V/H/S Halloween Directors Reveal Why Found-Footage Horror Remains 'Challenging AF to Shoot'

Following the significant found-footage horror boom of the 2000s inspired by The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't disappear but rather transformed into new forms. Audiences saw the emergence of “screenlife” movies, freshly stylized interpretations of the first-person perspective, and ambitious single-shot films dominating the screens where shakycam shots and unbelievably persistent camera operators once ruled.

A significant outlier to this pattern is the ongoing V/H/S franchise, a horror anthology that created its own boom in short-form horror and has kept the found-footage dream alive through multiple seasonal releases. The eighth in the franchise, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, includes several short films that all take place around Halloween, strung together with a wrapper story (“Diet Phantasma”) that follows a brutally disengaged researcher leading a series of consumer product tests on a soda drink that eliminates the people trying it in a variety of messy, extreme ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s global debut at the 2025 edition of the Fantastic Fest film festival, each of the V/H/S Halloween directors gathered for a post-screening Q&A where director Anna Zlokovic described first-person scary movies as “hard as fuck to shoot.” Her fellow filmmakers applauded in response. The directors later explained why they believe shooting a found-footage project is more difficult — or in one case, easier! — than making a conventional horror movie.

This interview has been condensed for concision and clarity.

What Makes Found-Footage Horror So Challenging to Shoot?

Micheline Pitt, co-director of “Home Haunt”: I think the biggest thing as an creator is having restrictions by your artistic vision, because each element has to be motivated by the character holding the camera. So I think that's the part that's hard as fuck for me, is to distance myself from my imagination and my ideas, and having to stay in a box.

Alex Ross Perry, director of “Kidprint”: I actually told her recently — I concur with that, but I also differ with it strongly in a very specific way, because I really love an unrestricted environment that's 360 degrees. I discovered this to be so freeing, because the blocking and the filming are the identical. In conventional movie-making, the blocking and the coverage are diametrically opposed.

If the character has to turn left, the coverage has to face right. And the fact that once you set up the action [in a found-footage movie], you have determined your shots — that was so remarkable to me. I have watched numerous found-footage films, but until you film your initial found-footage project… The first day, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you understand where the character moves, that's the filming — the lens doesn't move left when the character moves right, the camera advances when the character progresses. You shoot the scene one time, and that's all — we don't have to get his line. It moves in one direction, it arrives at the conclusion, and then we move in the next direction. As a frustrated narrative filmmaker, avoiding a traditional-coverage scene in a long time, I was like, "This is cool, this limitation actually is freeing, because you just need to figure out the identical element once."

Anna Zlokovic, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: In my opinion the difficult aspect is the suspension of disbelief for the audience. Each detail has to feel real. The sound has to feel like it's actually happening. The acting have to appear believable. If you have something like an adult man in a diaper, how do you sell that as realistic? It's absurd, but you have to create the sense like it exists in the environment properly. I discovered that to be difficult — you can lose the audience easily at any point. It only requires a single mistake.

Bryan M. Ferguson, creator of “Diet Phantasma”: I concur with Alex — as soon as you get the blocking down, it's great. But when you've got so many physical effects occurring at the same time, and ensuring you're capturing it and not making errors, and then preparation attempts — you have a certain amount of opportunities to get all these things correctly.

Our set had a large barrier in the path, and you couldn't hear anyone. Alex's [shoot] sounds like great fun. Our project was very hard. We had only three days to complete it. It is freeing, because with first-person filming, you can make some allowances. Although you do fuck it up, it was going to look like low-quality anyway, because you're adding effects, or you're employing a low-quality camera. So it's beneficial and it's bad.

A co-director, filmmaker of “Home Haunt”: In my view establishing pace is quite difficult if you're shooting mostly oners. Our approach was, "OK, this was edited in camera. There's this guy, the father, and he turns the camera on and off, and that creates our cuts." That required a lot of simulated single shots. But you really have to be present. You really have to see precisely your shot appears, because what's going into the lens, and in certain cases, there's no cutting around it.

We were aware we had only two or three attempts for each scene, because ours was very ambitious. We really tried to focus on discovering different rhythms between the takes, because we were unsure what we were going to get in post-production. And the true difficulty with first-person filming is, you're needing to conceal those cuts on shifting mist, on all sorts of stuff, and you really never know where those cuts are going to live, and whether they're going to betray your entire project of trying to feel like a fluid point-of-view camera moving through a three-dimensional space.

Zlokovic: You want to avoid trying to hide it with glitches as much as you can, but you must occasionally, because the process is difficult.

Her colleague: Actually, she's right. This is easy. Simply add glitches the shit out of it.

Another filmmaker, creator of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the biggest aspect is making the audience accept the characters operating the device would continue, rather than fleeing. That’s additionally the most important thing. There are some first-person scenarios where I simply don't believe the characters would continue recording.

And I think the camera should consistently be delayed to whatever's happening, because that happens in real life. For me, the magic is ruined if the camera is already there, anticipating an event to happen. If you are present, recording, and you detect a sound and pan toward it, that noise is no longer there. And I think that creates a sense of authenticity that it's crucial to preserve.

What's the One Scene in Your Movie That You're Proudest Of?

Perry: The protagonist sitting at a multi-screen setup of editing software, with four different videos playing out at the identical moment. That's all analog. We filmed those videos previously. Then the editor treated them, and then we loaded them on four computers hooked up to four monitors.

That frame of the person positioned there with multiple recordings running — I was like, 'This is the visual I wanted out of this project.' If it was the only still I viewed of this film, I would be pressing play right now: 'This appears interesting!' But it was more difficult than it looks, because it's like multiple art people pressing spacebars at the identical moment. It looks so simple, but it took three days of preparation to get to that shot.