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Following the significant found-footage horror boom of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't fade away but rather transformed into different styles. Audiences saw the emergence of computer-screen films, freshly stylized interpretations of the first-person perspective, and showy one-take movies dominating the cinemas where shakycam shots and improbably dogged filmmakers once ruled.

A significant outlier to this trend is the continuing V/H/S series, a scary-story collection that spawned its own surge in brief scary films and has maintained the found-footage dream alive through seven seasonal releases. The eighth in the franchise, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, includes five short films that all occur around Halloween, connected with a framing narrative (“Diet Phantasma”) that follows a completely detached scientist leading a series of consumer product tests on a soda drink that kills the people trying it in a variety of messy, over-the-top ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s world premiere at the 2025 version of Austin’s Fantastic Fest, each of the V/H/S Halloween filmmakers assembled for a question-and-answer session where filmmaker Anna Zlokovic characterized first-person scary movies as “extremely difficult to shoot.” Her fellow filmmakers cheered in reply. The directors later discussed why they believe filming a found-footage project is more difficult — or in some instances, easier! — than making a traditional scary film.

This interview has been edited for brevity and understanding.

Why Is Found-Footage Horror So Challenging to Shoot?

Micheline Pitt, co-director of “Home Haunt”: I think the most challenging aspect as an artist is being limited by your artistic vision, because everything has to be motivated by the person operating the camera. So I think that's the thing that's hard as fuck for me, is to separate myself from my creativity and my concepts, and needing to remain in a box.

Alex Ross Perry, filmmaker of “Kidprint”: I actually told her recently — I agree with that, but I also disagree with it strongly in a very specific way, because I greatly enjoy an open set that's 360 degrees. I discovered this to be so liberating, because the blocking and the filming are the identical. In conventional movie-making, the blocking and the shots are diametrically opposed.

If the actor has to turn left, the coverage has to look right. And the reality that once you block the scene [in a first-person film], you have figured out your coverage — that was so remarkable to me. I've seen numerous first-person movies, but until you film your initial found-footage project… Day one, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you understand where the person moves, that's the filming — the lens doesn't shift left when the actor goes right, the camera moves forward when the person moves forward. You film the scene one time, and that's it — we avoid capture individual dialogues. It moves in one direction, it arrives at the end, and then we move in the next direction. As a frustrated narrative filmmaker, avoiding a standard multi-angle shot in a long time, I was like, "This is great, this limitation proves liberating, because you only have to determine the same thing once."

A third director, filmmaker of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: In my opinion the difficult aspect is the audience's acceptance for the audience. Each detail has to feel real. The sound has to feel like it's genuinely occurring. The acting have to feel grounded. If you have something like an adult man in a diaper, how do you make that as realistic? It's ridiculous, but you have to create the sense like it exists in the environment properly. I found that to be challenging — you can lose the audience really at any moment. It only requires a single mistake.

Bryan M. Ferguson, director of “Diet Phantasma”: I agree with Alex — as soon as you get the blocking down, it's great. But when you've got numerous 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 limited number of opportunities to get all these elements correctly.

Our set had a large barrier in the way, and you were unable to hear anybody. Alex's [shoot] seems like great fun. Our project was extremely difficult. We had only 72 hours to do it. It is freeing, because with first-person filming, you can take certain liberties. Even if you do fuck it up, it was going to look like low-quality regardless, because you're putting filters on it, or you're employing a low-quality camera. So it's beneficial and it's challenging.

A co-director, filmmaker of “Home Haunt”: In my view finding rhythm is very challenging if you're shooting mostly single takes. The method we used was, "OK, this is filmed continuously. There's this guy, the dad, and he turns the camera on and off, and that creates our cuts." That required a lot of fake oners. But you really have to live in the moment. You really have to observe precisely your scene appears, because what's going into the camera, and in some instances, there's no cutting around it.

We were aware we only had two or three takes per shot, because our film was highly demanding. 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 real challenge with first-person filming is, you're having to hide those edits on shifting mist, on all sorts of stuff, and you cannot predict where those cuts are will be placed, and if they're will undermine your whole enterprise of trying to feel like a fluid point-of-view lens traveling through a realistic environment.

Zlokovic: You should try to avoid concealing it with glitches as much as you can, but you have to sometimes, because the process is difficult.

Norman: In fact, she is correct. It is simple. Simply add glitches the content out of it.

Paco Plaza, creator of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the biggest aspect is making the audience believe the characters operating the camera would persist, instead of fleeing. That’s additionally the most important thing. There are some first-person scenarios where I just cannot accept the people would continue recording.

And I think the device should consistently be delayed to whatever's happening, because that occurs in reality. For me, the illusion is destroyed if the device is positioned beforehand, anticipating something to happen. If you are present, recording, 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 crucial to maintain.

Which Is the One Scene in Your Movie That You're Proudest Of?

One director: The protagonist sitting at a multi-screen setup of video editing, with multiple clips playing out at the same time. That's all analog. We shot those videos previously. Then the editor treated them, and then we put them on multiple devices hooked up to four monitors.

That shot of the person positioned there with multiple recordings playing — I was like, 'That is the visual I envisioned out of this project.' If it was the only still I viewed of this film, I would be pressing play immediately: 'This looks cool!' But it was harder than it appears, because it's like multiple crew members pressing spacebars at the same time. It looks so simple, but it took several days of planning to achieve that image.