🔗 Share this article

Following the massive found-footage horror surge of the 2000s inspired by The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't disappear but rather evolved into different styles. Audiences witnessed the rise of “screenlife” movies, freshly stylized interpretations of the first-person perspective, and showy one-take movies largely taking over the cinemas where unsteady footage and unbelievably persistent camera operators once reigned.

One significant exception to this trend is the continuing V/H/S franchise, a scary-story collection that created its own surge in short-form horror and has maintained the first-person vision active through multiple themed installments. The eighth in the series, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, features five shorts that all occur around Halloween, connected with a wrapper story (“Diet Phantasma”) that follows a brutally disengaged researcher 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, each of the V/H/S Halloween filmmakers assembled for a post-screening Q&A where filmmaker Anna Zlokovic characterized found-footage horror as “hard as fuck to shoot.” Her fellow filmmakers applauded in reply. They later explained why they believe filming a first-person film is tougher — or in some instances, simpler! — 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 thing as an artist is being limited by your artistic vision, because everything has to be motivated by the character holding the camera. So I think that's the part that's hard as fuck for me, is to separate myself from my imagination and my concepts, and having to stay in a confined space.

Another director, filmmaker of “Kidprint”: I actually told her this last night — I concur with that, but I also disagree with it vehemently in a very specific way, because I really love an open set that's all-around. I discovered this to be so liberating, because the movement and the coverage are the identical. In traditional filmmaking, the positioning and the coverage are diametrically opposed.

If the character has to turn left, the camera angle has to look right. And the reality that once you set up the action [in a found-footage movie], you have determined your coverage — that was so remarkable to me. I've seen numerous first-person movies, but until you film your initial found-footage project… Day one, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you understand where the person goes, that's the coverage — the camera doesn't shift left when the actor moves right, the camera advances when the character moves forward. You film the scene one time, and that's it — we avoid capture individual dialogues. It progresses in a single path, it arrives at the end, and now we proceed in the following path. As a frustrated narrative filmmaker, avoiding a traditional-coverage scene in a long time, I was like, "This is cool, this limitation actually is freeing, because you only have to determine the same thing one time."

Anna Zlokovic, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: In my opinion the difficult aspect is the suspension of disbelief for the audience. Each detail has to appear authentic. The sound has to seem like it's genuinely occurring. The performances have to feel grounded. If you have something like an adult man in a nappy, how do you sell that as realistic? It's ridiculous, but you have to create the sense like it exists in the world correctly. I found that to be difficult — you can lose the audience easily at any moment. It only requires one fuck-up.

Bryan M. Ferguson, creator of “Diet Phantasma”: I agree with Alex — as soon as you finalize the movement, it's excellent. But when you've got so many practical effects occurring at the same time, and ensuring you're panning onto it and not fucking up, and then setup takes — you have a limited number of time to get all these things correctly.

Our set had a big wall in the way, and you were unable to hear anyone. Alex's [shoot] seems like very enjoyable. Our project was extremely difficult. I only had three days to do it. It can be freeing, because with found footage, you can make some allowances. Even if you make a mistake, it was destined to appear like low-quality anyway, because you're putting filters on it, or you're employing a garbage camera. So it's beneficial and it's challenging.

R.H. Norman, co-director of “Home Haunt”: I would say finding rhythm is very challenging if you're shooting primarily oners. Our approach was, "OK, this was filmed continuously. We have a character, the dad, and he operates the camera, and that creates our edits." That required a many fake oners. But you must live in the moment. You need to observe precisely your scene feels, because what is captured by the lens, and in some instances, there's no editing solution.

We knew we had only a few takes per shot, because ours was very ambitious. We really tried to focus on discovering varying paces between the takes, because we didn't know what we were going to get in post-production. And the true difficulty with first-person filming is, you're needing to conceal those cuts on shifting mist, on all sorts of stuff, and you cannot predict where those cuts are going to live, and whether they're going to betray your entire project of attempting to create like a fluid first-person camera moving through a three-dimensional space.

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.

Her colleague: In fact, she is correct. This is easy. Simply add glitches the content out of it.

Paco Plaza, director of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the biggest aspect is making the viewers accept the characters operating the device would persist, instead of fleeing. That’s additionally the most important thing. There are certain found-footage fields where I simply don't believe the characters would continue recording.

And I think the device should always arrive late to whatever's happening, because that happens in reality. For me, the magic is destroyed if the camera is already there, anticipating something to happen. If you are here, filming, and you detect a sound and turn the camera, that sound is no longer there. And I think that gives a sense of authenticity that it's very important to maintain.

What's the One Scene in Your Movie That You're Proudest Of?

One director: Our character seated at a four-monitor deck of video editing, with multiple clips running at the same time. That's all analog. We filmed those videos days earlier. Then the editing team processed them, and then we put them on multiple devices hooked up to four monitors.

That frame of the character positioned there with four different videotapes playing — I was like, 'This is the visual I wanted out of this film.' If it was the sole image I saw of this film, I would be starting it right now: 'This appears interesting!' But it was harder than it looks, because it's like four different art people activating playback at the same time. It appears straightforward, but it took three days of planning to achieve that shot.