The Found-Footage film is a small but burgeoning sub-genre of horror cinema, the most famous being the lower-than-low budget The Blair Witch Project which took the world by storm back in 1999. Other films have followed in its path, some adding successfully to the genre; the post 9/11 Manhattan dinosaur disaster movie Cloverfield (2008) & Spanish zombie film with a twist [REC] (2007) being two of the most prominent to date.
Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is generally accepted as being the first to utilise ‘Found-Footage’, an odd coupling between 1970s ‘snuff movie’ urban legends & the home video camera (an initial premise best exploited in 1993’s Man Bites Dog). But it wasn’t until the influential but little known The Last Broadcast (1998) & the ensuing worldwide interest resulting from Blair Witch that the ‘Found Footage’ film as a genre really began to take off. These range from the sublime but diminishing creeps of The Paranormal Activity series (2007 - present) & the deft daftness of Norway’s Trolljegeren (2010), to a raft of predictable demonic possession/exorcism-gone-wrong films like The Last Exorcism (2010) & The Devil Inside (2012).
British additions to the genre are scarce to the point of non-existence, which seems at odds with the country’s reputation for being one of the most haunted in the world. Michael Axelgaard and Matthew Holt’s Hollow (2012) attempts to redress this, with a film that tries valiantly but ultimately fails to escape from the long dark shadows of its more successful predecessors. Beginning with a Police evidence caption (a technique first seen in Cloverfield ) from the fictitious ‘East Anglia’ force, Hollow follows a small party of fairly unlikeable young people heading into the wilds of Suffolk for a weekend visit to a dead relative’s cottage. Fortunately for us, one of their number has seen fit to bring along his video camera to record this trip to the English countryside. So far, so clichéd.
