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After the significant found-footage horror surge of the 2000s inspired by The Blair Witch Project, the subgenre didn't disappear but rather evolved into different styles. Audiences saw the rise of computer-screen films, newly designed interpretations of the found-footage concept, and showy one-take movies largely taking over the screens where shakycam shots and unbelievably persistent filmmakers once reigned.

One major exception to this pattern is the continuing V/H/S franchise, a horror anthology that created its own boom in short-form horror and has kept the first-person vision alive through multiple seasonal releases. The eighth in the series, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, includes five short films that all occur around Halloween, strung together with a framing narrative (“Diet Phantasma”) that follows a brutally disengaged scientist conducting a set of product experiments on a diet cola that kills the people trying it in a variety of chaotic, extreme ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s world premiere at the 2025 version of the Fantastic Fest film festival, each of the V/H/S Halloween filmmakers gathered for a post-screening Q&A where filmmaker Anna Zlokovic characterized first-person scary movies as “extremely difficult to shoot.” Her co-directors cheered in reply. The directors later explained why they believe filming a found-footage project is tougher — or in some instances, simpler! — than making a traditional scary film.

The discussion has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What Makes First-Person Scary Movies So Challenging to Shoot?

One director, co-director of “Home Haunt”: In my view the most challenging aspect as an artist is having restrictions by your creative ideas, because everything has to be justified by the person holding the camera. So I believe that's the part that's incredibly tough for me, is to distance myself from my imagination and my ideas, and needing to remain in a box.

Another director, filmmaker of “Kidprint”: In fact mentioned to her this last night — I concur with that, but I also differ with it vehemently in a particular way, because I really love an open set that's all-around. I found this to be so freeing, because the movement and the filming are the identical. In conventional movie-making, the positioning and the coverage are diametrically opposed.

If the actor has to turn left, the coverage has to face right. And the reality that once you block the scene [in a found-footage movie], you have determined your shots — that was so amazing to me. I've seen numerous first-person movies, but until you shoot your first shaky-cam movie… Day one, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you understand where the person goes, that's the coverage — the camera doesn't shift left when the actor moves right, the lens moves forward when the character progresses. You film the scene once, and that's all — we don't have to get his line. It progresses in one direction, it arrives at the conclusion, and now we proceed in the following path. As a storyteller seeking simplicity, who hasn't shot a standard multi-angle shot in years, I was like, "This is cool, this restriction proves freeing, because you only have to figure out the same thing once."

Anna Zlokovic, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: In my opinion the hard part is the audience's acceptance for the audience. Each detail has to feel real. The audio has to feel like it's genuinely occurring. The acting have to appear believable. If you have something like an adult man in a nappy, how do you make that as plausible? It's absurd, but you have to create the sense like it exists in the world correctly. I found that to be challenging — you can lose people really at any point. It only requires a single mistake.

Another filmmaker, director of “Diet Phantasma”: I agree with Alex — as soon as you get the blocking down, it's excellent. But when you've got so many practical effects occurring at the same time, and trying to make sure you're panning onto it and not making errors, and then preparation attempts — you only get a limited number of time to get all these elements right.

Our set had a big wall in the way, and you couldn't hear anyone. Alex's [shoot] seems like very enjoyable. Ours was very hard. We had only 72 hours to do it. It can be freeing, because with found footage, you can take certain liberties. Even if you do fuck it up, it was destined to appear like low-quality anyway, because you're adding effects, or you're employing a low-quality camera. So it's good and it's bad.

R.H. Norman, co-director of “Home Haunt”: In my view finding rhythm is quite difficult if you're filming primarily single takes. The method we used was, "OK, this was filmed continuously. There's this guy, the father, and he operates the camera, and those are our cuts." That required a many fake oners. But you must live in the moment. You really have to see precisely your scene appears, because what's going into the lens, and in certain cases, there's no editing solution.

We were aware we had only a few attempts for each scene, because our film was highly demanding. We attempted to concentrate on finding varying paces between the attempts, because we didn't know what we were going to get in post-production. And the true difficulty 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 cuts are going to live, and if they're going to betray your whole enterprise of attempting to create like a fluid first-person camera traveling through a three-dimensional space.

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

Norman: Actually, she's right. It is simple. Just glitch the shit out of it.

Another filmmaker, creator of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the most challenging aspect is making the audience accept the characters using the camera would persist, rather than running away. That’s also the key element. There are certain found-footage fields where I just cannot accept the characters would keep filming.

And I think the camera should consistently arrive late to whatever's happening, because that happens in real life. For me, the magic is destroyed if the camera is already there, expecting something to happen. If you are here, recording, and you detect a sound and turn the camera, that noise is no longer there. And I think that gives a feeling of authenticity that it's crucial to preserve.

What's the Single Shot in Your Movie That You're Most Satisfied With?

One director: Our character seated at a four-monitor deck of editing software, with multiple clips running at the same time. That's completely practical. We shot those videos previously. Then the editing team processed them, and then we put them on four computers connected to several screens.

That frame of the character sitting there with multiple recordings running — I was like, 'This is the image I wanted out of this film.' If it was the only still I saw of this movie, I would be pressing play immediately: 'This looks cool!' But it was more difficult than it appears, because it's like four different crew members pressing spacebars at the identical moment. It looks so simple, but it took three days of planning to achieve that image.