the achievements and importance of superior examples. Or, we might

assume that the lack of critical interest is a qualitative judgment made against the relatively scant

3 Many of today’s prominent found footage filmmakers, such as Paco Plaza (Rec, 2007), Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity, 2007), and Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, 2008) fit this description, as do the filmmakers of such landmark found footage pieces as Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust, 1980, during which time the director was 41) and Daniel Myrick (who was 37 when The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999).


subdivision of a larger genre that, itself, has had difficulties being taken seriously. This last

supposition rings false, however, considering the wealth of serious study dedicated to related

subjects, such as the cultural foundations of the slasher movie, the sociopolitical underpinnings

of cinematic zombie mythology and, of course, issues ranging from familial tensions to

consumer psychology to gender difference amongst classic creature features. Found footage

horror continues to be produced, however, and in greater volumes all the time. In 2012,

Paranormal Activity 3 enjoyed an opening weekend of $52.6 million, a fall record at the time

(Box Office Mojo). That franchise, arguably the most successful in the subgenre, will be

continued in another film in 2015. And it will be competing with a host of new entries, including

The Gallows, The Fear Project, Stalker, The X Species, and Occupants, as well as international

titles including Ukraine’s Ghoul, and the UK’s Night Fall. Meanwhile, 2014 saw the most

recent installment of perhaps the most successful nonAmerican franchise, the Spanish [REC]

series. 4

But, academic attention notwithstanding, even the marketplace prevalence of the form is

a radical departure from where such films were even thirty years ago, at the dawn of practical

home filmmaking. At that point, with Poe and Lovecraft long dead and the recovered

manuscript form being taken up only occasionally and never with any great degree of success, it

becomes fascinating that the ultimate impetus for the resurgence of such a unique narrative

perspective would not be the development of new media content, but of new media forms and

increased consumer access. The economic and technological advancements of the second half of

4 Though, to be fair, the franchise name, a reference to the common on‐screen notification from many brands of video cameras, becomes ironic; only the first two films of the series are presented entirely as found footage. [REC] 3: Genesis is only partially shot in the style, while the last, subtitled Apocalypse, abandons the format entirely for a traditional, 3rd person camera perspective.


the 20th Century brought a commensurate lowering of production costs, so that independent

filmmakers were being allowed broader access to their materials, thereby leading to a greater

degree of cinematic experimentation far outside of studio structures. The affordability and ease

of amateur video production became the lynchpin that made found footage possible; as Super8

gave way to videotape, it became increasingly plausible that a group of amateurs would be able

to produce in the isolated locations that often provide the setting for found footage horror. In

fact, while setbased shooting has always been common to studio productions, filmmakers of the

1980’s and 90’s were taking lessons from gritty exploitation films, opting to shoot more cheaply

‘on location’ wherever and whenever possible—be that location the Amazonian jungle of

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or the local woods of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Given that

suspension of disbelief is of special importance to found footage horror, which strives for

plausibility within its own fantastic context, a nobudget production quality and unadorned

performances would become not only standard to the form, but would serve as some of the

hallmarks that made the ‘reality’ of the narrative more accessible as real.

But, while we might tend to look at examples of other genres in relative isolation—a

study of the film restrict to just the film—another great novelty of found footage horror is how it

often utilizes other media to more effectively blur the reality/fiction barrier. One the genre’s

most notable titles, the aforementioned The Blair Witch Project, made extensive use of the

internet as part of a marketing strategy of what we will call ‘authenticity confusion’. Rather than

relying strictly on traditional forms of marketing—such as interviews with the actors that

reference the process of making the film as a fictional piece—the producers of Blair Witch used

new media to plant the idea that what audiences were going to see was the chronicle of a


historical event, the most recent manifestation of a supernatural phenomenon that had been

established and studied for decades. Elements of a fabricated mythology were posted to web

blogs and bulletin boards, with hired writers taking on the guise of amateur detectives, sharing

clandestine information about Elly Kedward, the titular witch, histories of strange incidents and

ritualized murders, and even the police confession of Rustin Parr, a mid20th C. hermet, familiar

of Kedwards, and serial murderer. Such savvy marketing was quite successful, both in making

Blair Witch the first found footage horror film to earn top box office sales—almost $250M

worldwide (Box Office Mojo)—and, perhaps more impressively, in making some portion of

early fans legitimately believe that the narrative represented a material truth.

