What the camera saw: Witnessing and Intermedial Identities in Found Footage Horror

Using two independent faux documentary horror films – The Conspiracy (2012) and Savageland (2015) – as case studies, this keynote lecture will explore how found footage horror engages with themes of truth, testimony, and mediated identity. Both films, I argue, are fundamentally invested in how stories are constructed – and who constructs them – raising urgent questions around witnessing, evidence, and the instability of mediated reality.

Employing documentary-style framing, real archival footage, and strategies drawn from news media, YouTube conspiracy videos, and true crime aesthetics, I position The Conspiracy and Savageland as texts that deliberately blur the boundaries between fiction and reality in order to address pressing socio-political concerns. I demonstrate how both films utilise found footage horror conventions not only to unsettle, but to draw attention to the limits of witnessing in a post-truth media landscape, where narrative control rests with those in positions of power.

Ultimately, both The Conspiracy and Savageland are films that are situated within a liminal space between the horror genre’s more ambiguous political gestures and the more explicit aims of activist filmmaking. I will demonstrate that found footage horror – through its low-budget flexibility and formal ambiguity – can serve as a vital space for commentary on how identity is constructed, contested, and mediated in our contemporary screen culture.