Alone With Her and Behind the Mask: Interesting Found Footage

I'm currently working every spare second on my PhD thesis on found footage movies and after finishing most of the research side of things over the last two and a half years, I'm now fully moving into some hard core analysis.

First up I'm aiming to complete a chapter on the priming techniques that found footage films use to get audiences prepared for their unique viewing experiences. This has meant watching and analysing the opening scenes of my focus films (which I've narrowed down to about 20 films).

In the process, I re-watched the openings of two films that I thought deserved a mention as I'm sure not many people have seen them and I think they are very interesting examples on the fringe of the found footage sub-genre.

Alone With Her stars Colin Hanks as a stalker that uses high tech but affordable consumer gadgetry to spy on a beautiful girl he has become obsessed with. It's a really creepy and well made thriller, all shot from the perspective of Hanks' character's secret cameras and audio recording devices. Check out the trailer below. It doesn't really do it justice but you get the idea. With this and Dexter series 6, Colin Hanks is making a nice little name for himself as deranged and seedy madmen.



The other film is Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon which features a documentary crew trying to find out what makes a perfectly amiable slasher villain tick. It's great for fans of the slasher genre but also I think anyone who doesn't like slasher films could really enjoy this too as it parodies a lot of the conventions. It's really funny and you can watch the whole film here:



I know the found footage sub-genre gets a lot of flack being poorly shot and unoriginal but I think these two films at least strive for something a bit different and work pretty well. Let me know what you think if you give them a try. Back to analysis for me now!