The 25 Scariest Found Footage Horror Movies

Often maligned as a lesser horror subgenre, found footage movies can, at their best, reflect the technical omniscience of handheld surveillance while preserving the intimate, raw-nerve terror of whichever (usually ill-fated) character is holding the camera. Permitting audiences a front-row seat to whatever horrors befall their protagonists, found-footage offers no guarantee of anyone's survival save the camera's.

It's no wonder that the subgenre exploded after 9/11 became the first viral terror attack, its events playing out across thousands of disconnected phone screens, the totality of which traumatized a nation. With its images of video feeds, pixelated shadows, and petrified faces thrust into view, found footage emulates the personalized, handheld sensations of smartphone-era self-documentation and exploited the anxieties of the era with visceral, emotional intensity.

In a found footage movie, horrors are inescapable and unknowable. They lurk out of sight, then surge forward, overwhelming both the spectator and their lens. Here are 12 films that cement found-footage as a uniquely modern, nerve-shattering horror format.

A watershed moment for the found-footage format, Oren Peli's "Paranormal Activity" first struck the festival circuit like a bolt from the blue, sparking audience walkouts; many felt too frightened to keep watching. Its theatrical release proved such a sizable success that the film (shot for just $150,000) is generally considered the most profitable movie ever made, and five sequels of varying quality followed.

But few horror films since have matched the full-force tension of the first "Paranormal Activity," in which couple Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston) set up a camera to surveil the otherworldly presence haunting them at home. The genius of Peli's stationary camera placements is how this approach implores the audience to search every inch of the frame for terrors that are hidden in plain sight. Mounted on tripods around the house, these static cameras contribute to a near-constant sense of dread, locking the audience in for whatever frights a given night might have in store.

Though the entity that's attached itself to Katie starts out small, "Paranormal Activity" builds in intensity until it reaches a conclusion that ranks among the scariest in cinematic history. It involves Katie, either sleepwalking or possessed, standing next to the bed, staring at a slumbering Micah; two hours pass on fast-forward as she sways, motionless, and we watch, helpless.

"The Blair Witch Project” spawned countless imitators, many of which mistook that film's shaky-cam style and abrupt ending as strengths that could be easily replicated through mimicry, rather than techniques employed by talented filmmakers with a singular vision. The breathlessly clever, relentlessly terrifying Spanish production "[REC]," released in 2007, is too sophisticated a film to fall into such traps. Instead, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's contribution to found-footage takes a claustrophobic, conceptually terrifying premise, then forces audiences to ride it out with the characters.

After a TV news crew pushes its way into a Barcelona apartment complex, the block is sealed off as part of a quarantine procedure. Trapped inside, the crew faces a zombie outbreak that tears like wildfire through an assortment of firemen, police officers, and apartment residents. "[REC]" particularly relishes withholding its scares, ensuring that viewers are as on edge about what they're not seeing (and what they might be about to).

The ending of "[REC]" perfectly illustrates the visceral dramatic power of the found footage format, as an escape through the basement plunges the characters into pitch-black darkness. Night-vision is utilized to tremendous effect, and an onslaught of infected assailants overwhelms the lens. As the sound is reduced to panicked whimpers and disembodied snarls, then cuts out entirely, "[REC]" strips the audience of its senses, forcing them to share the characters' inability to see what's coming.

An Australian import distinguished by its unusually painful, precise exploration of familial grief, 2008's "Lake Mungo" is framed as a documentary about a family reeling from the accidental drowning of their teenage daughter, Alice (Talia Zucker). A modest success upon its original release, writer-director Joel Anderson's psychological horror-drama is experiencing a critical reappraisal as more audiences discover what stands as one of the most indelibly haunting ghost stories to utilize the found-footage format.

As Alice's secret life reveals itself to her grief-stricken parents, they begin seeing what they believe to be her spirit in family photographs and home videos, and summon a local psychic to make sense of these inexplicable yet reassuring sights. As "Lake Mungo" unravels the mysteries of Alice's young and tragic life, the film becomes more solemn and slower-burning than others on this list, but the subtlety of its scares — often lurking in the background of otherwise placid scenes, waiting to chill an observant viewer's blood — suits the mournful qualities of the overarching narrative.

The actors' performances, too, are roundly terrific, capturing the existential confusion and anguish of a family coping with an unfathomable loss. And there's something to be said for the film's deliberate, unshowy build, which pays off with one of the saddest, scariest, most psychologically devastating jump-scares ever filmed. You'll know it when you see it, and you'll feel it for weeks after watching.

At the beginning of the pandemic, filmmaker Rob Savage decided to make a horror film that reflected the forced isolation and virtual connectivity of the COVID-19 era. Partnering with writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd, Savage enlisted a crew of actors who worked remotely to shoot scenes for "Host," a horror movie about friends who decide to perform a seance over Zoom and inadvertently invite supernatural activity into their homes.

Lean, mean, and brutally effective, this 56-minute frightfest wastes little time before subjecting its extraordinarily expressive (and believably terrified) cast to a rapidly escalating series of demonic intrusions. What makes "Host" such an unusually clever and exciting found-footage film — not to mention a valuable encapsulation of this hyper-anxious cultural moment — is the imagination with which Savage exploits the specific anxieties of lives spent simultaneously online and alone. For all the time we commit to speaking with friends over an internet connection, none of them can intervene or do more than watch what's happening on our screens, however horrifying that is.

When one character starts typing in the chat, and their messages come across as a garbled mash, the possible explanations for this barrage are almost as scary as the reveal. "Host" is framed as a recording of a Zoom call from Hell, and Savage's ability to follow through on the setup's promise makes for a film more clever than anyone could've expected.

One of the most high-profile found footage films in recent years, "Cloverfield" follows five New York residents forced to flee as a massive, unexplained creature rises out of the ocean and lays waste to the city. As the protagonists move through crumbling skyscrapers and decimated New York landmarks, shaky-cam techniques immerse the viewers in their frantic, sustained efforts to escape all this inner-city carnage.

But director Matt Reeves, working in tandem with producer J.J. Abrams, keeps the "Cloverfield" monster off screen for hefty portions of the film, lingering on shots of bloodied civilians stumbling out of the rubble and achieving the film's most heart-in-mouth terrifying sequence when the characters climb one skyscraper to rescue their friend from another that's collapsed against it.

Though the central monster — and the tentacled offspring it sends scuttling and springing through subways — is a terrifying sight, "Cloverfield" more boldly evokes images of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, many of which were taken by horrified bystanders and none of which could employ a lens wide enough to capture the extent of the destruction. "Cloverfield" similarly draws its horror from the dread and disorientation of those at ground zero, offering a kind of overdue catharsis that allows audiences to process the sudden, senseless violence of inner-city destruction while containing it within a genre-movie framework — and presenting a towering monster onto which such fears can be easily, safely projected.

Found footage films don't often aim as high as this 2005 J-horror offering from director Kōji Shiraishi about the efforts of paranormal researcher Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) to make a documentary about a series of uncanny, seemingly unconnected events. Positioned as footage recorded by Kobayashi's cameraman and released as a cohesive documentary — complete with news broadcasts, interviews, and 16mm film footage depicting a rare ritual — in the wake of his unsolved disappearance, "Noroi: The Curse" is impressively ambitious and cumulatively terrifying.

As Kobayashi's research brings him into contact with a psychically gifted child (Rio Kanno), a tin-foil hat-wearing madman (Satoru Jitsunashi) who speaks of "ectoplasmic worms," and a woman who can't shake the sound of babies wailing inside her home, director Shiraishi takes the time to gradually weave plot threads together, allowing for plenty of eerie, shiver-inducing moments along the way. As Kobayashi follows the trail of an ancient demon named Kagutaba, "Noroi: The Curse" escalates in every conceivable way, becoming more dramatically compelling and conspicuously well-crafted even as its scares go from merely unsettling to full-on nightmare fuel.

You'll never go camping again after viewing "Willow Creek." Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait relies heavily on the power of suggestion, and it works like a charm. In doing so, he casts the Bigfoot legend back into mysterious and spooky territory. It's pure nightmare fuel.

A firm believer in the hairy woodlands creature, Jim (Bryce Johnson) convinces his girlfriend, Kelly (Alexie Gilmore), to accompany him on an excursion to Willow Creek, California, the self-proclaimed Bigfoot capital of the world. After interviewing several residents, the two head off into Six Rivers National Forest with the hope of capturing the mythic creature on camera. Things start fairly innocuously at first. Their camp gets trashed, but they shrug it off as the actions of hungry bears.

Once night falls, unseen creatures emerge from the woods and circle Jim and Kelly's tent. Ungodly noises fill the night air. They even hear a woman blubbering in the distance. A Bigfoot clan sniffs and inspects the area, eventually wandering off when the sun crests the horizon. In the morning, Jim and Kelly decide to leave, first discovering clumps of frizzy gray hair outside their tent before attempting to find their way back to their car. Lost, they walk in circles. The woods seem much bigger than when they entered. "Willow Creek" lures you in with the cozy warmth of nature but presents a darkness that is just as terrifying as Bigfoot itself.

The advent of laptops and smartphones gave life to a sub-genre of found footage called "screenlife" in the 2010s. In 2013's "The Den," director Zachary Donohue exploits the desperation to connect with others online and growing internet hoaxes in ways that feel incredibly personal.

Sociology student Liz (Melanie Papalia) pitches the graduate board her final project, which is based on a video chat service called The Den. On the site, users can connect with others from anywhere in the world. Liz believes it could be a huge game changer in the way we communicate online. As part of her work, she promises to document every single conversation and indicate which ones resulted in authentic connections. The board is skeptical, but her mentor and friend, Sally (Saidah Arrika Ekulona), convinces her colleagues otherwise. 

Liz is awarded a grant and dives into research. Soon afterward, Liz chats with a user whose webcam is broken. The conversation is immediately strange, but it seems innocent enough. What Liz doesn't know is that the person on the other end of the screen has hacked her computer and her cell phone. Slowly but surely, the unknown hacker chips away at her life, deleting important emails and phone calls. "The Den" distills our collective fear that we're all being watched. Experts still suggest that you should cover your computer camera. It's not so outrageous or paranoid to think something bad could happen to you if you don't. Liz learns that the hard way.

Director Barry Levinson fuses eco-horror and found footage into a terrifying environmental disaster film. Based on a short Levinson co-wrote with Michael Wallach, "The Bay" centers on residents in Claridge, Maryland, a fictional coastal town on the Chesapeake Bay. The area is a tourist draw and the home of a large chicken farm. However, some citizens are concerned about the dumping of chemicals and chicken excrement into the bay.

Naturally, Mayor Stockman (Frank Deal) brushes off the claims that the water is contaminated and forges ahead with the big Fourth of July celebration. Reporter Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue) catches wind of the rumors and decides to cover the town's holiday festivities. What begins as a carefree, joyful event quickly goes sideways when residents break out with oozing lesions and several contestants in the crab-eating contest vomit violently all over the boardwalk.

"The Bay" follows news reports and cell phone footage and camera feeds from numerous characters. It's utter chaos. Considering the COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing, we are not far off from a mass extinction event as depicted in this film. Researchers may claim more studies need to be conducted regarding the end of life as we know it, but there's truth to the matter. This frightening 2012 film may just be exactly how it all goes down. You'll never drink water without thinking about this one ever again.

Carlo Ledesma truly impresses with his directorial debut, "The Tunnel." What makes the movie a genre gem is the way it reshapes tropes and conventions. "The Tunnel" wastes very little time getting to the nitty gritty. Bel Deliá plays Natasha Warner, a reporter aiming to expose a government coverup regarding an underground reservoir and homeless people hiding in tunnels.

Much to the crew's dismay, Natasha first claims she is authorized to enter the network of hidden passageways and then, sneaks her way past security. It's a set-up we've seen time and time again, yet events immediately escalate when darkness sets in. Natasha, producer Peter (Andy Rodoreda), audio engineer Tangles (Luke Arnold), and cameraman Steven (Steve Davis), descend into madness they never thought existed.

"The Tunnel" is crucially underseen and underappreciated as one of the genre's best examples of subverting expectations to deliver an endless round of sucker punches. The dread of what may be circling the group in the shadows is so suffocating, that it'll knock you out.

"Leaving D.C." relies solely on one performance to sell the mayhem. Writer, director, and star Josh Criss turns up the heat on found footage with a hyper-focus on sound as the driving force behind the unexplainable. Criss plays the socially awkward Mark Klein, who has spent most of his adult life living in Washington, DC. The city has taken a toll, and he decides to move to a remote home in West Virginia to recharge.

Things immediately seem off. Mark first discovers a cat skull attached to a tree in a nearby clearing, and if that weren't creepy enough, a strange banging begins to happen in the middle of the night. He sets up a tape recorder to document sounds during the wee hours of the morning and discovers someone — or something — lurking in the woods and taunting him. The unknown being also enjoys some tranquil music, often playing a flute around the same hour almost every single night.

It becomes too much for him, and Mark slowly devolves into a state of delirium. The terror of "Leaving D.C." lies in not only the unwelcome presence but Mark's descent into fantasy. The ending notwithstanding, the film delivers on the scares and lives somewhere between "The Blair Witch Project" and "Bad Ben."

In "The Medium," director Banjong Pisanthanakun takes the script (co-written by Chantavit Dhanasevi and Na Hong-jin) and submerges the viewer in the rituals and misfortunes plaguing a small town in northern Thailand. A documentary team travels to the isolated location to tell the story of a shaman named Nim (Sawanee Utoomma) and chronicle the family legacy of spirit mediums and tragedies afflicting the men.

Nim's sister, Noi (Sirani Yankittikan), was originally expected to invite ancestral god Bayan into herself, but she refused. Instead, she turned to Christianity. Noi's only daughter, Ming (Narilya Gulmongkolpech), follows in her mother's footsteps, a decision that soon results in a bizarre possession. Ming begins exhibiting aggressive behavior and multiple personalities, indicating that Bayan has sinister plans for the young girl.

As you might expect, things only get worse for the family. "The Medium" is far more terrifying than most found footage films. Darkness practically oozes from the screen.