Found Footage & Folk Horror
Folk horror and found footage seem, at first glance, to belong to distinct aesthetic spheres: one is rooted in a mythical past where ancient beliefs manifest themselves through landscapes and occult rituals; the other, in the frenetic immediacy of the raw image, captured on the fly, where the viewer finds himself projected into a horror that seems to unfold in real time. But it is precisely in this apparent discrepancy that their essential complementarity lies. For what is often forgotten is that folk horror is not so much about a particular era as it is about a certain state of mind. It’s interested in the deep strata of time, in what persists beneath the modern surface of things, in the irruption of the archaic into the everyday. And found footage, with its brutal aesthetic, shaky cameras and approximate capture, becomes an ideal tool for revealing these buried strata, the unspoken that haunts the present.
It’s not simply a question of form, but of sensory experience. Found footage, popularised by works such as The Blair Witch Project in 1999, appropriates the codes of realistic immersion to revisit those of folk horror, featuring ordinary individuals confronted by forces beyond their control that resonate with the echo of the forgotten sacred. The shaky, precarious subjective camera transforms the viewer into a direct witness to events, forcing them to share the anguish of the characters, to feel with them the uncertainty of the terrain, the strangeness of the locations, and above all, the invisible but palpable threat that surrounds them. It is as if, by filming on the fly, without the control of a well-defined frame, the protagonists were unwittingly revealing hidden dimensions of reality, a nature inhabited by obscure forces that the human eye alone could not perceive.
And while found footage amplifies this sense of immersion, it’s not enough on its own to capture the profound essence of folk horror. That’s where analogue horror comes in. Born of a nostalgia for obsolete technological media – VHS cassettes, magnetic tapes, degraded audio recordings – analogue horror revives a dimension that digital technology has done away with: the idea that technology itself can be haunted. Where found footage anchors viewers in the immediacy of the action, analogue horror plunges them into an altered past, a time that is both familiar and distorted. This deformation, this alteration of images and sounds, acts as a form of corrosion of reality: it reveals flaws, distortions, forgotten truths that the modern world tries to conceal under the veneer of ever more efficient and sanitised technology. The fear lies not just in what we see or hear, but in the medium itself. The visual texture of analogue images – those pixels as big as grains of sand, those scrolling lines that blur the image, those sound parasites that alter voices – becomes the instrument through which horror manifests itself. It’s no longer just a question of raw capture, as in found footage, but a question of the pernicious transformation of the medium: the analogue devices seem possessed, haunted by forces beyond our understanding. The videos are cursed relics, vestiges of a bygone past, where technology, instead of making the world more intelligible, becomes a distorting mirror, amplifying the unknown and the unspeakable.
This continuity between found footage and analogue horror can also be found in video games, where these two forms come together to offer a new experience of horror. Contemporary video games, particularly those inspired by folk horror and analogue horror, exploit this technological nostalgia and sensory immersion to plunge players into worlds where the invisible is always lurking, ready to appear at the turn of a blurred screen or a corrupted radio recording. In games such as Blair Witch (2019) and Fears to Fathom, analogue becomes a metaphor for the flaws in reality: the player no longer simply controls their avatar, but manipulates technological media that betray their own vulnerability. Sounds are distorted, images fragmented, and it is through these fragments, these gaps in the digital flow, that horror emerges.
Found Footage and Folk Horror: an inevitable encountere
Found footage has established itself as a contemporary response to the ancestral anguish of folk horror, bringing a new dimension of immersion and realism. Where classic folk horror constructed an imaginary world of rural terrors, rooted in forgotten beliefs and rituals, found footage propels the viewer into the heart of this horror, without mediation, without filter. It breaks down the traditional distance between observer and story, immersing us directly in the isolated, mysterious landscapes that are the playground of folk horror. It’s an intimate horror, experienced through the eyes of a witness who, like us, falters in the face of what eludes comprehension.
