My first academic paper: Cine-Excess Conference 2014

On Friday I gave my first academic paper at the Cine-Excess conference at the University of Brighton. My paper was titled Shooting Backwoods: Footage Found in Rural Locations and was a part of the first panel of the weekend, titled Borders, Backwoods and Spatial States of Terror. I was joined by David Lerner, Sara Reininghaus and Stephen Curtis on this panel.

The theme of the whole conference this year was Are You Ready for the Country: Cult Cinema and Rural Excess. Seeing as I'm nearly four years through my part time PhD, I thought it about time I bit the bullet and tried to get myself talking at one of these conferences and as I'd been to Cine-Excess back in 2011 to meet Ruggero Deodato, I thought I'd give in an abstract and see if I got a response.

And I did! So here is the abstract. I'm doubt I'm supposed to publish the whole paper here but if Cine-Excess decide not to use it in their journal, then I will at a later date.

Shooting Backwoods: Footage Found in Rural Locations

What happens when Western filmmakers head off with their modern technology, into the woods and jungles of the world to record something more primitive and vicious than they could ever imagine? Films from Cannibal Holocaust (Deodato, 1980) to Willow Creek (Goldthwait, 2013) explore how supposedly civilised characters set out to film the unknown in rural spaces. Too late do the characters discover that they have become the subjects of their own audio visual documents as they are terrorised and finally disappear. The primal forces that attack them range from supernatural beings such as witches to savage tribal cannibals but all share an archaic relationship with the rural settings that they inhabit.

Found footage films have flooded the horror genre in recent years and despite the popularity of the suburban home settings of the Paranormal Activity (2007- date) franchise, many investigate ideas of culture clashes between the urban filmmakers and their rural subjects. Leading on from theoretical work surrounding Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999), I will analyse how the diegetic-camera-wielding characters and the foes they face in Welcome to the Jungle (Hensleigh, 2007), Trollhunter (Ovredal, 2010), Evidence (Howie Askins, 2011), and Willow Creek are dramatising contemporary anxieties over the failure of modern technologies (and Western youth) in tackling ‘primitive’ enemies. 

My findings will demonstrate that found footage films often take place in rural settings due to their central themes of control, dominance and superiority. The characters’ mastery of their technology is of little help to them when they are faced with the rural threats of the woods and jungles that they venture into. Exploring the aesthetic properties as well as the representation of youth, gender and race in these films will make this paper critical in furthering discourse on both the horror genre and more specifically the contemporary contextual relevance of found footage films.

 
More academic stuff from I Love That Film:

Referenced in a book on Found Footage Horror

Buy my book on The Blair Witch Project

My Blair Witch book just got a cover

Becoming a Found Footage Horror Expert: Media Interview

Alone With Her and Behind the Mask: Interesting Found Footage

The Lost Coast Tapes: Bigfoot Found Footage

The Making of The Blair Witch Project

Evidence of Good Found Footage

The Femme Castratrice in Horror

Evidence of Good Found Footage

It seems I swim through a lot of crap to get to some decent found footage horror these days. Evidence is I'm please to announce pretty damn good low budget horror. It starts off like a hundred others in the genre. Four friends are going for a camping trip and one of them wants to make a documentary. So far so blah blah blah. There's the requisite flash of boobs and a quick lesbian kiss to keep easily amused folk happy and then it starts descending into sub-Blair Witch arguments over why the cameraman is still filming and what are those noises in the night.

Some of the group want to go home, Ryan the budding documentary maker is getting just what he wants; some good footage of his friends freaking out for his documentary. They set up camp, drink, argue, spot a quick glimpse of a strange black creature and hear scary sounds while sitting round the campfire. Then predictably one goes missing. This is the point where so many found footage films fall apart with endless poorly lit scenes where you have little idea of what is going on except that people are running, screaming and scared. Their phones don't work, their RV is vandalised and they are stuck. Then another of their number goes missing and Evidence takes a wonderful turn towards the WTF!?

To say any more would be to spoil it but I actually found the rest of Evidence very enjoyable. The stuff before was ok and not nearly as annoying as other found footage examples. The latter parts still have a lot of running aimlessly and screaming but what it is the remaining characters are running and screaming from and about is brilliant. It's ludicrous of course but so was The Cabin in the Woods and that's vaguely what this reminded me of. It throws everything at the screen and looks pretty great despite the low budget. The characters lose out in all the running and its a shame that the found footage format suffers because so much time is spent not seeing the characters' faces or giving them a chance to breathe.

On the other hand this gets very exciting and kept me guessing what the hell was going on right till the very end. As usual  for found footage it barely fills its 75 minute running time but it is inventive, a little scary and completely bonkers. I recommend seeking out Evidence if you're a fan of this sort of thing. I even hope they make a sequel.

Check out the trailer:

The Death of Found Footage? Looking at Lovely Molly

In my continuing quest to see every damn bit of found footage horror that exists, I have subjected myself to another pair today, Lovely Molly and Evidence. Lovely Molly is the return to found footage horror of one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project, Eduardo Sanchez. Like REC 3 and End of Watch it goes down the route of only using found footage when it feels like it rather than constantly. I keep wondering if this is the death of found footage or merely an adaptation that will keep the sub-genre alive and kicking.

With other genres dabbling in found footage from End of Watch to Chronicle and Project X, and REC 3 deciding to kill its camera operator off in the first 20 minutes of the film, it feels like the stale stuff is being kicked aside and the found footage technique is being rediscovered in a way.

Lovely Molly has a protagonist who uses a video camera to capture what she is seeing when things start going bump in the night. It opens with our heroine Molly apologising to camera and trying to kill herself. It then flashes back to video footage of her wedding and then the diegetic camera device is used sparingly throughout. Molly often films things and we see her footage but much of the film is cinematic and ditches the technique. It works well switching between devices but the video camera scenes are slightly redundant.

Molly is one mixed up Mrs it seems and what she is seeing is not exactly what we are all seeing. Her husband Tim bares the brunt of her strange behaviour and the film has some deeply disturbing ideas. It's never too scary but as a study of a woman dinsintegrating when she should be enjoying newlywed bliss, it is pretty horrible. The insinuations of what is going on with Molly and why are pretty nasty and its a shame its not handled a little more sympathetically. But then again this is horror and its supposed to be scary not too sympathetic.

Its a shame it doesn't build to a bit of a bigger climax and the very ending is all a bit Paranormal Activity inspired for my liking. However it shows that Eduardo Sanchez still has a future in horror and his upcoming slate includes a slot in VHS sequel S-VHS and another found footage horror about Bigfoot called Exists.

So I guess that means its definitely not the death of found footage just yet then.

Here's the trailer: