A New Position for the Eye

I watched a lot of movies. Especially horror movies. I believe several essays from the blog show my fascination with horror.

And over the years this fascination evolved from general all-things-go horror to more specific areas. While in college I started looking for the most disturbing horror movies, but this search led nowhere. Most of the so-called “most disturbing movies ever made” I had already seen in the past, way before the age I was supposed to, and that desensitized me to a lot of things people considered disturbing or too much.

Titles like Martyrs or A Serbian Film became nothing more than another title in a list — or better said, another movie that tries to shock the audience with grotesque imagery. And this is a play that works for an untrained audience, the same trick a jump scare pulls. Works great at the beginning, but gets old fast. So I moved on.

But before I moved on, I tried to understand why these two mechanics fail. Because they do fail. And worse, I think they do the genre a disservice.

If we look at the beginning of horror, when special effects were in their infancy, audiences had never seen anything like a jump scare, and gore was still taboo. Films like Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari did an amazing job of shocking the audience of their time. As technology evolved, so did the audience’s tolerance. Psycho avoided gore and built horror through tension, and together with Peeping Tom gave rise to a new genre — the slasher. The Italians ran with it first: Bava’s giallo in the mid-60s, then Argento, all stylish killings and black-gloved murderers. That template crossed the Atlantic and hardened into the American slasher of the 70s — meaner villains, arguably dumber plots, and titles like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and John Carpenter’s Halloween. And the gore kept pace: effects artists like Tom Savini pushed practical splatter to a realism the screen hadn’t seen, turning the kill itself into the spectacle.

The jump scare evolved as well. Its origin sits even earlier than the gore. In 1922 Häxan gave cinema its first jump scare — a demon springing up behind a monk lost in his reading. No blood, no sound, just a thing appearing where it should not. Twenty years later Cat People turned that raw shock into a formula: build the tension, release it with a false alarm, then let the real threat come. The Lewton bus. Every cheap startle since has copied it. And moving into the 70s, the same slasher wave that sharpened the gore sharpened this too — a loud sting, a well-timed cut, the audience flinching on cue.

If we look past the 70s, the horror genre refined itself. Special effects dominated, making the gore and the jump scare more realistic and more effective. But this was not true innovation — it was refinement. And with refinement, the audience grew more and more acclimated to the recipes, so they, as I did, started searching for the extreme. And once there is a demand, there is a supply. More and more extreme movies were made — A Serbian Film, The Human Centipede, Guinea Pig, Lucifer Valentine’s vomit gore films, the August Underground franchise — all of them pushing toward the limit of what is acceptable. On the other hand, a small part of the audience got tired of the fakeness and searched for the thrill elsewhere. Gore sites provided the realness. People made mixtapes — so-called movies that are nothing but a compilation of the newest or the worst of what those sites had. And here we reach the never-ending discussion of the ethics of it, especially with compilations like MDPOPE, whose makers hide behind free speech while, in practice, only feeding the addiction a small number of people have for the real thing. The mixtapes are a dead end, but they are a diagnosis. The audience wasn’t asking for more blood — it was asking for less distance. Cinema had no answer for that yet. One subgenre found it.

But where can horror go from here? Are we actually stuck in a never-ending cycle of jump scare and gore improvements? Cosmic horror is hard to make and hard to understand. If we take Color Out of Space from 2019, we see the issue head-on. Lovecraft tried to describe a color never seen before, one that cannot be fully understood. The movie uses purple, because it is impossible to create a new unseen color — even if you consider tones of one color, for most people they are indistinguishable from the ones already seen.

This shows a deeper issue with horror cinema. It’s not about the topic or the trope — it’s about the limit of the vocabulary present in cinema. So what can horror cinema actually do to improve itself? Said simply: improve its language. But that’s a bigger task than anyone can envision, since improvements like those are rare, and they are what redefine cinema itself. An event like this happened in a very small subset of horror — the found footage genre. And it’s true we can trace it back to something like 1961’s The Connection, or 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust. But the subgenre was truly defined by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project.

