(Photo by Artisan Entertainment/courtesy Everett Collection. The Blair Witch Project.)

100 Best Found Footage Movies

The Blair Witch Project wasn’t the first found footage movie — those honors belong to the bohemian exposé The Connection (made in 1961!) and The Last Broadcast (beating Blair to the punch by releasing a few months earlier), but Blair Witch‘s marketing campaign that claimed to present the actual final days of a trio of doomed amateur filmmakers was a viral monster before that was even a thing. Grossing over 250 times its less-than-a-million budget, the Project paved the way for hordes of films following in the found footage footsteps.

Naturally, most found footage movies are firmly in the horror camp, as the style gives ample room for dreadful atmosphere and jump scores, frequently presenting the movie as unearthed or forbidden media exposing people at their most up-close and vulnerable. Think Cloverfield, Host, Trollhunter, and Late Night With the Devil. Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity, V/H/S, and [REC] have created entire frachises out of found footage.

And the whole ‘up-close and vulnerable’ thing also works majorly for comedies, like What We Do in the Shadows, Project X, and One Cut of the Dead. Outside of those two major genres, we’ve also seen success with superheroes (Chronicle) and high-stakes dramatic thrillers (End of Watch, Searching).

To sort our guide to the 100 best found footage movies ever, we went by Tomatometer score, with Certified Fresh movies first. (Thanks to filmmaker Adrian Tofei on maintaining and updating this guide with us.)