Found Footage Horror Movies: 'Apollo 18' and 'Area 51' Latest in a Long Line After 'The Blair Witch Project'

It seems that the 1999 movie "The Blair Witch Project" has sparked a new horror movie trend involving the use of faux "found footage" to give movies a feeling of authenticity. '"The Blair Witch Project" was set up to seem like a real documentary about lost kids searching for an entity known as the Blair witch out in the woods, and it definitely had people asking if the movie was really footage from the video camera of a group of kids that disappeared while trying to find evidence of a real witch.

However, this "mockumentary" wasn't the first horror movie to use such a concept. The gruesome 1980 movie "Cannibal Holocaust" uses the found footage method to show a documentary crew killing and mistreating a cannibalistic tribe in the Amazon jungle to create scenes for their movie. And of course their misdeeds don't go unpunished.

The 1992 black comedy "Man Bites Dog" was a mockumentary featuring a film crew following a serial killer as he commits crimes, while the 1998 movie "The Last Broadcast" is a mockumentary investigating the murders of a paranormal investigative team searching for the Jersey Devil.

But while "The Blair Witch Project" wasn't the first, it seems to be the found footage movie that proved the genre had staying power and that audiences are suckers for scares with a more realistic quality to them. The success of 2007 movie "Paranormal Activity", was even more proof that found footage could be turned into big box office numbers. The 2007 Spanish horror movie "REC" and its 2008 English remake "Quarantine" also used the found footage method to capture the madness inside quarantined buildings full of people suffering from a mysterious disease, and the 2010 movie "The Last Exorcism" is a mockumentary about an exorcism.

But it's J.J. Abrams' 2008 found footage movie "Cloverfield", which focuses on a group of friends videotaping an alien attack, that seems to be inspiring this horror sub-genre lately. It was followed by the 2009 movie "The Fourth Kind", which contained video segments featuring "actual" footage of people being hypnotized and recounting alien abductions. Abrams' upcoming movie "Super 8" is also about aliens and features younger kids who see an E.T. while filming with their super 8 camera. However, the movie itself is being shot traditionally.

The movie "Apollo 18", on the other hand, will be using the found footage method. "Apollo 18", which is set for release on April 22, 2011, reveals footage from a secret mission to the moon where astronauts find themselves being stalked by something sinister and inhuman. But it's not the only alien movie using found footage in the works; "Paranormal Activity" director Oren Peli has also been working on "Area 51", the result of a group of young people videotaping what they find inside the secret government base. There has been little news about where he's at with the film, but he's probably been too busy with both of his "Paranormal Activity" sequels to worry about it.

However, it looks like witches and ghosts may be out and aliens in when it comes to found footage horror movies, so Oren Peli might want to get the word out on his latest. Audiences may have embraced this less-expensive, more personal-feeling method of filmmaking, but they might want the things that go bump in the night to be scarier, more expensive monsters (think "Alien") in lieu of unseen entities that filmmakers don't have to worry about spending money on creating.