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This week, found footage, fog, and a feline . . . some spoilers below . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ [•REC], dir. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007.

Overlap. Found footage horror movies are, by necessity, genre-mashups. There must be footage to find, after all, and it isn't horror movie dailies—it's documentary, YouTube stream, home movie, bodycam, or perhaps, as in Rec, local news tape. It's the genre overlap between the horror situation and the footage that creates the fascinating interplay often found in these films.

Local news. Rec asks us to think about local news, a genre that can be a difficult watch. It can be vapid and stiff, though its blandly sincere presentational style does afford a measure of unintentional comedy. Rec begins as footage for a feature story about a crew of firemen that, for me, would be a difficult watch. But local news is also a vital, on-the-ground record of what's actually happening around us. I know that LAPD assaulted protestors during the Black Lives Matter uprising because I watched it happen, in real time, on my local news. In Rec, the reporter and cameraman embody both these aspects of local news—the vibe is off, and yet they tenaciously keep rolling through everything, pushing back even when they’re told by authorities that they can’t film. Found footage horror often elicits the question, “Why are they still filming with everything that’s going on?” That’s not really an issue here. It's easy to believe that the local news keeps rolling.