The Blair Witch Project, which turns 20 this week, wasn’t the first thriller to present itself as the raw video recordings of a doomed camera crew. The infamous Cannibal Holocaust got there almost 20 years before it, and nearly a decade before that, The Legend Of Boggy Creek blurred the line between documentary and horror. But Blair Witch was such a phenomenon—and in its ratio of shoestring cost to enormous earnings, so profitable—that it essentially transformed a cost-efficient gimmick into a genre onto itself. In the two decades since, they’ve just kept making these terror-tilted faux-home movies, endlessly subjecting a new gaggle of camera-carrying “regular people” to the aliens, ghosts, and monsters barreling headfirst into their viewfinders.
Of course, not too many of the found-footage flicks from this century are very good. Most of them are, in fact, lousy, the amateur-filmmaker scenario providing convenient cover for uneventful and artless schlock—for movies that look bad and go nowhere on purpose. But while none have come within zooming range of Blair Witch’s unholy, snuff-film power, there are a few worthwhile mock-doc chillers made in its wake. Below, we’ve gone to the tapes, reviewed the footage, and uncovered the best this craze has offered in the two decades since audiences came out in droves to see a trio of nobodies pantomime panic in the woods, blubbering directly into the shaky handheld camera.
https://film.avclub.com/just-keep-filming-16-worthwhile-found-footage-horror-m-1836018013