This realist approach, if it finds its apogee in cinema, has also found a powerful echo in video games, where the player becomes not just a spectator, but an actor in this immersion. Games such as Blair Witch and Outlast use subjective cameras to recreate the sensation of a world where horror unfolds through forgotten rituals and occult practices that seem buried in the recesses of reality. The camera we hold and manipulate becomes our only link with the outside world, but also the instrument that reveals what should remain hidden. Isolation is no longer merely geographical; it becomes mental and sensory. The forest that surrounds us, the encroaching darkness, all become vectors of fear, and what was once such a pleasant place to be, becomes a source of fear.
In this crossroads, a particular power lies in what is unspoken, in what escapes our senses. In essence, folk horror plays on the unspoken, the invisible. Its terrors are not exposed head-on, but distilled in the atmosphere, in whispers of forgotten rituals and traces of invisible presences. It’s a genre that thrives in the shadows, summoning forces that we never fully see, but feel everywhere. Found footage amplifies this dynamic by creating an experience where what we see is constantly limited, obstructed, even corrupted by visual or sonic interference. Where the camera seems to be our window on reality, it also becomes the tool that distances us from it, hiding more than it shows.
This aesthetic of the unseen creates a space where horror grows in the imagination of the viewer or player, letting fear feed on uncertainty and mystery. In works such as Slender: The Arrival, it’s the cameras’ interference, those sudden, unexplained distortions of the image, that intensify the fear of the unknown. The appearance of a scrambled signal or distorted sound is enough to suggest the presence of a hostile entity, even if it remains hidden from our view. It is in this absence, in this concealment, that anguish reaches its climax. More than the vision of the threat, it is its evasion that terrifies: the horror is there, lurking in the shadows, ready to emerge without ever fully revealing itself. The player, or spectator, is forced to fill in the blanks with his or her own fears, making the experience all the more personal and unsettling.
This fear of the unseen, which lies at the heart of folk horror, is part of a tradition in which the modern, rational world is constantly confronted by the more ancient, unfathomable mysteries of folklore. The interference of cameras in found footage symbolizes this confrontation: on the one hand, technology, which is supposed to capture and master reality; on the other, archaic forces, beyond any attempt at control or explanation. It is this fracture between contemporary rationality and the mysteries of the past that drives the essence of folk horror. In this context, invisible or barely perceptible phenomena manifest themselves like cracks in the fabric of modern reality, reminding us that horror cannot be fully grasped or understood.
Found footage becomes the mirror of this struggle between the old and the new, between what we know and what we refuse to see. The viewer or player is constantly trapped in this in-between state, oscillating between the comfort of modern technology and the terror of the ancestral forces that subvert it. Cameras, like the occult rituals of folk horror, are no longer tools of mastery, but imperfect artifacts, half-revealing the horror buried beneath the surface of the visible. This tension between the visible and the invisible, between modernity and folklore, lends found footage and folk horror a unique power, where every interference becomes a door ajar.
Between tradition and modernity (yes, I dared)
A central theme emerges with force: the conflict between modernity and the ancient, between contemporary technology and immemorial forces. This struggle manifests itself in the confrontation between tools designed to capture reality – cameras, recorders – and rituals or beliefs that escape all modern rationality. This clash creates a deep malaise, amplified by technology’s inability to capture or control the ancient horror it encounters.
The intrusion of modern devices into territories where ancestral traditions still reign is at the heart of folk horror. Where age-old rituals are based on natural cycles, on codes that escape contemporary understanding, the presence of cameras or cell phones becomes almost incongruous. This discrepancy, this inappropriate presence, only intensifies the sense of threat. Found footage captures this intrusion in real time, exposing the viewer to a world collapsing under the weight of what technology cannot comprehend. Rural or ritual space becomes hostile, not just because it is unknown, but because it actively resists attempts at modern documentation. It refuses to be confined by contemporary codes.
An example like Hereditary (although not found footage) perfectly embodies this conflict, illustrating how ancient heritage, represented by occult practices and dark family beliefs, overwhelms the apparent comfort of modern life. The protagonists, in trying to rationalize or ignore this heritage, inevitably end up devoured by what they cannot understand. In found footage, this confrontation is even more tangible: the camera, far from being a protective barrier, becomes a powerless witness to the characters’ fall into an abyss of ancient terrors.
