Most movies or episodes of television we watch make a peculiar bargain with us: if we pretend, for the sake of our own enjoyment, that we are not looking at a screen, the piece of media becomes a window to an alternate reality. The watcher may be viewing a single shot or perspective, but they can pretend that there are infinite coherent reference frames on the other side of the fourth wall, all of which breathe reality into the story.

This suspension of disbelief is a magical thing. However, the fact that this agreement must be made implies that the story is what is paramount, and the cinema is just the package it is shipped in. The director or creator wishes to immerse his or her audience in a universe and works as hard as they can to blur the barriers that separate our own world of reality from imaginative fiction. This can be a good thing— the camera angles, the framing, the brightness, and all other factors should be controlled to make for the best possible viewing experience. It does mean, though, that the work’s “video-ness” must be hidden, controlled, and made almost imperceptible.

Most films— at least the ones I have watched— play by these rules. A precious few choose a different path and embrace the fact that they are on a camera. The story of Creep (2014) is that of a videographer filming; the story is told through the perspective of the person who is currently filming at all times, putting us directly into the shoes of the protagonist— until we aren’t. This sense of intimacy is impossible with the “all-seeing eye” approach; it scares us because we are watching a piece of film and place the actual events into our own universe instead of beyond the screen.

Low budget YouTube series are known for using this aspect and specializing it to the “found footage” genre, where a person claims to publish unedited footage they came across on old video media. Marble Hornets (2009) uses this paradigm to great effect, especially considering it was published on early YouTube, which gives it a feeling of authenticity that is impossible in a movie theater.

In some forms of media, the “video-ness” is being used for its artificiality instead of authenticity. In Poor Things (2023) and Better Call Saul (2015), black and white films draw our attention to the fact that this is a piece of media. The scene is “other” to the rest of the world; it does not belong to the same sphere as the other scenes in each respective work. This logic also applies to unnatural lenses and viewpoints; they bring a dream-like quality to the work that highlights the fact that although we may be peeking into an alternate reality, we are not an omniscient viewer and are only seeing a specific perspective.

This second category of film is equally interesting as the first, but I will save that analysis for another time. I want to focus on two films that utilize their own existence as a piece of media in their desire to be genuine and their successful quest to convince their watcher that they inhabit the same world as the one the watcher lives in. These phenomenal movies— The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Saiko! The Large Family (2009)— accomplish the same task by playing with the reliability of the filmer.

The Blair Witch Project tells the story of three college students— Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams— who go camping in the woods to collect information about the infamous Blair Witch and eventually produce a documentary about it. It is painfully obvious from the start of the film that these students are amateurs. They tell stories to spook each other, they argue about the directions, and they do not have a clear plan about where to go or what footage they actually need to collect beyond a specific landmark. Furthermore, the camera-women for the majority of the film, Heather, seems to have some sort of extreme emotional attachment to filming that goes beyond the professional. She films scenes, even early on in the film when nothing has gone awry, that it is hard to imagine a documentary crew videoing. She records the group’s arguments, even after they beg her to stop doing so. When the clues that something paranormal is going on become too obvious to ignore, she continues videoing them— even when her life is in danger.

This level of dedication serves the plot and ensures that there is a rationale behind the existence of the video evidence, but it also says something about the character in universe. Heather is a real person with serious issues. We find what she finds more believable because she is not an expert undergoing the routine task of documenting her findings; she is discovering a strange and dangerous phenomenon along with us. While watching the film, one does not necessarily trust Heather’s conclusions, but there is an implicit belief that this is an unfiltered version of the trio’s journey.

The audience never stops being aware that this is footage found on a camera. Heather’s shaky pans— which at times infuriate the watcher because of their near misses in capturing something crucial— enhance the film’s authenticity. This approach not only maintains the film’s grounding in reality but also elevates it from merely being a narrative set in another reality to a palpable event, one that seems to unfold spontaneously and possibly within our own world. You feel like you’re watching a Twitter video of some terrible event instead of a fiction crafted in a draft room.

All of this is accomplished by making it clear that the videographer is just a normal person. Saiko! The Large Family gets its trustworthiness from the exact opposite source. It is framed as a documentary of a large family in Japan, a country with plunging birth rates. The stated aim of the documentary is simple, and stated by the documentary’s Canadian host, Veronica Addison: “how does this family live?” To answer this question, Veronica and her crew live with the family over an extended period of time and conduct interviews of the family members both individually and in groups.

The structure heavily mimics, and blends into, other low-budget documentaries about obscure topics. Addison’s slow drawl is tiresome and almost never adds any information to the narrative. The questions the crew asks are for the most part superficial. This is not a good thing if the director was trying to make an excellent documentary of Japanese family life. For someone trying to inject a small dose of horror into an innocent package, though, it is perfect. Veronica and her crew are professionals who have to figure out what to film in order to fulfill their goal and make an interesting program. We know that they will work with the family to frame the events in a specific way, but we also trust them to be able to capture nuances that an ordinary person would miss. The audience is also provided with a rationale behind the constancy of filming that is required to convincingly slip hints: they have volumes of footage to work with, much of which is not included in the final product.

The existence of the camera crew is also a foil to the less-hidden strangeness of the family. Veronica is able to react when Rie gets violent towards the father during their first family dinner. We know why this clip was included— the makers of the documentary are going to include anything interesting to sell their story, even if it was not the initial course they charted— and why it was able to be filmed. When the mother starts acting suspicious later in the film— for instance, when she threatens to “disappear” her children— we maintain that this could actually be filmed, even though the mother is aware she is being videoed, because of the sheer length of the period that the documentary covers. Even the most guarded individuals will show cracks over weeks and months.

Unlike in The Blair Witch, where Heather’s heavy-handedness and eagerness to capture everything causes her to miss vital elements, Veronica and her crew’s professionalism capture everything, even that which family members wish to hide. During some of the individual interviews, especially those discussing sensitive information, the mother can be seen hidden in the foreground. When one of the younger sons is asked about their biological father before his death, the subtitles explain that the son thinks that his father was sick before he died. When the mother translates into English, the story shifts— the father was in good health and just disappeared.

Unlike some easter eggs or hidden messaging in other works, it is so easy to believe these subtleties are a symptom of the documentary-making process. Veronica does not understand Japanese, so she naturally does not suspect the mother of mistranslating; the person who puts the subtitles, potentially months or years later in a studio far away, is in no position to judge the framing of the onscreen footage. Similarly, when the mother is hidden in the background, it is barely perceptible to the point where there is little chance the camera crew would have discovered the mother. When Ryuta “falls” off the balcony and the camera is at its most shaky to capture this event live, his mother can be seen in the second floor window for a few frames. All of these would be missed by a crew making a low-budget documentary.

By identifying the filmmaker, the audience is able to subsume them into their own world instead of making the leap into a different one. We believe Heather because we do not believe she is capable of lying, and we believe Veronica because she has no reason to lie. This deepens the connection between the viewer and the content, making the perceived reality of the film's world more tangible and immediate. As viewers, we are drawn not just to the story being told, but also to the storytellers themselves—their limitations, their biases, and their interpretations of events become part of the narrative fabric. This layering of perspectives adds a meta-narrative dimension that challenges viewers to discern the different layers of the film’s reality. `