“In a way, Paranormal Activity operates on a simple filmgoing notion which has proved successful for decades in even more conventional filmmaking: that of suspense of disbelief. We treat Paranormal Activity as a fiction film rather than a piece of evidence, but for the duration of the film we momentarily allow ourselves to accept and take at face value what the narrative demands that it pretends to be, just like any fiction film that we allow ourselves to get lost in.

I’ve adopted the term found footage filmmaking from Karina Longworth. She didn’t use the term for the horror movies I’ve described above, but in her New York Film Fest review for Kids scribe and Gummo writer-director Harmony Korine’s new film Trash Humpers. Trash Humpers is about exactly what you’d expect from the title and the name Korine attached, following a non-narrative observation of antisocial middle American misfits engaging in increasingly appalling antisocial behavior that starts at humping trash cans and escalates from there. The movie is grittily captured through pre-digital home video cameras—analog warts and all—posing as found footage that Korine described as something of a derelict treasure caught on VHS one could happen across in a trash can or stored intentionally in a desk drawer. Longworth basically calls Trash Humpers an interesting if dumbfounding piece of art, but a failure—in its artful embrace of the macabre—as a convincing piece of found footage. But in the aesthetic of found footage filmmaking today, from populist horror to challenging experimental projects, the degree that something which is evidently fake comes off as convincingly real is irrelevant, rather what matters is the intent of the aesthetic itself—not something meant to trick us with the false impression of the real, but to engage us with the stylized familiarity of the real.”

“In a way, Paranormal Activity operates on a simple filmgoing notion which has proved successful for decades in even more conventional filmmaking: that of suspense of disbelief. We treat Paranormal Activity as a fiction film rather than a piece of evidence, but for the duration of the film we momentarily allow ourselves to accept and take at face value what the narrative demands that it pretends to be, just like any fiction film that we allow ourselves to get lost in.

I’ve adopted the term found footage filmmaking from Karina Longworth. She didn’t use the term for the horror movies I’ve described above, but in her New York Film Fest review for Kids scribe and Gummo writer-director Harmony Korine’s new film Trash Humpers. Trash Humpers is about exactly what you’d expect from the title and the name Korine attached, following a non-narrative observation of antisocial middle American misfits engaging in increasingly appalling antisocial behavior that starts at humping trash cans and escalates from there. The movie is grittily captured through pre-digital home video cameras—analog warts and all—posing as found footage that Korine described as something of a derelict treasure caught on VHS one could happen across in a trash can or stored intentionally in a desk drawer. Longworth basically calls Trash Humpers an interesting if dumbfounding piece of art, but a failure—in its artful embrace of the macabre—as a convincing piece of found footage. But in the aesthetic of found footage filmmaking today, from populist horror to challenging experimental projects, the degree that something which is evidently fake comes off as convincingly real is irrelevant, rather what matters is the intent of the aesthetic itself—not something meant to trick us with the false impression of the real, but to engage us with the stylized familiarity of the real.”