ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the impact and effect of certain devices, movements, and forms, such as handheld and improvised cinematography, the subjective camera, and first-person viewpoints on found footage horror films. In this chapter, I thematically organise a range of antecedents that have influenced the production, technology, and aesthetics of diegetic camera horror films. These antecedents are relevant because the viewer’s knowledge, awareness, and familiarity with some of them are essential in order to understand the priming strategies of diegetic camera horror films and their attempts at creating, what I call, mediated realism.
A common theme across the antecedents is that they are faked representations of real documents, as in the case of epistolary novels or the War of the Worlds (Welles, 1938) radio broadcast. Other influences on the diegetic camera horror film consistently utilise first-person point of view (POV) as a central narrative and aesthetic choice. A further theme is the inclusion of actuality footage of real death. Perhaps most significantly, I also consider technological antecedents such as developments in camera technology, precursors in the cinematic horror genre, and finally those media forms that diegetic camera films specifically mimic.
