Blair Witch Returns to the Woods of Burkittsville
This decades-late sequel to The Blair Witch Project demonstrates director Adam Wingard’s talent behind the camera …along with his reluctance to innovate.
Every Cut is a Lie: M. Night Shyamalan, Found Footage and The Visit
Not long after M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense opened in 1999, my parents dragged my brother along to the theatre to watch it because “we had to see it.” They’d seen it already, of course, and I suspect their second visit was as much motivated by analysing the construction of the film’s famous twist as…
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)
The Marked Ones is the fifth Paranormal Activity film, the latest in a series that’s seemingly unstoppable. The reason for the series’ longevity isn’t complicated; people (especially teenagers) love to be scared. These films are primarily a vehicle for frightening its audience, and The Marked Ones is very much in that tradition. It eschews the…
The Bay (2012)
The Bay isn’t the best found footage film of 2012 – that was Chronicle, which told its fairly standard teen superhero story by pushing the boundaries of the genre – but unlike Chronicle, The Bay plays fair. The context is an environmental-horror tale of a small town decimated by an (initially) unknown pathogen, framed as…
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