The Next Crop of Found-Footage Movies
From The Wire:
Now that Paranormal Activity 3 has broken box office records for October, Hollywood is green-lighting any thriller you can shake a handheld camera at.
The “found footage” horror movie is set to have a new lease on life, with a pipeline full of jump scares. Here is the next crop of “found footage” flicks you should get excited about.
Here are three of the many titles they surfaced:
The Bay
Synopsis: It’s being described as an eco-terror flick, and we’re excited to see what becomes of the movie formerly known as Isopods. “The quaint seaside town of Chesapeake Bay thrives on water it is the lifeblood of the community. When two biological researchers from France find a staggering level of toxicity in the water, they attempt to alert the mayor, but he refuses to create a panic in the docile town. As a result, a deadly plague is unleashed, turning the people of Chesapeake Bay into hosts for a mutant breed of parasites that take control of their minds, and eventually their bodies. A brutal and harrowing creature feature for the 21st century, The Bay chronicles the descent of a small town into absolute terror.”
Who: Director Barry Levinson, of Sphere and The Natural fame, is making this thriller with PA3 producer Blum, who said in the EW article that this was, “Definitely the most graphic horror movie I’ve ever been involved with.” Excellent!
Area 51
Synopsis: “Terror strikes when a group of reporters visit the secret base, Area 51.”
Who: This is Blum’s next producing project with original Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli, and it’s already been postponed several times. Due to obsessive secrecy, there’s hardly anything about this project other than the news that actor/writer Chris Denham was sent in for rewrites earlier this year, and rumors that Peli went back and did some more reshoots in 2011 as well. Blum told EW that they were “still tinkering with it,” which in producer-speak is near disaster. However, we’re eager for Peli to get back behind the camera again.
Evidence
Synopsis: “The movie begins with the police arriving at an abandoned gas station following a brutal massacre — with the only evidence at the crime scene the victims’ personal electronic devices, including a camcorder, flipcam and two cellphones. With nothing else to go on, a detective must analyze the bits of found footage to piece together the identity of the killer.”
Who: It’s being directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi of The Fourth Kind (which was admittedly not good, however you could argue there were some real scares tucked away in there). We’re not sure if this movie will be genre or not, but we love the idea of piecing together so many different jittery cameras into one film!
I should note that Evidence was a spec script by John Swetnam that sold in January of this year. The fact the transition from sale to production is so quick suggests a few things: It was a well-conceived and written script, and the filmmakers wanted to strike while the found-footage trend is hot. [By the way, Swetnam recently sold another found footage spec script Category Six. You can read an interview I did with John here.
The series I recently ran Movie Story Types included an entry about Found Footage movies, noting that it has seemingly supplanted Contained Thrillers… at least for the moment. Will it stay hot? That’s the gamble any screenwriter takes in writing a found footage project just now. Is the market saturated with them… or not?
For the rest of the Wired article, go here.
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