But home video technology like that used to produce Blair Witch had been available to

consumers since the mid1970’s, and it is hard to believe that the market would take two and a

half decades to develop a genre that fit its expanding functionality so well; indeed, Blair Witch

had its precursors. Cannibal Holocaust—an Italian production showcasing not the emerging,

more convenient technology of video, but the 16mm film that was beginning its market

decline—concerns the disappearance of a documentary film crew in the Colombian Amazon. As

opposed to efforts like Blair Witch, in which local terrains were used as film setting, director

Ruggero Deodato and his crew used multiple means of transport to get to shooting locations deep

within the rainforest. Ironically, though, the best aid to suspension of disbelief that Deodato

provides is not in the realism of his piece, but in its fiction. As with the textual precedents we

have examined, horror as an overarching cinematic genre often integrates supernatural themes;

found footage horror, as a form, is no exception, but, unlike the other examples examined here,

Cannibal Holocaust eschews such elements entirely. While the settings are exotic, Deodato


chooses to deal only in horrors possible in the viewer’s own world, and it is the knowledge of

that possibility that casts the grotesqueries of the frame and plot as all the more striking and

disturbing. Besides being an early example of found footage horror, Cannibal Holocaust is

notable for being something of a cultural pariah, a historical blight that may be somewhat

responsible for the present reputation of the genre. Amongst so many other disturbing scenes of

death and dismemberment, Deodato filmed his actors gleefully slaughtering and eating a large

turtle, an act which would be hardly noteworthy if not for that fact that it was not simulated.

This and other scandalous images easily earned the film a place on the British Board of Film

Censors ‘video nasties’ list. Further, as the production used real cannibal tribesmen as extras, the

filmmakers’ attempt at authenticity confusion worked out quite better than they had hoped:

besides simply being banned in the UK, the producers of the film were prosecuted in several

countries for obscenity violations and speculation that the piece was actually just a glorified

snuff film persisted for decades, despite subsequent media appearances of the actors who

portrayed the ‘lost’ film crew (Balun).

Traditional horror film structure often includes the ‘grand reveal’, typified by Lon

Chaney’s (presumably) shrieking Phantom of the Opera, the unveiling of The Fly, or the first

glimpse of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Found footage horror, on the other hand,

assumes its position as thoroughly postmodern by offering the audience no such payoff. In

Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield, we are given only passing views of the nemesis; labels such as

‘monster’ or ‘alien’ seem insufficient or assumptive, as the nature of the creature is even more

obscured than its physical presence in the frame. This common practice amongst found footage

horror is to the genre’s psychoanalytical credit, as the inability to get a good look at the nemesis


mirrors the inability of the characters—victims in shock—to fully understand what they are

going through. A sense of profound disorientation persists until the ‘moment of catharsis’, or,

more colloquially, the ‘if you’re seeing this…’ moment. Here, the protagonist expresses both his

fears and insights as he comes to understand that he will not be rescued along with his chronicle.

In Cloverfield, the tale of a small group traversing New York as the city is attacked by a gigantic

creature of unknown origin, the moment of catharsis occurs as protagonist Robert Hawkins’ final

avenue of escape is cut off. He and girlfriend Beth become stranded in what the title card—the

allknowing future of Hawkins’ world, from a time on the other side of the disaster—refers to as

‘the area formerly known as Central Park’:

ROB

Approximately seven hours ago… something attacked our city.… If

you’re watching this right now, then you probably know more about that

thing than I do…. It killed my brother, Jason…. Among others…. We

took shelter under this bridge. The military… they’ve begun bombing

that creature. And we’re caught in the middle.

At the point of catharsis, the characters become as fullydimensional as they will be, maximizing

the potential for viewer sympathy even as all hopes for survival are irrevocably dashed. For Rob

and Beth, the moment of catharsis comes to its end as they proclaim their love for one another,

meeting their fate together as Central Park is carpetbombed. Meanwhile, in Blair Witch, the trio

of characters is whittled down until, Heather, the team’s leader and last surviving member, turns

the camera on herself. She apologizes to the families of her comrades before confessing to her

own culpability: “It was my project, and I insisted. … Everything had to be my way and this is


where we’ve ended up. And it’s all because

of me that we’re here now.” The

disorienting angle of this scene made it

material for several of the film’s posters and

advertisements, and the clip itself has

become perhaps the most recognized

segment of the film. Such a scene also

makes clear how efficiently found footage

horror evokes the dramatic; like the

Shakespearean soliloquy, all that is needed

is a single speaker and the viewer. But

while the soliloquist addresses himself or

Gd or the thin air, the wielder of the

reflective camera knows—or hopes—that

her words won’t be lost along with her life.

