The biggest exception to that rule is the ongoing V/H/S series, a horror anthology that spawned its own boom in short-form horror and has kept the found-footage dream alive through seven themed installments. The eighth in the series, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, features five shorts that all take place around Halloween, strung together with a wrapper story (“Diet Phantasma”) that has a brutally disengaged scientist leading a series of consumer product tests on a diet cola that kills the people sampling it in a variety of messy, over-the-top ways.
At V/H/S Halloween’s world premiere at the 2025 edition of Austin’s Fantastic Fest film festival, all seven V/H/S Halloween directors assembled for a post-screening Q&A where director Anna Zlokovic described found-footage horror as “hard as fuck to shoot.” Her co-directors cheered in response. Polygon sat down with all of them afterward to unpack why they feel shooting a found-footage project is more difficult — or in one case, easier! — than making a conventional horror movie.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: I’ve talked to found-footage horror directors before about individual shots or moments that were difficult to get right, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone just outright say the genre is universally difficult. What do you see as the major challenges in found-footage horror?
Micheline Pitt, co-director of “Home Haunt”: I think the most challenging thing as an artist is being limited by your creative ideas, because everything has to be motivated by the person holding the camera. So I think that’s the thing that’s hard as fuck for me, is to separate myself from my creativity and my ideas, and having to stay in a box.
Alex Ross Perry, director of “Kidprint”: I actually told her this last night — I agree with that, but I also disagree with it vehemently in a very specific way, because I really love an open set that’s 360 degrees. I found this to be so liberating, because the blocking and the coverage are the same. In traditional filmmaking, the blocking and the coverage are diametrically opposed. [Chorus of “Ooh!” “Hmm!”]
If the character has to look left, the coverage has to look right. And the fact that once you block the scene [in a found-footage movie], you have figured out your coverage — that was so amazing to me. I’ve seen 500 found-footage films, but until you shoot your first found-footage project… Day one, you’re like, [realization] “Ohhh!”
So once you know where the character moves, that’s the coverage — the camera doesn’t move left when the character moves right, the camera moves forward when the character moves forward. You shoot the scene once, and that’s it — we don’t have to get his line, his line, his line. It moves in one direction, it reaches the end, and now we move in the next direction. As a frustrated narrative filmmaker who hasn’t shot a traditional-coverage scene in years, I was like, “This is cool, this restriction actually is liberating, because you only have to figure out the same thing once.”
Anna Zlokovic, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: I think the hard part is the suspension of disbelief for the audience. Everything has to feel real. The sound has to feel like it’s actually happening. The performances have to feel grounded. If you have something like an adult man in a diaper, how do you sell that as realistic? It’s absurd, but you have to make it feel like it exists in the world properly. I found that to be challenging — you can lose people really at any moment. It just takes one fuck-up.
Bryan M. Ferguson, director of “Diet Phantasma”: I agree with Alex — as soon as you get the blocking down, it’s great. But when you’ve got so many practical effects happening at one time, and trying to make sure you’re panning onto it and not fucking up, and then setup takes — you only get a certain amount of time to get all these things right.
Our set had a big wall in the way, and you couldn’t hear anybody. Alex’s [shoot] sounds like great fun. Ours was very hard. I only had three days to do it. It is liberating, because with found footage, you can take certain liberties with it. Even if you do fuck it up, it was going to look like trash anyway, because you’re putting filters on it, or you’re using a garbage camera. So it’s good and it’s bad.
R.H. Norman, co-director of “Home Haunt”: I would say finding rhythm is very challenging if you’re shooting mostly oners. Our approach was, “OK, this is edited in camera. There’s this guy, the dad, and he turns the camera on and off, and those are our cuts.” That entailed a lot of fake oners. But you really have to live in the moment. You really have to see exactly how your shot feels, because what’s going into the camera, and in certain cases, there’s no cutting around it.
We knew we only had two or three takes per shot, because ours was very ambitious. We really tried to focus on finding different rhythms between the takes, because we didn’t know what we were going to get in editing. And the real challenge with found footage is, you’re having to hide those cuts on moving fog, on all sorts of stuff, and you really never know where those cuts are going to live, and whether they’re going to betray your whole enterprise of trying to feel like a seamless point-of-view camera moving through a three-dimensional space.
Zlokovic: You want to avoid trying to hide it with glitches as much as you can, but you have to sometimes, because the shit’s hard.
Norman: Actually, she’s right. This is easy. Just glitch the shit out of it. [General laughter.]
Paco Plaza, director of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the most challenging thing is making the audience believe the people operating the camera would continue, instead of running away. That’s also the most important thing. There are some found-footage fields where I simply don’t believe the characters would continue recording.
And I think the camera should always 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 hear a noise and pan toward it, that noise is already gone. And I think that gives a feeling of truth that it’s very important to preserve.
What’s the single shot in your movie that you’re proudest of?
Perry: Our character sitting at a four-monitor deck of editing software, with four different videos playing out at the same time. That’s all analog. We shot those videos days earlier. Then the editor treated them, and then we put them on four computers hooked up to four monitors.
That frame of the character sitting there with four different videotapes playing — I was like, ‘This is the image I wanted out of this project.’ If it was the only still I saw of this movie, I would be pressing play right now: ‘This looks cool!’ But it was harder than it looks, because it’s like four different art people pressing spacebars at the same time. It looks so simple, but it took three days of planning to get to that image.
Pitt: The witch’s flight for us. That was my favorite scene — selfishly, because I got to perform it, but also, it was an impossible shot that we did. It took us hitting all those marks. We did two takes, and that’s all we had. And I felt really proud of us in that moment and that was my favorite.
Zlokovic: There’s a shot in mine where the girls run up the stairs, they try to open another door, they go into a playroom, the cheerleader throws blocks, they go to the cheerleader, they see the mommy behind the door, they go out, they go down the stairs, they go into the poop room — that was all one shot, we didn’t do any cuts there. And I’m proud of that because it was hard, but it was cool to see it come together. The first five takes suuuuuucked, and then it started to feel real, and that was cool.
Ferguson: Mine was when the little boy explodes on the glass. [General cheers and whoops] It was like the last, we had the cannon set up with all the effects, and we only had like five minutes to get it right. It didn’t work. And then we had to quickly reset it, and we got the shot on the very last part of the day. But we got the laugh I was hoping for.
Casper Kelly, director of “Fun Size”: The shot at the end of the movie, when they’re on the air-duct conveyor belt, and she’s getting proposed to, and she’s crawling backward. It always makes me laugh.
Plaza: For me, when the boy starts vomiting up eyeballs. That was very, very fun to shoot. We were giggling the whole time. It was really nice. He was very skilled with his tongue — it’s not easy to pop four eyeballs out of your mouth, but he did. So I’m very proud of that.
V/H/S Halloween is streaming on Shudder now.
