The Innkeepers

 

To even the most rational and sceptical of people there is something irresistible about a good ghost story. We've all heard it a thousand times before, family move in to house, unexplainable events start happening, things start to turn nasty, outside help is bought in to fight the ghost and final battle ahoy! Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, The Shining, Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring... The list goes on. 

The Collingswood Story

 

Despite the success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999 it wasn’t until around 2007 when the likes of REC, Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield came along that any film makers were able to really cash in on the found footage format. The main contributing factor being that, by this time high quality equipment was now so cheap and widespread that the concept of documenting every split second of your life was a feat achievable by a majority of society.

Evil Things

 

Genre films can have a reputation for being formulaic, recycling old plots that are carbon copies of a defining predecessor. So it all comes down to the quality of the execution to distinguish one from the other, whether it’s the technical prowess, the acting, an interesting self-referential twist or solid story telling. Either way you can be pretty sure that James Bond is going to escape from the tank of carnivorous laser guided newts, Jason Statham is definitely going to solve his problems with face punching and everyone who isn't the girl with the troubled past who is charmingly insecure and hot but not slutty, is going to die.

V/H/S

 

An obsolete media format may seem like an odd subject for a horror film but 2012 saw the release of V/H/S all the same. Rather than being a monster movie based around The Mighty Boosh’s BetaMax Bandit, V/H/S is a portmanteau film consisting of found footage shorts by a collection of modern horror directors.