Fear, trauma and found footage : how found footage horror can help us feel better

Why would people experiencing a global pandemic seek out a pandemic disaster movie? Why would horror films help people feel better about an unrelated real world source of health anxiety? Why do people enjoy horror cinema at all? This project seeks to understand the mechanism by which horror scares and how this can be a therapeutic or preventative process, and then understand the found footage subgenre of horror by the function of this mechanical framework. This entails outlining a phenomenologically biocultural approach to horror, as informed by the work of scholars and researchers like Mathias Clasen et al, Coltan Scrivener, Julian Hanich and Adam Daniel as well as radical embodied cognition and affect theory. This approach argues that the effects of horror are fundamentally biological and cultural at the same time, and that horror provides an opportunity to vicariously experience and as such survive danger. I argue that found footage horror should defined not by the visual or formal traits the presentation seeks to emulate, but rather its relationship to the viewer; found footage horror will always feature a camera-using person or group who seeks to record. The distinction between found footage and mockumentary is in the embodiment or foregrounding of the people behind the camera, though these lines can often become blurred. This grounding of the camera-user furthers the impact of horror elements both specific to found footage and shared with more traditionally presented cinema. Finally, I will use the established methodology and the prior definitions of found footage and its thematic movements to break down Host (Savage, 2020) in order to understand both how it scares and how it can be seen as potentially therapeutic during a time of global pandemic