Submitted my Found Footage Horror PhD Thesis Today

After 5 years of part-time studying; countless hours of sitting in libraries and reading (188 sources cited), writing, re-writing and more re-writing and watching and analysing about 20 films again and again and again, I submitted my PHD thesis today. It is 292 pages and 99,543 words long. 

Now I've just got to get through the viva exam around Easter time, and then hopefully get the thesis published as a book, and hopefully get a lecturing job out of it now! Thanks to everyone who has been in any way supportive over the last 5 years. It's been awesome and I'm going to miss it.

As I'm now in a navel-gazing kind of mood, here's a look back at some of the highs and lows of the past 5 years, as I have attempted to complete this thesis, watched a lot of awful films (and some really good ones too) and got a short book on The Blair Witch Project published at the same time!

Reviews of my book on The Blair Witch Project

My first academic paper: Cine-Excess Conference 2014

Referenced in a book on Found Footage Horror

My Blair Witch book just got a cover

Becoming a Found Footage Horror Expert: Media Interview

The Making of The Blair Witch Project

Blair Witch Book Just Got Really Real

Evidence of Good Found Footage

Alone With Her and Behind the Mask: Interesting Found Footage

Scraping the Bottom of the Found Footage Barrel

Found Footage PhD Update

Characters With Cameras

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

Referenced in a book on Found Footage Horror

Yesterday I discovered that an article of mine has been referenced in the book Found Footage Horror Films by Alex Heller-Nicholas @FoundHorror. I bought this book last week as it sounds perfect for my PHD thesis and when I was looking through the bibliography, much to my surprise I saw this!

You can read the article here entitled Zero Day and Cloverfield: Shooting America's Scars here:

Blair Witch Book Just Got Really Real

For the past four and a half months, I've been hard at work on writing my first book to be published by Auteur in their Devil's Advocate series on classic horror films. My entry in this series will be on The Blair Witch Project and though I've been writing it for four and half months and already long ago signed a contract saying when I should be delivering the manuscript, it suddenly just got very real to me the other day.

For Christmas I asked for the Devil's Advocate book on Saw by Benjamin Poole so I could get a better sense of the writing style of this series of books and the kinds of things they cover. Not only was it an excellent book but it also filled me with new respect for the film and a renewed determination to do The Blair Witch Project justice with my own book. Also my old Film Studies teacher Ian Cooper from Amersham and Wycombe College and the guy who made me think being a teacher might be fun and even more so, made me fall in love with the subject has also written a book in this series on Witchfinder General.

Anyway after reading and loving the Saw one, I thought I'd buy James Rose's Devil's Advocate book on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. James Rose is a writer who is constantly in Media Magazine, another publication I write for and his articles always interest me as I suspect we have similar taste in movies and interests. So I opened up my copy of the Texas Chain Saw book and what did I see as soon as I flipped over the first page? You'll have to excuse the crappy photo from my phone but yes that is my name under the heading Forthcoming. I got very excited. This makes it just that extra bit real.

Now I just have to finish writing the damn thing, then redraft it until its properly ready and then wait for it to be put together and published in a beautiful way. I can't wait to see what image gets used for the cover. Hopefully then it obviously sells millions and millions of copies, becomes a phenomenon like the film itself and makes me hugely rich so I can retire to a private island and just write about films for the rest of my life!

Becoming a Found Footage Horror Expert: Media Interview

Have you ever been interviewed for TV or radio? I've done a couple of bits and pieces in the past but never have I been called as an expert to discuss something that I am supposed to know a lot about. As part of my training for my PhD on found footage horror movies, Oxford Brookes University put on a media training workshop.

The idea of the workshop is to prepare academic students for being approached by the media and specifically journalists looking for an expert on a particular subject. We had to consider what exactly about our research might make an interesting story and what specific aspects of our findings would interest journalists.

Usually in these training workshops I sit very silently at the back, hoping that no one will ask me what my research is on. Usually the other PhD students in attendance are doing amazing research that will no doubt help the world in some huge and brilliant way. Then there's me and I have to talk about found footage movies. It gets a bit embarrassing when people are doing such incredible research into things that really really matter and could change lives. I usually come away feeling a bit depressed and useless.

The other thing I find very difficult is talking in an academic way, using all the fancy language and articulating my thoughts in a professional and intelligent way. I'm much better at writing than talking but I'm not a natural academic that's for sure!

But in this session run by Tim and Lily from media players international, we were encouraged to not use overly complex and detailed language and to be able to speak simply and plainly about our research. The idea is that we are communicating with a mass audience who know next to nothing about what we are talking about and we have to simplify and explain and keep to the point of the story.

We got loads of great tips from Tim and Lily and the whole day culminated in a couple of mock interviews. Lily had prepared questions to ask me as if she was a journalist interested in my studies. They were very interesting questions and she's clearly done her research which made the interviews really fun!