Thus, like Lovecraft’s complicit reader, the

found footage viewer serves, in turns, as

interloper, witness, inheritor and,

ultimately, successor.

But recall, too, that the creation of

the record in the recovered manuscript is a

slow and deliberate process, done during


breaks in the action that require singular focus. Migration of such tales to film, and the

commensurate inclusion of technology allows events to unfold at a pace independent of the

recording, at least within the context of the story. Likewise, the impetus toward adventure—and

peril—with camera inhand affords the audience a view largely different from more conventional

cinematic perspectives, which rely on wide shots, telling angles and the artistic closeup (as

opposed to what we see in the cathartic ‘nose shot’ shot of Blair Witch, mentioned above).

Instead, the viewer is literally in the hands of whoever is holding the camera and aware only of

what is happening in the immediate vicinity of that character. No breaks to the creation of the

record are necessary, aside from manufactured, strategic technology faults, such as a battery

dying or a lens getting damaged. This, of course, necessitates ‘missed moments’, episodes in

which the camera operator fails to catch an essential piece of visual information or some view of

the enigmatic nemesis. But the forced subjugation of the viewer is also a means by which to

gain insight into the mentality of the cameraman, especially when he deliberately chooses what

to record. In Diary of the Dead, a group of student filmmakers, cut from the same mold as the

Blair Witch trio, stumbles upon and is moved to document George Romero’s latest zombie

apocalypse. While roaming an abandoned hospital in search of help for an injured friend,

groupleader Jason finds that his video camera has run out of battery life and he must plugin to

recharge. The others urge him to continue searching the hospital with them while the camera

charges. His response; “I can’t leave without the camera. The camera’s the whole thing.” The

context of the fiction demands that at least one of the participants bind themselves to the

documentation process; the viewer, on the other hand, is bound to the camera, or its product, and

the development and delivery of content are what make the transaction valid, at least for Jason.


Yet, the needless complications of such dedication are not lost on other characters, as the found

footage horror film strives to counterbalance blunt illogic with sensibility. Jason’s incredulous

girlfriend, Debra, disparagingly proclaims that “If it’s not on camera, it’s like it didn’t happen”.

The viewer is meant to relate better to this more practical perspective, yet we also know that the

value placed on documentation must will out if there is to be a film at all and if we are to be able

to continue playing our own role within a history that we ourselves imagine for it. Accordingly,

Jason sits out the action of his own volition, foregoing even the opportunity for catharsis as he

futilely searches for a solution to reinsert the camera into the center of the action. Upon

returning, Debra confronts Jason with another camera, found elsewhere in the hospital. As she

demands that the filmmaker become the filmed, his squirming is visible and understandable.

Even though his own camera has never left his hand, Jason’s relationship with his film has

suddenly taken a sharp turn. Such abrupt distancing of author and media, and the commensurate

redefinition of one’s role in the creation of the other, provides a point of sharp contrast with the

genre’s literary ancestor. As the entirety of the recovered manuscript relies on the deliberate

recording of the events, so the author not only must find the time to write, but must have the

chance to focus on nothing else. The document becomes not simply a record, but an extension of

the author’s state of mind. The automated creation of content made possible by the camera

obviates such intimacy to the point that the device will continue to record even if there is no one

present—or alive—to operate it. As the shot switches from Jason’s view to Debra’s, the

originator of the document becomes just another subject of its focus. 5

5 Tangentially, Diary of the Dead also shows how found footage horror has come into its own since Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project. Romero, being arguably as important a director to the horror genre as Steven Spielberg is in mainstream cinema, makes extensive use of new media forms in this expansion of his Night of the Living Dead mythos. The use of the internet to research and track the epidemic inverts Blair Witch’s own


Backstory of the nemesis, like the ‘grand reveal’, is another custom often bucked by

found footage horror, especially when the production has a good grip on its material and it

wishes to maintain a greater degree of suspense by invoking and manipulating viewer fears of

the perpetually unknown, a modern manifestation of the same sort of constitutive otherness that

has captivated western thought since Hegel. Cloverfield, after all, is essentially a remake of

