The 15 Best Found Footage Horror Movies Ranked

The found footage horror movie's fortunes have gone up and done countless times since the release of "The Blair Witch Project," which is widely credited with launching the subgenre in 1999. It's often been frequently written off, usually after a glut of unoriginal efforts, but rebounds every time one succeeds, like 2023's hit "Late Night with the Devil." Its shifting status and the sheer number of uninspired efforts may have you wondering if there are actually any good found footage horror films. But the answer is yes, and we have 15 of them.

For this list, we only chose titles which focus on previously unseen footage, usually taken by the participants, that reveals a strange or paranormal event. This excluded several great films, including "Late Night" (part of which takes place in the main character's imagination), the terrifying 1982 British made-for-TV feature "Ghostwatch" (it's presented as a live broadcast) and the more recent "Host" (about a live Zoom session). But there's still plenty here to leave you terrified.

The story for "Final Prayer," about paranormal investigators who run afoul of the supernatural in a spooky location, has been done time and again in found footage horror movies — see "Grave Encounters," the "Hell House LLC" series — to varying degrees of success. What sets "Final Prayer" (aka "The Borderlands") apart is writer-director Elliot Goldner's willingness to favor atmosphere over shocks and a memorably unsettling conclusion.

The investigators — a Scottish skeptic (TV vet Gordon Kennedy), English techie (Robin Hill), and Irish priest (Aidan McArdle) — are looking into strange going-ons at a medieval church, where naturally, something sinister is afoot. But the "what" is less important than the "how," which Goldner illustrates through a barrage of phenomena, both familiar (spooky voices) and unique (what happens to Father Crellick). The terror builds to a trip underneath the church, for which Goldner reveals one of the most audacious finales for any horror movie, found footage or otherwise. "This one's got an ending that sticks with you," stated Fangoria.

Starring: Gordon Kennedy, Robin Hill

Directed by: Elliot Goldner

Year: 2013

Runtime: 89 minutes

Rating: NR

Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%

The core conceit of found footage horror — that what viewers are seeing is real —  has led to some graphic experiments with extreme horror. Efforts like "The Great American Snuff Film" have explored the genre's furthest boundaries; John Erick Dowdle's "The Poughkeepsie Tapes" covers territory that, while less punishing, is equally harrowing.

The tapes in question feature video footage that depicts the crimes of "the Water Street Butcher," a sadistic, unapprehended serial killer. Clips from the tapes are interspersed with a faux documentary about the killer, which attempts to explain his predatory habits. But nothing is revealed: the Butcher's MO is solely to inflict pain. The clips starkly depict victims in abject fear, and are difficult to watch, especially ones concerning teenager Cheryl Dempsey (Dowdle's wife, actress Stacy Chbosky).

"Poughkeepsie" simply becomes an unbroken cycle of terror and agony (which may have resulted in the film being abandoned by MGM prior to release) that's frightening but also exhausting. As Rue Morgue noted, "The result is an objective, rather than subjective, viewing experience that's sometimes chilling yet otherwise emotionally cold."

Starring: Stacy Chbosky, Ben Messmer

Director: John Erick Dowdle

Year: 2007

Runtime: 84 minutes

Rating: NR

Rotten Tomatoes score: 50%

Another found footage horror film built around a documentary that goes off the rails? Yes, that is the case with 2014's "The Taking of Deborah Logan," but the feature debut by "Escape Room" director Adam Robitel uses the framework to craft a story that's not only frightening but also thoughtful and even heartbreaking. The film crew here is making a documentary on the toll of Alzheimer's disease, but they soon discover that the increasingly disturbing behavior of their subject, Deborah Logan (Jill Larson), is not entirely due to her illness, but something more alarming from her past.

The pitfalls of found footage horror are on display here — the film crew is frustratingly dense at times, and the finale trades a straight-faced tone for an onslaught of startling special effects — but what precedes is also an emotionally charged look at the malignant, transformative effects of disease. To Robitel's credit, neither side is underfed. As Oh, The Horror noted, "'The Taking of Deborah Logan' is unrelentingly, oppressively ominous until its final shot."

