The movie Stephen King called the pinnacle of the found footage genre: “Genius perfected”
It’s well-known that Stephen King has a soft spot, if you can call it that, for The Blair Witch Project, but that wasn’t the movie he described as found footage’s finest example of perfected genius.
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s low-budget chiller was a cultural phenomenon in 1999, weaponising the nascent cultural obsession with the internet to position itself as a genuine documentary that had been recovered and released in cinemas to share a tragic story with the world.
That particular brand of wool will never be pulled over anyone’s eyes again, and it helped turn the picture into the most profitable release in cinema history. In the long run, though, The Blair Witch Project did more harm than good, since it ushered in Hollywood’s obsession with found footage.
It’s the only film that King found so scary he had to switch it off before he made it to the end credits, and as always tends to be the case when one movie does a specific thing very well, every studio and production company in town leapt on the bandwagon and proceeded to run it straight into the ground.
There were a few decent-to-good found footage flicks to emerge in the post-Blair Witch years, but not many. However, even though you can’t really call it a definitive part of the subgenre when it doesn’t maintain the gimmick all the way through, the legendary author had special praise for one title that picked up the baton from Myrick and Sánchez’s to finish the race and claim the gold medal.
“The mainstream faux docs I can think of, Cloverfield, Quarantine (the remake of the Spanish [Rec]), Diary of the Dead, are all pretty good, but only George A Romero’s Diary approaches the purity of Blair Witch,” King mused. “Not until District 9 do we find genius perfected.”
Neill Blomkamp’s breakthrough and ‘Best Picture’ nominee starts off as a found footage-type story that follows Sharlto Copley’s Wikus van de Merwe, but it eventually drops that aspect of its narrative structure while retaining the roving camera aspect, something that King was fully aware of.
“It’s not ‘pure’, if we take that to mean absolute adherence to the idea of amateurs with cameras,” he acknowledged. “And, of course, D9’s not a pure horror movie, either, but the technique allows the film to achieve a sense of reality that’s seldom seen in the old monsters-from-space genre.”
The mixed-media approach grounds District 9 in a real, tangible world, albeit one that’s populated by intergalactic refugees. Of course, it wouldn’t have made sense keeping the found footage gimmick in place when the third act amps up the action set pieces, because any camera crew following Wikus would have fucked off long before then, but King nonetheless viewed it as the perfect successor to The Blair Witch Project, fooking prawns and all.