Three people go into the woods with two cameras and never come out; what we watch is the footage they left behind. There is no crew. The actors held the cameras themselves, so every shot is bound to a hand that is tired, scared, or running. When someone trips, the frame hits the dirt. When something moves in the dark, the camera turns toward it too late and finds nothing. The witch is never shown. Not once. The horror is a sound outside the tent, a pile of stones that should not be there, a shape the lens keeps failing to catch. Blair Witch chooses never to show its threat — but that is a choice the format allows, not a rule it demands. Keep that in mind; it matters later.

What happens here? Two things that differ from conventional horror. One, there is no cameraman — the cameraman and the actor are the same person. Two, the scare is not explicit. There is no witch, no monster, no criminal. The tension and the mere implication of one create the horror.

Now, neither of these is mandatory for found footage. Look at REC, where the infected are shown, or Paranormal Activity, where a fixed CCTV is the camera. But there is one thing every found footage film has that normal horror does not. Proximity.

When a counselor is chased by Mrs. Voorhees, we watch as a third observer. The camera can be placed anywhere, and one question arises that breaks the immersion: why is the person holding it not involved? Same with the Saw films — you can never get involved enough, because there is always a lens filming everything from safety, an imaginary third observer that every member of the audience occupies. And the cinematic shots break it further. How can I be scared of a ghost when minutes earlier I was shown a nice panorama of the mountains?

This is where found footage excels. The immersion is not broken by anything. You watch the scene as the investigator, or as the character. Your point of view is the same as the one being chased, or the one who first found the footage. That proximity is what creates the horror. Gore can be part of it, jump scares can be part of it — but the mechanic that ties everything together is proximity.

Proximity is one core mechanic. Another is the ordinary. At first glance you might argue that more complexity makes a better film, but for found footage the opposite is often true. The format draws its power from looking unmade, and complexity is the mark of a made thing. The Fear Footage runs on long continuous shots — no elaborate cuts, no memorable transitions, nothing but raw bodycam-grade footage. Be My Cat gives us the point of view of the killer himself: Adrian Țofei is a real director, but the edit reflects his character far better than it reflects his craft, because he shot it guerrilla-style and assembled the story in post like a man sorting through his own evidence. Found footage has the advantage of real life — tragedy happens in private, unstaged, and it can happen to anybody.

But proximity has a cost. It is fragile in a way gore never is. Gore can only bore you; it cannot break. Proximity shatters the moment the camera stops making sense. Why is he still filming. Why didn’t she drop it and run. Why is the frame so steady while someone is dying in it. One question like that and you are thrown out of the scene, back into your chair, watching again instead of being there. And found footage falls harder than normal horror when it breaks, because it promised you were inside. This is the whole game. The good films protect the position — they give the camera a reason to keep rolling and never let you ask the question. The bad ones forget that the camera is a physical object with a frightened person attached to it.

Mixed media is where found footage does something no other horror can. A normal film is one object — you sit, it plays, it ends. Found footage can spread across forms. The premise gets seeded somewhere else first: a website, a missing-person post, a channel of clips, an account that behaves like a real person. By the time you reach the footage, you are not being introduced to a fiction. You are arriving at the end of something you already half-believe. And then the film does not betray that belief with a cinematic experience. It gives you exactly what the setup promised — the close, unmade footage. No orchestral swell, no crane shot, no reveal staged for your benefit. The other media built the reason for the camera to exist, and the film simply delivers on it.

Every other innovation changed what the camera shows. Found footage changed where the camera stands and who holds it. That is not a new word in cinema’s vocabulary — it is a change in its grammar. A new position for the eye, and through it, a new position for you.

And the same fact that gives it that power draws its only border. The camera has to be a real thing, held by a real hand inside the story. So it reaches anywhere a hand could hold a lens — and no further. A haunting in 1970 works; someone had a camcorder. A plague in 1348 does not, because no one stood in that street holding anything. Its strength and its limit are one fact: it can only take you where someone was already looking.

And maybe that is the whole point. In life it works the same way. The closer we stand to a thing, the more it costs us. Found footage is the only horror that puts you that close — not watching the event, but standing where it happened, holding the thing that saw it.