Are the conventions of realism able to be productively deployed with those of genre?

Since the start of film, there have been many realist film movements, with some of the most prevalent ones being Italian Neorealism and Dogme 95’. With almost all of the movements, the films made following them fit into specific genres, (i.e. ‘Kitchen Sink’ films and the comedy-drama genre, and New Iranian Cinema with Drama), and also making similar statements within their movements, which are mostly political based. Today however, there is no specific movement, with most realist films being able to adhere to movements in the past for example; Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy & Lucy (2008) for Italian Neorealism. A lot of the key traits from previous realist movements are being pulled together and used to make fictional subjects in the physical world, real in the film world - examples of this would include the use of monsters, or beings having special powers.

In the horror genre particularly a lot of their films have been based around real people and real stories, most famous ones including Ed Gein inspiring Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Having being constructed around real happenings, it would give audiences reasons to believe that the films were more credible than others since part of it is truth. In a lot of films nowadays, title cards are used in the beginning of the films to let audiences know that it is based on a true story. The reason why horror films like using this technique is on the belief that audiences would overall find the film scarier if they knew it was partly real or at least felt real to them, and since horror films are made to scare, they’re upping their chances of their film being a success.

One technique that the horror genre has recently capitalised on is by making their film seem like it is found footage. The film is seen through the camera lens that the characters are using, and the footage is presented as if someone discovered their recordings. The first film to use this technique was Ruggero Deodata’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), in which a documentary crew travel to the Amazon to film a cannibal tribe. The film was a success, and even though it was entirely fiction, Deodata was arrested as police thought that some of the characters were actually killed on screen. Since the film, there were a couple of small releases that used the handheld camera method, but it wasn’t until Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1990) did the technique really take off. In a news article from 1999, journalist Akin Ojumu stated that mock documentaries have developed into its own genre, thanks to the success of The Blair Witch Project. In the years after its release, there were only 1 or 2 films of this new genre being released - until 2007 when Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007) came out. It kick-started the genre again throwing it into the media spotlight and it is now known as found footage films.

In both The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, the way in which they were made was very similar. The directors took a step back and allowed both casts to improvise the entire film. Sanchez and Myrick for The Blair Witch Project took the cast to their location and literally let them run free in the forest for eight straight days. The directors left them occasional notes in the forest with plot points for them to follow and sometimes shook their tent at night to really scare them as they thought they were alone. In Paranormal Activity however, the two characters weren’t left completely alone, but did improvise the entire script with Peli only giving short instructions on what he wanted to see in the coming scenes. By method acting in the two films, it allowed the actors to give a more credible performance as the fearful reactions on camera were actually their real reactions in the physical world, and their characters in the film were essentially just the actors in real life.

Alike with Italian Neorealism, the two films share a lot of the same characteristics as the movement. The most prominent are that all of the actors are amateurs; they hadn’t done any other acting work before the film and were not known at the time either. By doing this, audiences wouldn’t recognise their faces and automatically recall other films they were in, making the film seem less real to them. Being fresh in their minds, it was entirely possible that the film’s plot could in fact be real, as the ‘actors’ were not previously known as them. Alongside this, in both films the main characters all have the same names as the actors playing them. When audiences search online about the films or see information about it, having the same names would also increase the plausibility of the film.

To take things a step further, both films used different approaches to making them seem more realistic to audiences. In Paranormal Activity, there were no opening or closing credits and not even Paramount’s logo which is unusual for a film to have. The reason for this is so that it doesn’t look like anyone created the film, except for the characters in it. With The Blair Witch Project, the filmmakers decided to make the actors literally disappear to add to the authenticity of the film’s plot. The actor’s IMDB pages had them listed as ‘missing, presumed dead’, and there were missing persons posters being given out at film festivals. This part of their marketing campaign worked so well, the lead actress’s mother received sympathy cards from friends and family who believed that the film was real. 

