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Following the massive found-footage horror boom of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the subgenre didn't fade away but rather transformed into different styles. Viewers witnessed the emergence of “screenlife” movies, freshly stylized interpretations of the found-footage concept, and ambitious single-shot films largely taking over the cinemas where unsteady footage and unbelievably persistent camera operators once reigned.

A significant outlier to this pattern is the continuing V/H/S series, a scary-story collection that spawned its own boom in short-form horror and has maintained the found-footage dream active through multiple themed installments. The eighth in the franchise, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, features several short films that all occur around Halloween, connected with a framing narrative (“Diet Phantasma”) that follows a completely detached scientist leading a set of consumer product tests on a soda drink that eliminates the participants sampling it in a range of messy, over-the-top ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s world premiere at the 2025 version of the Fantastic Fest film festival, all seven V/H/S Halloween filmmakers gathered for a question-and-answer session where filmmaker Anna Zlokovic characterized found-footage horror as “extremely difficult to shoot.” Her fellow filmmakers applauded in reply. They later explained why they feel shooting a first-person film is tougher — or in one case, simpler! — than making a conventional horror movie.

The discussion has been edited for concision and clarity.

What Makes Found-Footage Horror So Difficult to Film?

Micheline Pitt, director of “Home Haunt”: I think the most challenging thing as an artist is having restrictions by your artistic vision, because everything has to be justified by the character holding the camera. So I believe that's the thing that's incredibly tough for me, is to separate myself from my imagination and my concepts, and having to stay in a box.

Another director, director of “Kidprint”: In fact mentioned to her this last night — I concur with that, but I also differ with it strongly in a very specific way, because I greatly enjoy an unrestricted environment that's 360 degrees. I discovered this to be so freeing, because the blocking and the coverage are the identical. In conventional movie-making, the positioning and the shots are completely opposite.

If the actor has to turn left, the coverage has to look right. And the fact that once you block the scene [in a found-footage movie], you have figured out your shots — that was so amazing to me. I've seen numerous found-footage films, but until you shoot your first shaky-cam movie… The first day, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you know where the character goes, that's the filming — the camera doesn't shift left when the character goes right, the camera moves forward when the character moves forward. You shoot the scene one time, and that's all — we don't have to get his line. It progresses in one direction, it reaches the conclusion, and now we move in the next direction. As a storyteller seeking simplicity, avoiding a traditional-coverage scene in years, I was like, "This is great, this limitation proves freeing, because you only have to figure out the same thing one time."

Anna Zlokovic, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: I think the hard part is the audience's acceptance for the audience. Everything has to feel real. The audio has to feel like it's actually happening. The acting have to feel grounded. If you have an element like an adult man in a diaper, how do you sell that as plausible? It's ridiculous, but you have to make it feel like it exists in the environment properly. I found that to be challenging — you can lose the audience really at any point. It just takes one fuck-up.

Another filmmaker, director of “Diet Phantasma”: I concur with Alex — once you get the blocking down, it's great. But when you've got numerous physical effects occurring at one time, and ensuring you're capturing it and not making errors, and then preparation attempts — you only get a certain amount of opportunities to get all these things right.

Our set had a big wall in the way, and you were unable to hear anyone. Alex's [shoot] seems like very enjoyable. Our project was extremely difficult. We had only 72 hours to complete it. It is liberating, because with first-person filming, you can take certain liberties. Although you make a mistake, it was going to look like low-quality anyway, because you're putting filters on it, or you're using a garbage camera. So it's beneficial and it's bad.

A co-director, co-director of “Home Haunt”: In my view finding rhythm is quite difficult if you're filming mostly oners. Our approach was, "Alright, this is filmed continuously. We have a character, the father, and he operates the camera, and those are our edits." That entailed a many fake oners. But you really have to be present. You really have to observe precisely your scene feels, because what's going into the lens, and in some instances, there's no cutting around it.

We knew we had only a few takes per shot, because our film was highly demanding. We attempted to focus on finding varying paces between the takes, because we didn't know what we were would achieve in editing. And the real challenge with first-person filming is, you're needing to conceal those edits on shifting mist, on various elements, and you cannot predict where those cuts are will be placed, and whether they're will undermine your entire project of trying to feel like a seamless first-person camera traveling through a three-dimensional space.

The director: You want to avoid trying to hide it with glitches as often as possible, but you have to occasionally, because the shit's hard.

Her colleague: In fact, she's right. This is easy. Just glitch the content out of it.

Another filmmaker, creator of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the biggest thing is making the audience accept the characters using the device would continue, rather than fleeing. That’s additionally the most important element. There are some found-footage fields where I simply don't believe the people would continue recording.

And I think the device should consistently arrive late to any event, because that happens in reality. For me, the magic is destroyed if the camera is already there, anticipating an event to happen. If you are present, filming, and you detect a sound and pan toward it, that sound is no longer there. And I think that gives a sense of authenticity that it's very important to preserve.

What's the Single Shot in Your Movie That You're Proudest Of?

One director: The protagonist seated at a multi-screen setup of editing software, with multiple clips running 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 frame of the person positioned there with multiple recordings playing — I was like, 'That is the visual I envisioned out of this film.' If it was the sole image I saw of this movie, I would be starting it right now: 'This appears interesting!' But it was more difficult than it appears, because it's like four different crew members pressing spacebars at the same time. It appears straightforward, but it took three days of planning to get to that image.