The Blair Witch Project

Paranormal Activity is Blair Witch's method applied to a house instead of a wood: a camera the characters are holding or have set up themselves, no score, unknown actors, and a budget small enough that the film cannot fail commercially. The inheritance is structural rather than atmospheric. Both films spend most of their length on nothing happening, both make the audience search a static frame for a change, and both withhold the thing itself. Oren Peli's film was made for a reported fifteen thousand dollars, which is the Blair Witch economic argument repeated.

Creep is a found-footage film in the line Blair Witch opened: one camera, held by a character with a reason to be holding it, and a shoot small enough to be largely improvised. It narrows the form rather than repeating it. Where Blair Witch puts three people in a wood, Creep puts two men in a house and makes the camera operator the victim, so the thing the audience fears is the person who commissioned the footage. The dread comes from social awkwardness that will not resolve, which is a use the form had not been put to.

Deodato's film invented the device Blair Witch turned into a genre: a film crew goes into a remote place, does not come back, and what the audience watches is presented as the footage recovered afterwards. Both films also ran the same trick on their audience, which is the part usually missed. Deodato had to produce his supposedly dead actors in court to prove he had not killed them; Blair Witch's campaign listed its cast as missing and seeded a fabricated mythology online before release. In both cases the claim that the footage is real is not a framing device, it is the product.

Both films open by telling you this happened. Hooper's narration about events that befell five young people is invented, and it worked so well that audiences went on believing it for decades; Myrick and Sánchez took the same device and built the entire film and its marketing on it, down to missing-person posters and a website presenting the footage as recovered. The other inheritance is texture: 16mm grain and non-actors in the first, camcorder and improvisation in the second, both chosen so the film does not look made.