It has been 25 years since The Blair Witch Project first haunted audiences with its eerie, exhilarating, and at times experimental take on found footage horror.

Often celebrated, the film is still seen as emblematic of the sub-genre, cleverly playing with our understandings of reality and expertly exploiting to macabre effect the supposed authenticity of amateur filmmaking. This course views this particular anniversary as an opportunity to not just revisit and closely explore The Blair Witch Project and its legacy, but to sharply analyze and even rethink its impact on found footage horror over the last few decades.

Across the span of five weeks, our course examines found footage horror from 1999 to the present; from modern American classics like Paranormal Activity (2007) to more recent South Korean chillers like Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018), we’ll investigate the continued cultural, commercial, and critical relevance of found footage horror. The course will also navigate the sub-genre’s web of connections across the media landscape - from documentary, home movie, and avant-garde practices, to reality TV, web video, and the artificial authenticity of social media. Ghoulishly blurring the line between fact and fiction, found footage horror is an especially important object of study in a media world where notions of truth are regularly questioned, manipulated, and subverted - sometimes to terrifying ends.

About Alex Svensson

Alex Svensson is an Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College in their Visual & Media Arts department; he has also been a Lecturer of film and media studies at MIT. His research primarily focuses on horror media, media controversies, and promotional culture. Alex's work can be found in the book Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (ed. Dawn Keetley), as well as in Monstrum, Horror Homeroom, in media res, and Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies.