🔗 Share this article

Following the significant found-footage horror boom of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't disappear but rather evolved into different styles. Viewers saw the emergence of computer-screen films, freshly stylized interpretations of the found-footage concept, and ambitious single-shot films largely taking over the screens where unsteady footage and improbably dogged camera operators once reigned.

One major exception to this trend is the continuing V/H/S series, a horror anthology that created its own surge in brief scary films and has kept the first-person vision alive through multiple themed installments. The eighth in the franchise, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, features several shorts that all occur around Halloween, connected with a wrapper story (“Diet Phantasma”) that involves a completely detached scientist conducting a set of product experiments on a soda drink that kills the people sampling it in a variety of messy, extreme ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s global debut at the 2025 version of Austin’s Fantastic Fest, all seven V/H/S Halloween directors assembled for a post-screening Q&A where filmmaker Anna Zlokovic described first-person scary movies as “extremely difficult to shoot.” Her fellow filmmakers cheered in response. The directors later discussed why they believe shooting a found-footage project is tougher — or in some instances, easier! — than making a traditional scary film.

This interview has been condensed for concision and understanding.

Why Is Found-Footage Horror So Challenging to Shoot?

Micheline Pitt, co-director of “Home Haunt”: In my view the biggest aspect as an artist is being limited by your creative ideas, because everything has to be justified by the person operating the camera. So I believe that's the part that's hard as fuck for me, is to distance myself from my imagination and my ideas, and needing to remain in a box.

Alex Ross Perry, director of “Kidprint”: I actually mentioned to her this last night — I concur with that, but I also disagree with it strongly in a particular way, because I greatly enjoy an unrestricted environment that's 360 degrees. I found this to be so freeing, because the blocking and the filming are the same. In traditional filmmaking, the positioning and the shots are diametrically opposed.

If the actor has to look left, the camera angle has to face right. And the reality that once you block the scene [in a found-footage movie], you have determined your coverage — that was so remarkable to me. I've seen numerous found-footage films, but until you film your first shaky-cam movie… Day one, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you understand where the person moves, that's the coverage — the lens doesn't move left when the character goes right, the lens moves forward when the person moves forward. You shoot the sequence one time, and that's all — we don't have to get his line. It progresses in one direction, it reaches the conclusion, and then we move in the following path. As a frustrated narrative filmmaker, who hasn't shot a standard multi-angle shot in years, I was like, "This is great, this limitation proves freeing, because you only have to determine the identical element one time."

A third director, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: I think the hard part is the audience's acceptance for the viewers. Everything has to appear authentic. The sound has to seem like it's actually happening. The performances have to appear believable. If you have something like an grown man in a nappy, how do you sell that as plausible? It's absurd, but you have to create the sense like it exists in the world properly. I found that to be challenging — you can lose the audience easily at any moment. It just takes one fuck-up.

Bryan M. Ferguson, creator of “Diet Phantasma”: I concur with Alex — as soon as you get the blocking down, it's great. But when you've got numerous physical effects happening at one time, and ensuring you're capturing it and not fucking up, and then preparation attempts — you only get a certain amount of opportunities to get all these things correctly.

The filming location had a large barrier in the path, and you couldn't hear anybody. Alex's [shoot] seems like great fun. Our project was extremely difficult. We had only 72 hours to complete it. It is freeing, because with first-person filming, you can take certain liberties. Although you do fuck it up, it was going to look like low-quality regardless, because you're putting filters on it, or you're employing a garbage camera. So it's beneficial and it's bad.

R.H. Norman, co-director of “Home Haunt”: I would say establishing pace is very challenging if you're shooting primarily oners. Our approach was, "OK, this was edited in camera. There's this guy, the dad, and he operates the camera, and that creates our edits." That entailed a lot of fake oners. But you must be present. You really have to see exactly how your scene appears, because what is captured by the camera, and in some instances, there's no editing solution.

We knew we had only a few attempts for each scene, because our film was very ambitious. We attempted to concentrate on finding varying paces between the takes, because we didn't know what we were would achieve in post-production. And the true difficulty with found footage is, you're having to hide those edits on moving fog, on various elements, and you really never know where those edits are going to live, and whether they're will undermine your whole enterprise of attempting to create like a fluid first-person camera moving through a realistic environment.

The director: You want to avoid trying to hide it with digital errors as much as you can, but you must sometimes, because the shit's hard.

Norman: In fact, she's right. This is easy. Just glitch the shit out of it.

Another filmmaker, director of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the most challenging thing is convincing the viewers accept the characters using the camera would continue, instead of fleeing. That’s also the key thing. There are some first-person scenarios where I just cannot accept the characters would keep filming.

And I think the device should always arrive late to any event, because that occurs in real life. For me, the magic is destroyed if the device is positioned beforehand, expecting something to occur. If you are present, filming, and you hear a noise and pan toward it, that sound is no longer there. And I think that gives a feeling of truth that it's crucial to maintain.

What's the One Scene in Your Movie That You're Most Satisfied With?

Perry: Our character seated at a four-monitor deck of video editing, with four different videos running at the same time. That's all analog. We shot those clips days earlier. Then the editor processed them, and then we loaded them on four computers connected to several screens.

That shot of the person positioned there with four different videotapes running — I was like, 'That is the image I envisioned out of this film.' If it was the sole image I saw of this film, I would be starting it right now: 'This looks cool!' But it was more difficult than it appears, because it's like multiple crew members activating playback at the identical moment. It looks so simple, but it took three days of preparation to get to that shot.