Godzilla, at least in terms of the nature and scope of the threat, and a more wellknown villain is

hard to find; the ‘Godlizard’—a product of nuclear weapons testing in an era when the Bikini

Atoll experiments were in the midst of their 12year run—has been the subject of dozens of

productions within both Asian and Englishspeaking markets. But Cloverfield’s alien—a fitting

term regardless of origins—gives us no clues beyond a scene in which the characters watch news

footage of the rampage as a literal riot unfolds around them. In any of the Godzilla films, the

action might regularly cut back to scientists, military men, or others who are removed and,

subsequently, betterinformed; the nature of Cloverfield and its ilk, however, renders such

background so inaccessible as to be irrelevant. Rather, all the viewer knows in any detail is the

cast of characters with whom they are presented and become familiar, and it is those

characters—in the midst of their deepest grappling with their own mortality and the threats that

serve to redefine it—to whom the viewer turns for the only relatability to be had, stilted though it

is. Despite the chronically brisk pacing and straightforward plot goals, found footage commonly

displays subtlety in how it chooses to parse out character background and motivations. In

contrast to Diary of the Dead’s use of the technology failure to restrict the viewer’s access even

as unseemly character motivations are made explicit, Cloverfield employs a variant of the same

aforementioned advertising strategy, while YouTube becomes central to the dissemination of the film within the world of the fiction.


conceit to expand the audience’s understanding of and sympathy for its cast’s quest. Rob

Hawkins begins the evening of the film at a goingaway party; he has recently taken a job in

Japan and will be leaving the next day. Beth, the heroine, is also in attendance, along with her

date. Throughout early party scenes, the viewer catches snippets of conversation which allude to

Rob and Beth’s recentlyended relationship and the pair is eventually caught fighting by Hud, the

film’s first cameraman, at which point Beth leaves. Once the creature is introduced, Rob (in

typical hero fashion) resolves to rescue Beth from her halfdemolished apartment before they and

their accompanying friends flee the city. Soon thereafter, as pieces of a ruined New York are

raining down on the group—including the severed head of the Statue of Liberty—a camera

failure allows the action to cut back to footage which has been largely recorded over: a night and

day, several weeks before, which the lovers spend together at Coney Island. Aside from

providing a welcome respite from the pace and violence of the main plot, these few segments

allow Cloverfield to transcend its status as a horror film and become something of a tragic

romance, even if only a sophomoric one. A similar strategy can be seen in ‘The Lost Tape:

Andy’s Terrifying Last Days Revealed’, a short film accompanying 2004’s Dawn of the Dead.

Here, the isolated survivor of a zombie outbreak records a video diary; but rather than taking the

camera along during his scavenging missions, Andy leaves it on a tripod in his apartment; the

filmmakers likely adopted the stationarycamera strategy to cuts costs and lessen the chance of

factual conflicts with the main feature. The conceit of a camera malfunction gives the viewer

greater insight into the protagonist’s strained relationships with his family. Andy has

unknowingly taped over portions of a family day at the park; his adoration for his daughter is

evident, as are the beginnings of a friction with his wife that will eventually end in divorce. Both


daughter and exwife are heavily alluded to

as Andy records his diary; their fates are

left unknown even as Andy’s own tragic

end is displayed plainly. ‘The Lost Tape’

also highlights the aforementioned

necessity of only a single actor and the

viewer, as the great majority of the piece

features Andy in seclusion and there are no

other oncamera speaking roles during the

apocalyptic scenes.

But all of the concerns we have noted thus

far are eclipsed by a construction—or,

perhaps, a form of documentation—that

allows us to perceive novelty of use even

within documentation itself. In Poe’s

taleor, more accurately, its titlewe can

examine an attempt to resolve an issue so

pervasive and lasting that, even today, it is

overtly addressed in almost every example

of found footage horror. The fact that the

story is titled ‘Ms. Found in a Bottle’

indicates that the message has been


discovered by someone other than its author and, ultimately, delivered to a publisher. Though

we rationally understand the story to be fiction, full investment necessitates an actual structure

from which to suspend disbelief; the establishment of some chain of delivery, no matter how

scant, will suffice. In fact, while some link in the chain of delivery is essential, the overall lack

of information regarding the delivery process frees the reader to imagine for themselves how the

material came to the attention of the public. Poe’s title belies his intention that the reader should,

to some degree, take what he is reading as chronicle of an actual event; to maintain that

suspension requires the reasonable and explicit documentation of but a single step in the

document’s journey from creation to publication. Lovecraft fulfills this requirement in a

similarly effective manner in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, noting in the epigraph that the chronicle has

been “Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston,” Thurston

being the narrator of the tale’s outermost frame.

