Found footage films are something that seems to come up
frequently in the discussion of bad filmmaking.
It’s not because they are all terrible films. That’s not it at all. There are many good films made in this
style. The problem is that it is so easy
to stumble when using the found footage concept. There’s a wide array of bad found footage
films that can be easily found by searching whatever brick and mortar stores
remain, looking at Redbox, or digging through Netflix. You could even own some of them in your
personal collection. I don’t know. I can’t see through my computer and browse
your collection. The only thing I know
for sure is that there has been a nearly endless supply of found footage films
in the past decade or so.
One of the lesser found footage movies is 2012’s Area
407. This horror movie doesn’t have a
lot of scares, and instead is filled to the brim with annoying characters who
are basically just names. There’s the
annoying main female character Trish (Abigail Schrader), her older sister
Jessie (Samantha Lester), a cameraman named Jimmy (James Lyons), air marshal
Laura (Melanie Lyons), flight attendant Lois (Samantha Sloyan), and asshole
Charlie (Brendan Patrick Connor). Who
they are doesn’t really matter because everyone acts as annoying as everyone
else. Except for Charlie, who is an
asshole. They spend the entire movie
yelling each other’s names, screaming, and dying. There is no depth to anyone in the movie.
The reason I am highlighting Area 407, aside from the fact
that it is the Sunday “Bad” Movie this week, is because it can help me to
clarify the ways that a found footage movie can fail. It is one of the worst movies made in the
found footage style that I have come across.
It falls into many of the trappings of bad found footage films, which I
will go over through this post. Why
don’t we get to these things that can hamper the creation of a good movie?
The first thing that should be known about found footage
movies are that they are cheap and quick to make. That is the reason that so many of them
exist. The cheapness helped to make the
Paranormal Activity series into a money-making machine. They make back their budget in the first few
days and go on to exceed it by vast amounts.
Studios like large profits and will make other found footage films in
the hopes of capturing the same magic.
Independent filmmakers also like the found footage style because of how
quick and cheap it is. They don’t have
the wealth that studios have and cannot spend nearly as much money making
movies. Found footage can help them to
not show their budgetary limitations as much as making a standard film would.
Yet, as positive as these reasons may seem, there are also
negatives to the fact that the movies are cheap, quick, and easy to make. Many times, that comes in the form of the
writing. When a low budget filmmaker
wants to make a movie, they want to make a movie. As I’ve written before, many times it is a
group of friends who think it would be fun to hang out and make a cheap
movie. They’ll rush it, not caring about
the quality of what they make. They only
care that they can get it done. They
like how easy and quick using the found footage concept can make the filming
process. When with a bunch of friends,
you want to hang out. You’ll do stupid
things on camera and think that it should be added to the movie. The whole writing process flies out the
window so that the people making the movie can amuse themselves. The improvised amusement makes it into the
movie solely based on the fact that it might as well. This isn't always the case, for sure, but
many times, I’m sure that what you watch on screen in low budget movies
includes random stuff that was shot just for the fun of it. That’s a little bit off topic though. That’s about low budget films in
general. When it comes to found footage
movies, it’s usually just a lack of quality writing that exists.
When looking at Area 407, the lack of writing is apparent in
many ways. The characters don’t have
depth outside of job and name. The plot
goes almost nowhere. The majority of the
movie involves characters yelling at each other or yelling each other’s names. Between the brief moments of action, the
characters repeatedly end up in cabins.
There’s a lot of repetition throughout the film with no characters that
a viewer can attach themselves to and care about. If we remove the idea that the people
involved in making Area 407 were friends, why is the quality of the writing so
poor in the case of this film? Disregarding
what I wrote above, another theory for the bad script could be realism.
Found footage movies are based upon the concept that what
the viewers are witnessing actually happened.
Everything seen in the film is supposed to be realistic. It is purported to have happened. The writers have to try and make everything
that happens seem like something that would actually happen. Sometimes that can work to the detriment of
the movie, such as Area 407. After a
plane crash, everyone would be yelling and on edge. They would wait for someone to come save
them. That’s what the movie did, until
throwing a monster into the mix. It made
everything in between the crash and the monster irritating. But it was at least semi-real to what would
happen in the situation. The dialogue in
found footage also suffers from the realism.
People talk like you would hear in the situation, which is never as
entertaining as typical movie dialogue.
One of the things that can really pull the audience into a movie is the
prose that is used within the dialogue.
Found footage movies can lean towards reducing dialogue to the minimum
amount of words to get a point across.
Names, directions, and yelling out feelings are some of the
minimums. They don’t add anything to
those components to make them interesting.
They leave them at the bare minimum and the product is uninteresting
because of it.
What is written above is a lot of rambling. I understand that. There is still one more part of found footage
filmmaking that needs to be covered.
This part is the ending. The
thing about found footage films is that the footage needs to be found. There needs to be a way for someone to
stumble upon the camera or the tapes and be able to edit it all together in a
way that could make a movie. As you
probably know, most found footage films are done in a first person
point-of-view. This means that someone
is holding a camera and filming the action.
Viewers of the movie are watching the footage captured through that
camera. I say most because there are
exceptions. Area 407 is not one of the
exceptions. The first person
point-of-view is used to bring the audience into the action with the
characters. It is supposed to make the
viewer feel like they are one of the people involved in the situation, rather
than someone witnessing the footage. It
leaves a question about how the footage was found though. In the majority of first person found footage
horror films, the characters all die by the end. How, then, does anyone get the footage out of
the dangerous location? In Area 407, how
does anyone find both cameras without being attacked by the monster? I’ve never seen an answer to a question of
this kind when it pertains to the horror films of this style. Movies are supposed to be about the ride and
not the destination, but the destination always leaves that question
behind. It’s a frequent destination that
should be accounted for but never is.
These aren’t all of the reasons that found footage films can
end up being some of the weaker films released.
There are definitely more that could be covered. That will come at another time. This post is long enough as it is. It has gone over a few of the bigger
components of found footage that, if done well, could make for a great movie,
but if done poorly, could make for disaster.
Between the accessibility for aspiring filmmakers, the realism that
tends to come along with the style, and the fact that the footage needs to be
found, there are many different ways in which these movies could fall
apart. Area 407 certainly fell
apart. There are good found footage
movies out there. There definitely
are. But it’s easy to fumble the style. It’s really damn easy.
There are a few notes to make before I finish up here:
- One of the actors in Area 407 was Jude Gerard Prest who directed Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes.
- Another found footage film I’ve covered is The Devil Inside.
- I’ve watched two parodies of found footage films for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were 30 Nightsof Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and A Haunted House.
- Area 407 was suggested by @Deggsy.
- If you have any movies you think I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can suggest them in the comments, or you could tell me on Twitter.