I'm not even going to go in to how much I hate the silly facial expressions I pull but overall I think I did ok at talking about my research in a very basic and easy to understand and (hopefully) vaguely interesting way. Please give them a watch and let me know what you think! Please be gentle though!

The Lost Coast Tapes: Bigfoot Found Footage

My quest to seek out good examples of found footage horror continues with The Lost Coast Tapes. Ahead of Blair Witch director Eduardo Sanchez's return to found footage with Bigfoot movie Exists come this surprisingly good effort to make the Bigfoot myth scary again.

The Lost Coast Tape, like so many other found footage films is short but at over 80 mins, it's longer than most I've seen. What is most important about The Lost Coast Tapes is that, for a change, it does not outstay its welcome. Found footage films can too often become running around shaking a camera in the dark way too early and they quickly descend into virtually incomprehensible repetitive nonsense.

However The Lost Coast Tapes takes a while setting up some amusing characters and an intriguing premise. A disgraced investigative journalist and his team head out to Bigfoot territory to interview a man who claims to have dead body of a Bigfoot in his possession. The cynical team are quite comical, particularly in their amusing banter with the serious stern Drybeck, the man who claims to have evidence of the monster's existence.

The entire cast are excellent in their roles, the camera work is far from the annoying mess of many other found footage films and the script and story maintain interest and suspense for almost the entire running time. It all ends with an added layer of mystery and the potential for an interesting twist but like with so many others of these films, it leaves the audience completely unaware of exactly what happens at the end. It will be unsatisfying to many and fails to match the abrupt, bleak ending of classics such as Blair Witch and Cloverfield.

The Lost Coast Tapes if far from terrible though and much better than the likes of Tape 407, Monster, Atrocious and many others. Its sense of humour is its real strength, making the ride worth taking with the amusing characters. The highlight is the black guy's reaction early on when asked if he wants to come on the trip to the woods to go looking for Bigfoot. It's nice when these kind of films don't take themselves too seriously sometimes. Give it a watch if you like this sort of thing!

Below is the trailer:

The Making of The Blair Witch Project

For my upcoming book on The Blair Witch Project, commissioned for the Auteur Devil's Advocate series on classic horror films, I am currently writing a chapter on the production of the film. It's likely a story you have heard a thousand times before but I've been completely immersing myself in research for the last couple of weeks and finding out more all the time.

The directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick took what they called a 'method directing' approach. The level of improvisation they demanded from their actors Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams is astounding. The torment, anxiety and discomfort the cast went through while shooting the film is now legendary.

It's got me thinking how many of these Blair Witch imitators these days actually try to achieve a similar effect. Blair Witch was all shot by the stars. I'm sure this is not the case with most other found footage films. I know for a fact films like REC and Cloverfield did not use this technique.

Is this why Blair Witch was so successful? Is the realism created by the production process the reason for its phenomenal success or was it more a case of being the first on the scene to try the found footage thing since Cannibal Holocaust?

I'm reading some fascinating interviews with the stars of Blair Witch in which they go into great detail about what happened on the grueling shoot of the film. To me, it is absolutely fascinating stuff. It's the kind of film I wished I'd made, not just because it made a ton of money but because I love the idea of totally immersing your actors in an experience and making them improvise. The stimulus that the directors provided should have made 'acting' an easier task for the cast. Not having to wait hours for the camera and lighting departments to set up must have been a dream come true for the actors too.

I don't want to reveal all the details of what is in the chapter but suffice to say it's looking like it will be around 5000 words and if you think you know the full story of the making of The Blair Witch Project, then I assure you that it is unlikely you do. I hope you might buy the book when it gets published, hopefully maybe by the end of this year or early 2014!

10 Things I'd Rather be Doing than Marking

It's the first day of half term and I've got a shed load of marking to do so here's 10 things I'd rather be doing:

1. Watching Django Unchained before the Oscars on Sunday

2. Watching Zero Dark Thirty, another best picture nominee I need to see

3. Watching Lincoln, because I haven't seen this best picture nominee either

4. Watching more episodes of The Walking Dead Series 2 which I started last night by watching the first two episodes

5. Finishing my review of Stoker for Filmoria which I saw the other day

6. Writing the second chapter of my thesis on how found footage films prime the spectator for their distinctive viewing experiences

7. Writing the second chapter of my book on The Blair Witch Project all about the aesthetics and how they impact the viewing experience

8. Reading the rest of The Hobbit which I started at the beginning of this year but have only managed to get up to chapter 6 so far

9. Reading the latest issue of Total Film that looks packed full of good stuff as usual

10. Getting a much needed haircut

What would you rather be doing than working today?

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:

Personal Highlights of 2012

2012 was an incredible year for me. Basically a big part of starting this blog was to share some of the cool film related things I had been doing. I was desperate to tell anyone and everyone that I got to ask Danny Boyle a question at a 127 Hours screening organised by Lovefilm at the end of 2010. Since then things have gotten better and better and although I may not be getting paid for my efforts yet, I am living the dream of what I have always wanted to do, writing constantly about films!