In the establishment of a piece’s perceived authenticity, the chain of delivery is perhaps

the most important element of all. But while the recovered manuscript is, within its context,

usually produced for the sole motive of documenting the horrific, the same cultural

developments that made found footage horror plausible also tend to lead to substantially different

premises for filming. ‘Real’ or artistic found footage presents the material in a way that deviates

from the original intention of its creation. So too, found footage horror functions on the premise

that what we are seeing was originally produced for a different purpose or audience, and that it

has been reappropriated due to the very events it chronicles. Though the phenomenon itself

might spark a number of broad questions about the ways that the viewer interacts with the film,

the establishment of the chain of delivery in an example of found footage horror is usually a


straightforward matter. Cloverfield, for example, begins with an officiallooking identifier rather

than a formal title; a document number, the media (a digital card, presumably recovered from

Hud’s camera), then an association to the larger events that this film is only a single, small part

of; “Multiple sightings of case designate ‘Cloverfield’”. In a sly reinforcement of authenticity

confusion, the same screen also contains a superimposed watermark, a wellknown claim of

ownership: “Property of the U.S. government / Do not duplicate.” If Cloverfield’s strategy is at

all subtle, The Blair Witch Project takes a decidedly more overt route, harkening back to the

openings of such mainstream horror classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: “In October of

1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while

shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.” Diary of the Dead, on the other

hand, frames itself as a YouTube posting, taking advantage of ubiquitous realworld technology

to facilitate suspension of disbelief and make the story not only more accessible, but accessible

in a manner which is rare even for found footage and which might ultimately mark the future

direction of the entire subgenre. Once the narrative has been presented in such fashion so as to

maximize its plausibility, the inculcated viewer takes his place as the final link in the chain, the

recipient—or inheritor—of the lost narrator’s message.

As more and more found footage films are produced, the parameters of the genre expand

and change; Video, internet, and associated communications technologies are fast approaching a

point that today’s ‘essential elements’ of found footage horror may eventually be obviated.

Cannibal Holocaust is only associated with modern found footage horror amongst the small

minority of aficionados who even know if its existence, and it eschews some conventions which

would be considered standard or even necessary today. Indeed, even The Blair Witch Project,


Cloverfield, and other more modern examples might eventually be seen as relics as technologies

such as BluRay and innovations such as YouTube fundamentally reshape media creation and

reception.


Works Cited

Balun, Chas.. Liner Notes. Cannibal Holocaust: 25th Anniversary Edition DVD. Dir. Ruggero

Deodato. Grindhouse Releasing, 2005.

"The Blair Witch Project (1999)." Box Office Mojo. IMDB.com, Inc., n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2012.

The Blair Witch Project. Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Perf. Heather Donahue.

Artisan Entertainment, 1999. Film. Blairwitch.com. Web. 8 Sept. 2012.

Cannibal Holocaust: 25th Anniversary Edition DVD. Dir. Ruggero Deodato. Grindhouse

Releasing, 2005.

Cloverfield. Dir. Matt Reeves. Paramount Pictures, 2008. DVD.

Diary of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. The Weinstein Company, 2008. DVD.

"The Lost Tape: Andy's Terrifying Last Days Revealed". Perf. Bruce Bohne. Universal Pictures,

2004. DVD Extra (The Dawn of the Dead).

Lovecraft, H. P. ""The Call of Cthulhu"" Weird Tales Feb. 1928: n. pag. The H. P. Lovecraft

Archive, 20 Aug. 2009. Web. 10 Sept. 2012.

"Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)." Box Office Mojo. IMDB.com, Inc., n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2012.

Poe, Edgar Allan, and Gary Richard Thompson. "Ms. Found in a Bottle." The Selected Writings

of Edgar Allan Poe: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New

York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. Print. Norton Critical Editions.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable &, 1897. Project Gutenberg, 30 Apr.

2011. Web. 10 Aug. 2012.

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