it's not quite reality
The shot also suggests the “immediacy” of video with the shakiness of the camerawork, which implies that someone has picked up the camera spontaneously, creating or reinforcing the sense of liveness... (Tryon, 2009, p. 43) The concept of the found footage film is fairly simple: someone—someone real, mind you—filmed the events in question, and now we are privy to that footage. With the found footage horror film, in particular, we can guess someone has probably died. The opening titlecard for The Blair Witch Project informs us that these three students disappeared. Paranormal Activity gives us a similar titlecard at the end, informing us that Micah’s body was found but Katie disappeared. The text mimics that we might see at the beginning or end of an actual documentary, which (minus selective editing) is supposed to present objective reality. (By the way, my daughter Saer apparently thought this movie was real, still. She has just claimed that I ruined her childhood by showing her...