As well as using the actors for realism in the films, they use real locations, and ones in which audiences would associate everyday life with. Paranormal Activity is exclusively set in the house owned by the two main characters (which was also the house Peli owned and lived in at the time to keep costs down). By setting it all in a house would ignite the viewer’s everyday fears that somewhere so personal could be haunted. The Blair Witch Project is almost entirely set in a forest, which isn’t as everyday as the former, but it is somewhere that everyone knows about and has probably visited sometime in their lives. By using locations that are natural to most, their fears would be heightened as it would be a familiar feeling to them. Also, the two locations used both allow a deep focus because of the camera equipment they were using, and the fact that most of the time they weren’t focusing on anything in particular. This lets the audience see everything in the shot and how it would have been in the film’s universe, as they haven’t focused away from anything they want to hide.

As the characters in both films are using the camera equipment within the film’s universe and the characters aren’t trained to use them, nor do they come from a film background, there is a lot of room for error and imperfections. Both films use this to their advantage though – as well as the obvious fact that untrained non-professionals would be able to correctly use their equipment perfectly all of the time, especially when under threat as they are in the films, they are able to imply that someone, or something else is with them. Take The Blair Witch Project for example, the cameras that they are using are their eyes, if they see something, turn around and run away, the audience only gets to see what they see as they won’t be holding the camera backwards to get a perfect shot whilst running away from it. It allows the characters to imply that what they saw was much, much scarier than it actually was. The ambiguity and uncertainty of it all would allow the viewers to try and decipher what just happened in their head. In a journal about how the film was made, Scott Dixon McDowell writes “I can think of no other film that prompts the viewer to anxiously search the periphery of the screen for a glimpse of something that simply is not there” (McDowell, 2001). Since the viewers haven’t actually seen any kind of supernatural being, they would just assume that if the characters reacted like they saw something, then there would definitely be something there, and they would want to know what it was. Vivien Sobchack describes this feeling in his book Screening Space “A great deal of our rising curve of excitation is based in a cinematic teasing of our desire to see everything in one uncut long shot” (Sobchack, 1997). With Paranormal Activity, it is exactly the same, but most of the cameras in this film are static, so when a character sees something off screen or goes out of shot – that’s it for the viewers, they are left to just try and work out what’s happening.

When it comes to the editing of both films, they have both clearly been edited since all of their cameras would have been rolling 24 hours a day, and the films are only just under 90 minutes each. Audiences could either think two things about this, either that the shots that have made the final cut of the film were added into it because it would strengthen the plot and something significant happens, or that the films are being presented as if they were a real, unedited documentaries where the characters had actually turned off the cameras a lot. Out of the two options, the latter seems a lot more realistic, and it would explain the numerous shots that are blurry as it is showing everything that they recorded. Since the films are part of the horror genre, their ultimate goal is to scare audiences, and with the editing, they make some key scenes last a little too long for comfort. By doing this, it heightens the tension of the scene, but also it gives off the sense of how trapped the characters are. There are no fast cuts away to a different scene when they are in danger – the cameras instead linger and show their reactions, as if they would in reality.

There are also a lot more elements of realism that have been popularised over the years for the general audiences. The most notable would be the lack of mise-en-scene in films that want to convey realism. In both films the use of lighting isn’t controlled, it was left up to the actors to determine how it should be, and in the case of The Blair Witch Project, the only light available to them was natural light, and the light on the top of their cameras. It would have been very hard to manipulate it under the harsh conditions they were shooting in. As for costumes and make-up, there was very little choice about it. The characters in The Blair Witch Project wore the same clothes throughout the film, and their make-up was non-existent as didn’t have any outside communications. Every aspect of mise-en-scene was largely uncontrolled by the filmmakers and came from within the film’s universe.

Both The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are able to convey realism whilst being part of a genre. The conventions of realism that they use, particularly camerawork fit perfectly in the horror genre, so much so that it is debatable if found footage is now fully fledged enough to become its own genre. The filmmakers use specific techniques such as method acting, lack of any type of mise-en-scene and the use of an unknown cast to make their films seem more genuine. Plus, the more the film seems real to the audiences, the closer it brings them to the story and the more personal the experience will be, ultimately frightening them more. The horror genre has definitely changed due to the impact of found footage films and the faux documentary style is undeniably here to stay.

References

McDowell, S D. (2001). Method Filmmaking: An Interview with Daniel Myrick, Co-Director of the Blair Witch Project. Journal of Film and Video. 53 (2/3). pp 140.

Sobchack, V. 1997 Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. 2nd ed. New York: Rutgers University Press. pp 137.