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Following the significant shaky-cam thriller surge of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't disappear but rather transformed into different styles. Viewers saw the emergence of “screenlife” movies, newly designed versions of the first-person perspective, and showy one-take movies dominating the screens where unsteady footage and unbelievably persistent camera operators once ruled.

One major exception to this trend is the continuing V/H/S series, a horror anthology that spawned its own surge in short-form horror and has maintained the found-footage dream active through multiple themed installments. The latest in the series, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, includes several shorts that all take place around Halloween, connected with a wrapper story (“Diet Phantasma”) that follows a brutally disengaged researcher leading a series of consumer product tests on a diet cola that kills the people trying it in a range of messy, extreme 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 assembled for a post-screening Q&A where filmmaker Anna Zlokovic described found-footage horror as “hard as fuck to shoot.” Her co-directors applauded in response. The directors later explained why they believe shooting a first-person film is tougher — or in one case, easier! — than making a conventional horror movie.

The discussion has been condensed for brevity and understanding.

What Makes First-Person Scary Movies So Difficult to Film?

Micheline Pitt, co-director of “Home Haunt”: I think the biggest thing as an creator is having restrictions by your creative ideas, because everything has to be motivated by the person holding the camera. So I think that's the thing that's incredibly tough for me, is to distance myself from my creativity and my concepts, and having to stay in a confined space.

Alex Ross Perry, filmmaker of “Kidprint”: I actually mentioned to her this last night — I agree with that, but I also disagree with it vehemently in a very specific way, because I really love an unrestricted environment that's 360 degrees. I found this to be so liberating, because the blocking and the filming are the identical. In conventional movie-making, the positioning and the shots are completely opposite.

If the actor has to look left, the camera angle has to look right. And the reality that once you set up the action [in a first-person film], you have figured out your coverage — that was so amazing to me. I have watched numerous found-footage films, but until you film your first found-footage project… Day one, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you know where the person goes, that's the coverage — the camera doesn't shift left when the character goes right, the camera advances when the person progresses. You shoot the sequence one time, and that's it — we don't have to get his line. It progresses in a single path, it reaches the conclusion, and now we proceed in the next direction. As a frustrated narrative filmmaker, avoiding a traditional-coverage scene in a long time, I was like, "This is great, this limitation actually is liberating, because you just need to figure out the same thing once."

A third director, filmmaker of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: In my opinion the hard part is the suspension of disbelief for the viewers. Everything has to appear authentic. The audio has to feel like it's actually happening. The performances have to appear believable. If you have something like an grown man in a diaper, how do you sell that as realistic? It's absurd, but you have to create the sense like it fits in the world correctly. I found that to be challenging — you can lose the audience easily at any point. It only requires one fuck-up.

Bryan M. Ferguson, director of “Diet Phantasma”: I concur with Alex — once you finalize the movement, it's excellent. But when you've got so many physical effects occurring at one time, and ensuring you're panning onto it and not fucking up, and then setup takes — you have a certain amount of time to achieve all these elements 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. I only had 72 hours to complete it. It can be freeing, because with found footage, you can take certain liberties. Although you do fuck it up, it was going to look like trash anyway, because you're putting filters on it, or you're employing a garbage camera. So it's beneficial and it's challenging.

A co-director, co-director of “Home Haunt”: I would say finding rhythm is quite difficult if you're shooting primarily oners. Our approach was, "OK, this is edited in camera. We have a character, the father, and he turns the camera on and off, and those are our edits." That required a many simulated single shots. But you really have to live in the moment. You need to observe exactly how your shot appears, because what is captured by the camera, and in some instances, there's no cutting around it.

We knew we only had two or three attempts for each scene, because ours was very ambitious. We really tried to concentrate on discovering different rhythms between the attempts, because we were unsure what we were would achieve in post-production. And the real challenge with found footage is, you're having to hide those edits on shifting mist, on all sorts of stuff, and you really never know where those edits are will be placed, and whether they're will undermine your whole enterprise of trying to feel like a seamless point-of-view lens moving through a realistic environment.

The director: You want to avoid concealing it with digital errors as much as you can, but you must sometimes, because the shit's hard.

Norman: In fact, she is correct. It is simple. Simply add glitches the content out of it.

Another filmmaker, creator of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the biggest aspect is convincing the viewers accept the people operating the device would persist, rather than fleeing. That’s also the key thing. There are certain found-footage fields where I just cannot accept the characters would continue recording.

And I think the camera should consistently be delayed to any event, because that happens in reality. For me, the illusion is destroyed if the camera is already there, expecting something to happen. If you are present, filming, and you hear a noise and pan toward it, that sound is no longer there. And I think that creates a sense of authenticity that it's crucial to maintain.

Which Is the One Scene in Your Movie That You're Proudest Of?

Perry: Our character sitting at a four-monitor deck of editing software, with four different videos running at the identical moment. That's all analog. We filmed those clips days earlier. Then the editor treated them, and then we loaded them on four computers connected to several screens.

That shot of the person sitting there with four different videotapes running — I was like, 'That is the image I wanted out of this film.' If it was the sole image I viewed of this film, I would be starting it immediately: 'This appears interesting!' But it was harder than it appears, because it's like multiple art people activating playback at the identical moment. It looks so simple, but it took three days of preparation to get to that image.