My 2011 was very exciting filled with highlights like these but 2012 was even better and below are links to posts about some of the highlights of my year. With 2013 starting with having a chat with Denzel Washington and Robert Zemeckis on the red carpet of the Flight premiere for my Filmoria premiere report, I hope that things are going to get even more exciting as the year goes on so please join me on the adventure!

If anyone reading this hates those self-indulgent blog posts where people look at their successes or cannibalize their own work instead of writing something new and original then please look no further. This is as much for me as it is for anyone who reads this. I feel like looking back into the past to see how far I've come this year and this will be my hopefully permanent record of what has been achieved.

Anyway here are the highlights of 2012:

Taking my college media students to New York got me all excited and prompted this post on my favourite New York movies.

Two articles published in Media Magazine.

Made it through my first year of blogging in March.

An independent film called One by One that I worked a lot on got a trailer.

In May I got to sit down and have a chat with legendary Oscar winning production designer of Titanic, Peter Lamont.

Andina at Inspired Ground invited me to write my first ever guest post on her blog. I chose to write about Fight Club as the film that changed my life. 

I finally got the scope and aims of my PhD thesis on found footage horror sorted.

My first ever article for Splice Cinema Journal on Documentaries and star directors was published in June.

Write my first article for Filmoria on the use of The Pixies Where is My Mind? at the end of Fight Club. Here is the full article. Had no idea that Filmoria would provide me with such amazing opportunities in the future!

Director of Storage 24, Johannes Roberts came to my college to give a brilliant talk to our students in June.

David Jackson wrote his first post for this blog on why he loves Aliens, the first time I've had a guest writer!

Wrote my first piece for Boolean Flix on Finding the Fun in Found Footage

In July I got married to the love of my life and went on the best honeymoon to Costa Rica anyone could ever ask for.

Got a letter published in Empire Magazine

Had my first article published on Static Mass Emporium on the director Michael Moore. This was the beginning of another great writing adventure and opportunity to work with more talented writers.

Filmoria sent me to interview the directors of Untouchable, Olivier Nackache and Eric Toledano. I had to rush out and buy a recording device that has become an essential tool in my work for Filmoria! It was a nerve wracking but incredible experience.

Took part in my first of many From the Red Carpet film clubs for the film Premium Rush.

Filmoria sent me to a gala screening of Paranormal Activity 4 where I got to interview actress Katie Featherstone.
 
Got a letter published in the 200th edition of Total Film.

I had my radio debut on Amazing Radio talking movies with Ruth Barnes on her breakfast show in November. You can listen to my second appearance here.

I love stats so was very happy for I Love That Film to hit 100,000 page views in December!

Had my second article on Will Ferrell's sports movies published in Splice Cinema Journal.

I decided to keep a record of all my writing at other sites. So here's links to all my Static Mass Emporium writing, Filmoria news, interviews and reviews.

Finally here are the top ten films I watched in 2012.

This year I intend to continue taking all the opportunities I can get and seeking out more ways to get paid for doing what I love. I hope that you will continue to stick with me.

What were your 2012 highlights?

Found Footage PhD Update

Been a bit quiet on the blogging front and that's because for the last week I've been working on clarifying what my thesis is actually aiming to do.  It's taken me eight drafts to get this right.  I won't bore you with the details but for anyone who is interested.  This is the nuts and bolts of what I've been researching for the last year and a half and what I will be working on for the next three and half years:

Identification, Self-Consciousness and Proof in the ‘First-Person’ Contemporary Horror Film 

 My investigation will focus on the use of the mock-documentary format in contemporary horror cinema, and more specifically on those films such as The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999), Paranormal Activity (Peli, 2007) and Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008) that create the impression of a character within the film being in control of the camera. It is my aim to analyse the aesthetic, technological and perceptual elements of these films in order to:

 

• Ascertain all the key influences on the body of films studied here as concerns production, reception and aesthetics
• Establish who or what the audience is encouraged to identify with when viewing the films and why this identification occurs
• Establish the aesthetic, technological and psychological means by which the audience is primed for the viewing experience of these films
• Ascertain how the level of self-consciousness (e.g. the characters’ awareness that they are being filmed) impacts on the viewing experience and thought processes of the viewer 
• Determine how video recording technology is used as a method to gain proof and often fails in the task of collecting evidence of the supernatural by the characters in the film 

 So that's it bascially.  That's what I'm spending five years of my life and a shitload of money on.  If anyone does have an interest in seriously academic analysis, I will try and do the occasional update on this but I can completely understand if you think this sounds desperately boring and pretentious.  And if so, my humble apologies!



Meanwhile in completely unrelated news, have you seen the Skyfall teaser?


   

What do you reckon, best Bond ever?  Well until Nolan grabs the reins (fingers crossed)!