The video game Outlast, for example, makes perfect use of this principle. The protagonist’s camera, originally intended to document the strange goings-on in an asylum, soon proves useless in the face of the uncontrollable forces he confronts. The technological tool, supposed to capture and unravel the mystery, only shows the horror without ever taming it. Infrared light and close-up zooms become ridiculous in the face of occult rites and the violence of an evil that predates the age of cameras. Here, modernity, represented by this portable technology, fails to understand or combat what belongs to another time, another logic.
This conflict between tradition and modernity is a revelation that certain forces, however ancient, have never disappeared. They have been relegated to the margins of the modern world, hidden away in the recesses of forests, mountains and forgotten villages, where shaky cameras barely dare to venture. By drawing on this opposition, found footage shows how modern technology is often powerless not just to understand, but to capture the rituals and forces that still inhabit these remote spaces.
The collective narrative and the creation of new myths
In folk horror, as in found footage, one phenomenon repeats itself, almost inevitably: the birth and propagation of myths. Folk horror, rooted in oral traditions and ancient legends, shows us how stories, passed down from generation to generation, acquire an almost tangible force, shaping reality according to their terrifying contours. In the same way, found footage, with its supposedly authentic and documentary format, reinvents this process in a modern setting. It recreates the way in which legends and horror stories spread, no longer in the restricted circles of villages or families, but on a planetary scale, via digital networks. Myth becomes viral, shared at the speed of an Internet connection.
Found footage shows us how these stories, once captured by a camera, detach themselves from their sources, become autonomous, amplified, mutated and propagated. What traditional folklore performed in small, closed communities, where legends were woven around seasonal rituals, songs or tales told by the fireside, found footage reproduces in the fluid, infinite space of digital platforms. Videos become artifacts of a new kind, fragments of narratives that escape the hands of their creators to live their own existence, their own expansion. This is how modern myths are born, no longer around tutelary, local figures, but in anonymity and virality.
Take the example of Marble Hornets and the myth of Slender Man, where this spread of fear becomes almost uncontrollable. Initially confined to creepypasta circles, Slender Man quickly became a modern myth, fueled by a series of viral videos which, like the oral tales of yesteryear, have multiplied variations, additions and detour. The myth, now out of control, reinvents itself with each new iteration, each new video, each new story. This process of perpetual recreation, in which the legend adapts to new generations, is the very driving force behind folk horror. Found footage acts as both a witness to and a vehicle for this mutation: the camera, though supposed to capture a raw truth, becomes a tool for transmitting the myth, contributing to its ambiguity and scope. In this way, found footage reproduces the logic of folk horror, where terror is often born of the weight of tradition and ancient tales. Like village tales, in which children are warned not to go near a certain wood or to avoid certain forgotten rituals, viral videos recreate a space where the invisible and the unspoken are insidiously transmitted. It’s no longer the voice of the wise old man or grandmother that carries the legend, but the blurred, trembling video, which we never know whether it captures something real or the fruit of manipulation. And this ambiguity is at the heart of found footage’s effectiveness.
In Marble Hornets, this ambiguity becomes a narrative weapon. The horror lies not only in the figure of the Slender Man, but in the way the videos themselves, broadcast without explanation, sow doubt and paranoia. Each video becomes a fragment of an elusive reality, a piece of a puzzle that the viewer tries, in vain, to piece together. This process echoes the structure of rural folk horror legends, where each generation passes on snippets of stories, fragments of partial truth, that the whole village tries to understand and assimilate.
This is the power of both genres. Through the documentary videos of found footage, as through the terrifying tales of folk horror, the old mechanics of myth-making are replayed. Horror becomes collective, no longer confined to the enclosed space of a film or video game, but continues in the mind of the viewer, and above all, in his or her willingness to pass on the story. In this way, the myth grows, expands and spreads. Found footage becomes the new folklore, the instrument of this viral transmission, where fear itself is transmitted faster than the image. The collective tale that once shook villages by firelight now circulates online, feeding the great machine of contemporary legends.