Starring: Jill Larsen, Anne Ramsey, Michelle Ang

Director: Adam Robitel

Year: 2014

Runtime: 90 minutes

Rating: R

Rotten Tomatoes score: 92%

A slow burn of a chiller, 2021's "Horror in the High Desert" skillfully blends found footage with a pseudo-documentary about a hiker who disappears in the Nevada desert. Writer-director Dutch Marich crafts both sides with care: The documentary scenes, which follow the family and friends of the missing man, Gary Hinge (real-life hiker Eric Mencis), have the flat, professional look of a "Dateline" episode, while the recovered footage is credibly amateurish.

"High Desert" can be glacially paced, with ample time devoted to hiking footage and interviews with HInge's sister, roommate, and a detective — but as iHorror noted, "Marich carefully crafts a story that becomes more unsettling by the moment. He chooses dread over jump scares and character over inflated plot." The payoff is a quietly creepy film with an unsettling conclusion that also paints a sobering portrait of a man so desperate for connection (he operates a secret blog devoted to his hiking videos) that he risks his own life. Two well-regarded sequels followed, with a fourth on the way.

Stars: Eric Mencis, Tonya Williams-Ogden

Director: Dutch Marich

Year: 2021

Runtime: 82 minutes

Rating: NR

Rotten Tomatoes score: 59%

After the failures of "The Happening," "The Last Airbender," and "After Earth," writer-director M. Night Shyamalan took a step back from epic scale productions and released "The Visit," a quirky found footage horror experiment with a distinct comic bent and most importantly, one of his most plausible twist endings. Though met with mixed reviews by critics upon release, "The Visit" is perhaps one of Shyamalan's most enjoyable, unpretentious features, and a satisfying addition to the found footage fold.

The premise is simple: Teen siblings Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould are shipped off to their grandparents' house when mom Kathyrn Hahn takes a cruise with a new boyfriend. The pair are initially excited to finally meet their grandparents, but are soon unnerved by their strange behavior, which DeJonge records with her ever-present camera. 

Shyamalan shrewdly mines the disconnect between estranged family members and unfamiliar customs in humorous and horrific ways, and when he reaches his traditional twist, it feels anchored in reality (specifically, childhood fears about strangers and family secrets). "Screams of terror often dissolve into hysterical laughter, and he uses that emotional dovetail, its tension and catharsis, in almost every scene," wrote RogerEbert.com.

Starring: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould

Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan

Year: 2015

Runtime: 94 minutes

Rating: PG-13

Rotten Tomatoes score: 68%

Four amateur filmmakers disappear in the California desert, only for their SD cards to be discovered years later. Yes, "The Outwaters" shares a premise with "Blair Witch" and countless other found footage horror films, but the similarities end there. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find another genre title that approaches its hellish visuals, which are closer to psychedelic exercises like "Beyond the Black Rainbow" or "The Endless."

In the desert, brothers Robbie (writer-director Robbie Banfitch) and Scott (Scott Schamell), makeup artist Angie (Angela Basolis) and singer Michelle (Michelle May) perceive numerous strange forces, from underground electrical currents to axe-wielding figures. A sensory assault flips the film into nightmare territory, as Robbie encounters monsters, leaps through time and space, and possibly murders his companions. 

Many of these visions are barely visible, glimpsed only in pinhole lights or frenzied camera movement, which also increases the ceaseless disorientation. "The second half of 'The Outwaters' is more or less a nonstop ride of tension and chaos — and yet, it never feels totally chaotic," we wrote in our review.

Starring: Robbie Banfitch, Angela Basolis

Directed by Robbie Banfitch

Year: 2022

Runtime: 110 minutes

Rating: NR

Rotten Tomatoes score: 75%

Preceding "The Blair Witch Project" by one year but generating one-tenth the attention, "The Last Broadcast" also concerns documentarians who disappear while researching a folk legend. Here, the quarry is the Jersey Devil, and three of the four investigators die in pursuit. Is the survivor the killer, or the monster? Or someone else?

Both "Blair Witch" and "Broadcast" hook the viewer by promising that the found footage will reveal the truth. But "Broadcast" takes a deeper look at the idea of film "truth": we see what happened to the documentarians during the live broadcast that captured their deaths, but then pulls back the curtain to show that things are not as they seem. 

