V/H/S Halloween Filmmakers Reveal Why Found-Footage Horror Is Still 'Hard AF to Shoot'

After the significant shaky-cam thriller surge of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't disappear but rather transformed into different styles. Audiences witnessed the rise of “screenlife” movies, freshly stylized interpretations of the first-person perspective, and showy one-take movies largely taking over the cinemas where unsteady footage and unbelievably persistent camera operators once reigned.

One significant outlier to this trend is the ongoing V/H/S franchise, a horror anthology that spawned its own surge in short-form horror and has kept the found-footage dream active through seven themed installments. The eighth in the series, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, features five shorts that all occur around Halloween, connected with a wrapper story (“Diet Phantasma”) that follows a completely detached researcher conducting a series of product experiments on a diet cola that kills the people trying it in a variety of chaotic, extreme ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s world premiere at the 2025 version of the Fantastic Fest film festival, each of the V/H/S Halloween filmmakers assembled for a post-screening Q&A where filmmaker Anna Zlokovic described first-person scary movies as “hard as fuck to shoot.” Her co-directors cheered in reply. The directors later explained why they feel filming a found-footage project is more difficult — or in one case, simpler! — than creating a conventional horror movie.

The discussion has been edited for concision and clarity.

Why Is First-Person Scary Movies So Difficult to Shoot?

One director, director of “Home Haunt”: I think the biggest thing as an creator is having restrictions by your creative ideas, 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 creativity and my ideas, and needing to remain in a box.

Alex Ross Perry, director of “Kidprint”: In fact told her recently — I agree with that, but I also disagree with it strongly in a very specific way, because I really love an unrestricted environment that's all-around. I discovered this to be so liberating, because the blocking and the filming are the same. In traditional filmmaking, the positioning and the shots are diametrically opposed.

If the actor has to look left, the camera angle has to face right. And the reality that once you set up the action [in a first-person film], you have figured out your coverage — that was so amazing to me. I have watched 500 found-footage films, but until you film your first found-footage project… Day one, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you understand where the character goes, that's the coverage — the lens doesn't shift left when the actor goes right, the lens moves forward when the character progresses. You shoot the sequence one time, and that's it — we don't have to capture individual dialogues. It progresses in a single path, it reaches the end, and now we proceed in the next direction. As a frustrated narrative filmmaker, who hasn't shot a traditional-coverage scene in a long time, I was like, "This is great, this limitation actually is freeing, because you only have to figure out the same thing once."

A third director, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: In my opinion the hard part is the suspension of disbelief for the viewers. Everything has to feel real. The sound has to seem like it's genuinely occurring. The acting have to appear believable. If you have an element like an adult man in a nappy, how do you make that as plausible? It's absurd, but you have to make it feel like it exists in the environment correctly. I discovered that to be difficult — you can lose the audience really at any point. It just takes one fuck-up.

Another filmmaker, director of “Diet Phantasma”: I concur with Alex — once you get the blocking down, it's great. But when you've got so many physical effects occurring at one time, and trying to make sure you're panning onto it and not fucking up, and then setup takes — you have a certain amount of time to get all these things right.

Our set had a large barrier in the way, and you couldn't hear anybody. Alex's [shoot] seems like great fun. Ours was extremely difficult. We had only 72 hours to do it. It can be freeing, because with first-person filming, you can take certain liberties. Even if you make a mistake, 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 good and it's challenging.

A co-director, co-director of “Home Haunt”: In my view finding rhythm is quite difficult if you're shooting primarily oners. The method we used was, "OK, this was edited in camera. There's this guy, the dad, and he turns the camera on and off, and that creates our edits." That entailed a lot of simulated single shots. But you really have to be present. You really have to observe exactly how your shot feels, because what is captured by the camera, and in certain cases, there's no cutting around it.

We knew we only had two or three attempts for each scene, because our film was very ambitious. We really tried to concentrate on finding different rhythms between the takes, because we didn't know what we were going to get in post-production. And the true difficulty with found footage is, you're needing to conceal those cuts on shifting mist, on all sorts of stuff, and you cannot predict where those edits are will be placed, and if they're will undermine your entire project of trying to feel like a seamless point-of-view lens moving through a realistic environment.

The director: You want to avoid trying to hide it with digital errors as much as you can, but you have to occasionally, because the process is difficult.

Norman: In fact, she is correct. This is easy. Just glitch the content out of it.

Paco Plaza, creator of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the biggest thing is making the audience accept the people using the device would persist, instead of fleeing. That’s additionally the key element. There are certain found-footage fields where I simply don't believe the characters would continue recording.

And I think the device should consistently be delayed to whatever's happening, because that happens in real life. For me, the magic is destroyed if the device is positioned beforehand, anticipating an event to occur. If you are present, filming, and you hear a noise and pan toward it, that noise is already gone. And I think that gives a sense of truth that it's very important to maintain.

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

Perry: The protagonist sitting at a four-monitor deck of editing software, with four different videos running at the same time. That's completely practical. We filmed those clips previously. Then the editing team processed them, and then we put them on multiple devices hooked up to four monitors.

That shot of the character sitting there with four different videotapes playing — I was like, 'This is the image I wanted out of this film.' If it was the only still I viewed of this film, I would be pressing play immediately: 'This looks cool!' But it was more difficult than it looks, because it's like four different crew members activating playback at the identical moment. It appears straightforward, but it took several days of planning to achieve that image.