“Wish I’d seen it in ˜07 because it does suffer a bit from existing in the post-found-footage pile.
Found footage seemed like a great thing at first, I think because people thought it was a way to make a relatively inexpensive movie, perhaps with inexperienced actors and so-so equipment and technical know-how, and have it still come out looking decent. Can’t do many stunts? Shake the camera a lot. Can’t get a good effect of a major event? That’s okay, you can have the camera operator swing over to it JUST after it happens, and that still feels real.
I think the problem is that it’s actually tougher to make found footage than people think.
For one, the format and the story are sometimes at odds. Cloverfield is a good example of a movie that keeps the audience asking Why is this dude still recording? REC has some of that, too, setups where it doesn’t make sense for the cameraman to keep filming.
Two, I think you have to have a pretty decent story. You have to convince us to stick around for shaky camera work and so on. And that’s what a lot of found footage horror lacks: much in the way of story.
So while REC is pretty good, it suffers as we’ve all become so familiar with the setup.
The other big problem dovetails with the found footage horror problem #3.
What can work with found footage is that we’re experiencing something from a point of view of another character in a movie. So if something really weird or fucked up is going on, we are closer to that feeing.
The problem that movies still don’t often address: what the audience knows and what the characters know.
The characters in REC have no idea what’s going on, why a building is being quarantined, no reason to be suspicious.
But I scrolled on over to this in the horror section and read a brief synopsis. And I’ve seen a zombie movie before.
I know EVERYTHING that’s happening, they know NOTHING, and apparently George Romero does not exist in this reality.
I think one of the finest examples of handling this issue is in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. Shit just starts happening immediately, we’re in the action, and there is one brief discussion of zombies that amounts to,Does it really matter that we properly name what’s happening here? We really don’t go through a lot of stuff where people are unsure what’s happening or try and talk their friends out of being zombies or whatever.
The longer we spend getting characters up to speed, the longer we spend in a period where I don’t feel like I’m in it with them, and that pulls found footage apart at the seams.
REC suffers from both being on the found footage wave and the zombie glut of the late 2000’s, and it’s not totally fair to say this movie is bad. It’s really pretty good, but when you’ve seen the dozens of things that lifted tricks and ideas from it before you see the OG, it kills some of the fun.”