The payoff may lack the visceral punch of "Blair Witch," but it's still both creepy and thought-provoking. "This combination of traditional campfire-style storytelling and a scrappy, low-budget take on Hollywood soul-sucking offers solid chills and enough striking, tastefully handled effects to make it worth seeking out," noted Mondo Digital.

Starring: David Beard, Jim Seward

Director: Stefan Avalos

Year: 1998

Runtime: 86 minutes

Rating: NR

Rotten Tomatoes score: 50%

If "The Blair Witch Project" launched found footage horror, Ruggero Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust" established its template. One of several gruesome '80s-era Italian productions about cannibal tribes, inspired by the sensationalized "mondo" films of the 1960s, "Holocaust" is anchored by the subgenre's stock trope: lost film reels shot by a documentary crew who pay dearly for investigating a terrifying legend that proves true. But its "success" is due to the convincing nature of the found footage.

The segments look disturbingly real — so much so that "Cannibal Holocaust" was banned in numerous countries. Unfortunately, to heighten the realism, Deodato had real animals killed on film and also adheres to ugly stereotypes, which he addresses with a lame last-minute musing on "the real savages." As we wrote in a review, "It takes a moviegoer with a VERY high tolerance for gore and simulated depravity to make this a movie they revisit after the first time around."

Starring: Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi

Director: Ruggero Deodato

Year: 1980

Runtime: 95 minutes

Rating: NR

Rotten Tomatoes score: 65%

You can argue in favor of any of the scholarly reasons for why found footage horror movies are scary, but the fact is that audiences will find one frightening if it can convince them that what they are seeing is real. Big stars, special effects — none of it is necessary. A creepy premise and the ability to pull it off are the key factors, which was the case with "Paranormal Activity."

Like "The Blair Witch Project," "Paranormal Activity" is a bare-bones project, with a cast of unknowns and a skeletal budget (around $15,000). It also plays up the "real" aspect with clever gimmicks like a title card thanking the families of co-stars Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston, much in the same manner as "Blair Witch." Writer-director Oren Peli knows how to play on childhood fears like strange noises and unexplainable images, and by suggesting that there's a reason to be wary of such things, generated a multi-film franchise.

Starring: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat

Directed by: Oren Peli

Year: 2009

Runtime: 86 minutes

Rating: R

Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%

"V/H/S" is uneven, like all horror anthology films, but the 2012 feature and franchise starter also showed that found footage horror was not only still viable, but also remarkably adaptive. The five segments — directed by Ti West and Radio Silence, among others — set the template for films like "Unfriended" by finding clever means to integrate recording into their stories, from hidden camera glasses ("Amateur Night") to video chats ("The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger"). As with "Host," recording technology itself also proves a conduit for horror: In "Tuesday the 17th," camera glitches hide a homicidal entity.

The low-fi quality of amateur recording also helps to disguise the modest special effects, especially in "10/31/98." As the New York Times reported, "This compendium of creepitude embraces (and sometimes simulates) the idiosyncrasies of analog recording with varying degrees of skill and creativity."

Starring: Hannah Fierman, Helen Rogers

Directors: Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, Radio Silence

Year: 2012

Runtime: 115 minutes

Rating: R

Rotten Tomatoes score: 56%

Another missing filmmaker, more lost-and-found footage — at first blush, Koji Shiraishi's "Noroi: The Curse" sounds like any other found footage horror movie. But like "The Outwaters," "Noroi" pushes the subgenre's boundaries into new and terrifying areas. 

The vanished filmmaker is a paranormal researcher investigating several seemingly unrelated incidents — the mysterious sound of crying infants from an apartment, the disappearance of a young psychic, and an actress (Marika Matsumoto, playing herself) haunted by strange voices and dreams. What he finds is that the cases are connected to a village where a ritual was performed to restrain a demon — and which can no longer be performed, due to the village's destruction.

"Noroi" doesn't give answers easily, and Shiraishi prefers to maintain an atmosphere of dread over shock, save for one deeply disturbing flash-frame and the horrifying reveal of the researcher's fate. Yet "Noroi" lingers in ways that many other found footage horrors cannot. "Images from its final reel will still burn into your brain," stated Vox.

