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After the significant shaky-cam thriller surge of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't disappear but rather evolved into different styles. Viewers saw the emergence of “screenlife” movies, newly designed versions of the found-footage concept, and showy one-take movies largely taking over the cinemas where shakycam shots and unbelievably persistent camera operators once ruled.

A significant outlier to this pattern is the continuing V/H/S franchise, a scary-story collection that created its own surge in brief scary films and has kept the found-footage dream active through seven seasonal releases. The eighth in the franchise, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, includes several shorts that all take place around Halloween, connected with a wrapper story (“Diet Phantasma”) that follows a brutally disengaged scientist conducting a set of product experiments on a soda drink that eliminates the people trying it in a range of messy, extreme ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s world premiere at the 2025 version of Austin’s Fantastic Fest, all seven V/H/S Halloween directors assembled for a question-and-answer session where director Anna Zlokovic characterized first-person scary movies as “hard as fuck to shoot.” Her co-directors applauded in response. The directors later explained why they feel filming a first-person film is tougher — or in some instances, easier! — than making a conventional horror movie.

The discussion has been edited for concision and understanding.

What Makes First-Person Scary Movies So Challenging to Film?

One director, director of “Home Haunt”: I think the most challenging aspect as an creator is being limited by your artistic vision, because everything has to be justified by the character holding the camera. So I believe that's the part that's hard as fuck for me, is to distance myself from my creativity and my concepts, and having to stay in a box.

Another director, director of “Kidprint”: In fact mentioned to her this last night — I agree with that, but I also disagree with it vehemently in a very specific way, because I greatly enjoy an open set that's 360 degrees. I discovered this to be so freeing, because the movement and the coverage are the same. In conventional movie-making, the positioning and the shots are diametrically opposed.

If the actor has to turn 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 shots — that was so remarkable to me. I have watched 500 found-footage films, but until you film your first shaky-cam movie… Day one, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you understand where the person goes, that's the coverage — the lens doesn't shift left when the actor goes right, the lens moves forward when the character progresses. You film the sequence one time, and that's it — we avoid get his line. It progresses in a single path, it reaches the conclusion, and then we proceed in the next direction. As a frustrated narrative filmmaker, who hasn't shot a traditional-coverage scene in years, I was like, "This is great, this restriction actually is liberating, because you just need to figure out the same thing one time."

Anna Zlokovic, filmmaker of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: I think the difficult aspect is the audience's acceptance for the audience. Everything has to feel real. The sound has to feel like it's genuinely occurring. The performances have to appear believable. If you have an element like an adult man in a nappy, how do you make that as plausible? It's absurd, but you have to create the sense like it exists in the world properly. I discovered that to be difficult — you can lose people really at any point. It only requires a single mistake.

Another filmmaker, creator of “Diet Phantasma”: I concur with Alex — as soon as you get the blocking down, it's great. But when you've got numerous practical effects happening at one time, and ensuring you're capturing it and not making errors, and then setup takes — you have a limited number of time to achieve all these things correctly.

The filming location had a big wall in the way, and you couldn't hear anyone. Alex's [shoot] seems like very enjoyable. Ours was very hard. We had only three days to do it. It can be liberating, because with first-person filming, you can take certain liberties. Although you do fuck it up, it was destined to appear like trash anyway, because you're adding effects, or you're using a low-quality camera. So it's good and it's challenging.

R.H. Norman, co-director of “Home Haunt”: In my view establishing pace is quite difficult if you're filming mostly single takes. The method we used was, "OK, this is filmed continuously. We have a character, the father, and he operates the camera, and that creates our cuts." That entailed a lot of fake oners. But you must live in the moment. You need to see precisely your shot appears, because what's going into the camera, and in some instances, there's no editing solution.

We knew we had only a few attempts for each scene, because ours was very ambitious. We really tried to concentrate on finding varying paces between the takes, because we were unsure what we were going to get in editing. And the true difficulty with found footage is, you're needing to conceal those cuts on shifting mist, on all sorts of stuff, and you cannot predict where those cuts are going to live, and whether they're will undermine your whole enterprise of attempting to create like a seamless first-person lens traveling through a realistic environment.

The director: You want to avoid concealing it with glitches as much as you can, but you must occasionally, because the shit's hard.

Norman: Actually, she's right. It is simple. Simply add glitches the content out of it.

Paco Plaza, creator of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the most challenging aspect is making the viewers believe the characters operating the device would persist, rather than fleeing. That’s additionally the key thing. There are some first-person scenarios where I simply don't believe the people would keep filming.

And I think the device should consistently be delayed to any event, because that occurs in reality. For me, the magic is destroyed if the camera is already there, expecting an event to occur. If you are here, recording, and you detect a sound and pan toward it, that noise is no longer there. And I think that gives a feeling of authenticity that it's crucial to preserve.

Which Is the Single Shot in Your Movie That You're Most Satisfied With?

One director: The protagonist sitting at a four-monitor deck of video editing, with four different videos running at the identical moment. That's all analog. We filmed those videos previously. Then the editing team processed them, and then we loaded them on four computers connected to four monitors.

That frame of the character sitting there with multiple recordings playing — I was like, 'That is the visual I wanted out of this project.' If it was the sole image I saw of this film, I would be starting it immediately: 'This appears interesting!' But it was harder than it looks, because it's like four different crew members activating playback at the same time. It looks so simple, but it took three days of planning to achieve that image.