Found Footage Films and How Area 407 Does Not Do Found Footage Well

Found footage films are something that seems to come up frequently in the discussion of bad filmmaking.  It’s not because they are all terrible films.  That’s not it at all.  There are many good films made in this style.  The problem is that it is so easy to stumble when using the found footage concept.  There’s a wide array of bad found footage films that can be easily found by searching whatever brick and mortar stores remain, looking at Redbox, or digging through Netflix.  You could even own some of them in your personal collection.  I don’t know.  I can’t see through my computer and browse your collection.  The only thing I know for sure is that there has been a nearly endless supply of found footage films in the past decade or so.

One of the lesser found footage movies is 2012’s Area 407.  This horror movie doesn’t have a lot of scares, and instead is filled to the brim with annoying characters who are basically just names.  There’s the annoying main female character Trish (Abigail Schrader), her older sister Jessie (Samantha Lester), a cameraman named Jimmy (James Lyons), air marshal Laura (Melanie Lyons), flight attendant Lois (Samantha Sloyan), and asshole Charlie (Brendan Patrick Connor).  Who they are doesn’t really matter because everyone acts as annoying as everyone else.  Except for Charlie, who is an asshole.  They spend the entire movie yelling each other’s names, screaming, and dying.  There is no depth to anyone in the movie.

The reason I am highlighting Area 407, aside from the fact that it is the Sunday “Bad” Movie this week, is because it can help me to clarify the ways that a found footage movie can fail.  It is one of the worst movies made in the found footage style that I have come across.  It falls into many of the trappings of bad found footage films, which I will go over through this post.  Why don’t we get to these things that can hamper the creation of a good movie?

The first thing that should be known about found footage movies are that they are cheap and quick to make.  That is the reason that so many of them exist.  The cheapness helped to make the Paranormal Activity series into a money-making machine.  They make back their budget in the first few days and go on to exceed it by vast amounts.  Studios like large profits and will make other found footage films in the hopes of capturing the same magic.  Independent filmmakers also like the found footage style because of how quick and cheap it is.  They don’t have the wealth that studios have and cannot spend nearly as much money making movies.  Found footage can help them to not show their budgetary limitations as much as making a standard film would.

Yet, as positive as these reasons may seem, there are also negatives to the fact that the movies are cheap, quick, and easy to make.  Many times, that comes in the form of the writing.  When a low budget filmmaker wants to make a movie, they want to make a movie.  As I’ve written before, many times it is a group of friends who think it would be fun to hang out and make a cheap movie.  They’ll rush it, not caring about the quality of what they make.  They only care that they can get it done.  They like how easy and quick using the found footage concept can make the filming process.  When with a bunch of friends, you want to hang out.  You’ll do stupid things on camera and think that it should be added to the movie.  The whole writing process flies out the window so that the people making the movie can amuse themselves.  The improvised amusement makes it into the movie solely based on the fact that it might as well.  This isn't always the case, for sure, but many times, I’m sure that what you watch on screen in low budget movies includes random stuff that was shot just for the fun of it.  That’s a little bit off topic though.  That’s about low budget films in general.  When it comes to found footage movies, it’s usually just a lack of quality writing that exists.

When looking at Area 407, the lack of writing is apparent in many ways.  The characters don’t have depth outside of job and name.  The plot goes almost nowhere.  The majority of the movie involves characters yelling at each other or yelling each other’s names.  Between the brief moments of action, the characters repeatedly end up in cabins.  There’s a lot of repetition throughout the film with no characters that a viewer can attach themselves to and care about.  If we remove the idea that the people involved in making Area 407 were friends, why is the quality of the writing so poor in the case of this film?  Disregarding what I wrote above, another theory for the bad script could be realism.

Found footage movies are based upon the concept that what the viewers are witnessing actually happened.  Everything seen in the film is supposed to be realistic.  It is purported to have happened.  The writers have to try and make everything that happens seem like something that would actually happen.  Sometimes that can work to the detriment of the movie, such as Area 407.  After a plane crash, everyone would be yelling and on edge.  They would wait for someone to come save them.  That’s what the movie did, until throwing a monster into the mix.  It made everything in between the crash and the monster irritating.  But it was at least semi-real to what would happen in the situation.  The dialogue in found footage also suffers from the realism.  People talk like you would hear in the situation, which is never as entertaining as typical movie dialogue.  One of the things that can really pull the audience into a movie is the prose that is used within the dialogue.  Found footage movies can lean towards reducing dialogue to the minimum amount of words to get a point across.  Names, directions, and yelling out feelings are some of the minimums.  They don’t add anything to those components to make them interesting.  They leave them at the bare minimum and the product is uninteresting because of it.

What is written above is a lot of rambling.  I understand that.  There is still one more part of found footage filmmaking that needs to be covered.  This part is the ending.  The thing about found footage films is that the footage needs to be found.  There needs to be a way for someone to stumble upon the camera or the tapes and be able to edit it all together in a way that could make a movie.  As you probably know, most found footage films are done in a first person point-of-view.  This means that someone is holding a camera and filming the action.  Viewers of the movie are watching the footage captured through that camera.  I say most because there are exceptions.  Area 407 is not one of the exceptions.  The first person point-of-view is used to bring the audience into the action with the characters.  It is supposed to make the viewer feel like they are one of the people involved in the situation, rather than someone witnessing the footage.  It leaves a question about how the footage was found though.  In the majority of first person found footage horror films, the characters all die by the end.  How, then, does anyone get the footage out of the dangerous location?  In Area 407, how does anyone find both cameras without being attacked by the monster?  I’ve never seen an answer to a question of this kind when it pertains to the horror films of this style.  Movies are supposed to be about the ride and not the destination, but the destination always leaves that question behind.  It’s a frequent destination that should be accounted for but never is.

These aren’t all of the reasons that found footage films can end up being some of the weaker films released.  There are definitely more that could be covered.  That will come at another time.  This post is long enough as it is.  It has gone over a few of the bigger components of found footage that, if done well, could make for a great movie, but if done poorly, could make for disaster.  Between the accessibility for aspiring filmmakers, the realism that tends to come along with the style, and the fact that the footage needs to be found, there are many different ways in which these movies could fall apart.  Area 407 certainly fell apart.  There are good found footage movies out there.  There definitely are.  But it’s easy to fumble the style.  It’s really damn easy.

There are a few notes to make before I finish up here:

• One of the actors in Area 407 was Jude Gerard Prest who directed Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes.
• Another found footage film I’ve covered is The Devil Inside.
• I’ve watched two parodies of found footage films for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  They were 30 Nightsof Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and A Haunted House.
• Area 407 was suggested by @Deggsy.
• If you have any movies you think I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can suggest them in the comments, or you could tell me on Twitter.