Starring: Jin Murakami, Marika Matsumoto

Directed by: Koji Shiraishi

Year: 2005

Runtime: 85 minutes

Rating: NR

Rotten Tomatoes score: 74% (on the Popcornmeter)

If there's a recurring fault to be found with found-footage horror films, it's that they often meander too long before getting down to business. Not so with the 2007 Spanish film "[REC]," which wastes little time in turning its core plot — a news team and paramedics are trapped in an apartment building where a virus turns the tenants into monsters — into five-alarm terror. Directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza hint that the virus's origin is supernatural, but wisely remain focused on depicting the carnage in claustrophobic, harrowing, real-time footage.

Three sequels delved more deeply into the demonic side with varying degrees of success ("[REC] 3" takes an ill-advised turn towards comedy), while John Erick Dowdle's near-shot-for-shot 2008 American remake, "Quarantine," underscored that less info is better (and that star Jennifer Carpenter deserved hazard pay). "'[REC]' offers wall-to-wall thrills and intensity, period," observed Film Threat.

Starring: Manuela Velasco, Pablo Rosso

Directors: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza

Year: 2007

Runtime: 78 minutes

Rating: NR

Rotten Tomatoes score: 90%

As "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity" showed, scaring audiences can be easy if you tap into primal fears. The 2014 indie "Creep" hinged on the enduring anxiety that a person is actually someone, or something, that they are not. And "Creep" pulls it off by casting one an inherently likeable actor — Mark Duplass — as its (literal) wolf in sheep's clothing.

Duplass's Josef is a study in extremes and contradictions, given to big hugs and intimate confessions one moment and then wearing a wolf mask to scare director Patrick Brice, who also plays Aaron, a videographer Josef hires to document his life. The abrupt shifts in behavior leave Aaron unmoored — is Josef overly friendly or something worse? Aaron isn't ever sure, even after he flees Josef's house. And that doubt ultimately costs him his life, as one of the biggest scares in found footage horror shows. Followed by a 2017 sequel and a 2024 spin-off series.

Starring: Mark Duplass, Patrick Brice

Directed by: Patrick Brice

Year: 2014

Runtime: 80 minutes

Rating: R

Rotten Tomatoes score: 91%

Say what you will about "The Blair Witch Project" — it's slowly paced, it muddles its payoff, it's one of the most overrated horror movies of the '90s — but the fact is that it not only established the ground rules of found footage horror (even more so than "Cannibal Holocaust") but also remains the textbook to which every film in the subgenre must refer.

Two things about "Blair Witch" are undeniable. The film absolutely nails the terror behind deep-rooted fears (of the dark, the woods, being lost): if the scene in which the three leads come across the wooded area filled with stick figures doesn't produce a shiver, there's a chance that your imagination may be irreparably damaged.

It also sold its "authenticity" better than any found footage horror before or since, thanks to canny production choices (having the actors use their own names) and its storied advertising campaign. "'The Blair Witch Project' puts a clever modern twist on the universal fear of the dark and things that go bump in the night," wrote Variety.

Starring: Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, Joshua Leonard

Directed by: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez

Year: 1999

Runtime: 87 minutes

Rating: R

Rotten Tomatoes score: 86%

The 2008 Australian thriller "Lake Mungo," about a grieving family and a deceased daughter who might not rest in peace, is equal parts pseudo-documentary and found footage horror. But (literal) found footage is the key to the film's melancholy mysteries and fuels its most frightening moments.

Director Joel Anderson made not only one of the most underrated found footage movies, but also one that unnerves in ways that many other found footage movies don't or can't attempt. "Mungo" is about the horror of bereavement, which as the film shows, can cause people to distrust their own eyes and betray their own hearts.

It tops our list because its tragic moments land as hard as its terrifying ones. "Take away the creeping sense of supernatural dread, and what remains is a low-key tale of a mourning family, made more tender by the broken stoicism of the survivors," claimed The Austin Chronicle.

Starring: Talia Zucker, David Pledger

Directed by: Joel Anderson

Year: 2008

Runtime: 88 minutes

Rating: R

Rotten Tomatoes score: 95%