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Why Is The Found Footage Genre Still A Thing?

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Why is the found-footage genre still a thing? It’s almost like “fetch” at this point, filmmakers need to stop trying to make found-footage happen. It’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s friend on a plane, it’s dead tired. In all seriousness, I do still think there’s hope for the found-footage genre, but that kind of salvation can only come about when the people backing these films learn to remedy a few of the more problematic elements that have long plagued the genre.
One of the biggest red flags that I frequently notice in found-footage films are the characters. Unlike most other films, you, whether you like it or not, are intimately connected directly to these characters. That’s why I feel the genre has this massive untapped potential, it can…show more content…
When your film is riddled with characters like these, that’s when films stop being escapism and instead begin to closely resemble the very thing you wish to escape in the first place. I’m not saying remove all annoyances from your film, I’m saying maybe don’t make them the focal point of the entire picture.
Another problem with found-footage films is character development, or lack there of. I get it, it’s not easy to develop characters when you can only tell the story from their perspective, but it is possible. Thus far, these films have been giving their characters exaggerated personality traits in order to compensate for the one-sided perspective. The best found-footage films use situations to develop characters through the way they react to them, that’s something ‘Chronicle’ did immensly well. ‘Chronicle’ established its main character through the events that he endured on camera, being beaten by his step-dad, watching his mother slowly fade away, being bullied at school, it all culminated in what would come to be a very broken person. This film does use the bullying angle, but it explores the perspective of the bully without any sort of consequences, when you do that, it’s not character development, that’s aggravating. It’s almost the intention of the filmmakers, this film wants you to hate that character, which isn’t an uncommon technique in horror
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