This Pre-’Blair Witch’ Found Footage Horror Film Is Far More Realistic

The Big Picture

• Found footage subgenre went stale with filmmakers putting in little effort for easy money.
• Pre-
  Blair Witch
  films like
  Cannibal Holocaust
  set the stage for immersive found-footage horror.
• The Last Broadcast
  excels by combining documentary and found-footage styles for a chilling experience.

The found footage subgenre is got very tired very fast. We all love solid entries like As Above, So Below and Cloverfield, but let’s be honest — it’s been nice having a break from these movies in recent years. The late 2000s to mid-2010s saw a massive boom in these inexpensive horror films. While it was a fun ride at first, things got old fast after enough filmmakers decided they could spend next to no money and make a couple of bucks after putting in very little effort. But lest we forget that there was a time when the prospect of first-person horror movies was actually exciting!

While The Blair Witch Project is often cited as ground zero for found footage movies, it was actually just the film that popularized them. There had been a couple of footage pictures before Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez raked in $248 million at the box office, none of which were as financially successful. Still, many were extremely effective projects in their own right (1980’s Cannibal Holocaust led to legal proceedings because people thought the footage was real). One of these pre-BlairWitch titles is 1998’s The Last Broadcast. In many ways, Broadcast feels like a proto-Blair Witch. It tells the story of a couple of filmmakers who travel into the woods, only for everything to go completely wrong. This isn’t just a Blair Witch beta, though! Broadcast incorporates multiple narrative frameworks to tell its story, jumping from found footage to documentary and, briefly, a conventional third-person narrative. While it might not stick with you as much as its successor, this early-found footage endeavor is a must-watch for those looking to broaden their knowledge of this subgenre.

Before analog horror became an interesting throwback style for today’s filmmakers and TikTokers, movies like The Last Broadcast were unknowingly creating an aesthetic. The film was directed by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler and it was also the first film entirely shot and edited on consumer-grade digital equipment. Recent films like The Creator and The Outwaters have proven that you can make a phenomenal-looking picture with cameras that you can purchase in a Best Buy. Back in the ’90s, things were different. Shooting a movie on VHS tape meant a much grainier, relatable, and more disorienting experience than the typical studio method of shooting on 35mm film, and by most accounts, would probably be considered amateur. In short, it shouldn’t work. For a movie like The Last Broadcast, that’s exactly what you want.

Avalos and Weiler should be credited as some of the smartest and most forward-thinking horror filmmakers of the last 30 years. Aside from being the first film that was the first film ever streamed into theaters via satellite, its digital palette is key to every aspect of the experience. These guys leaned into what makes the grain of VHS, the natural fuzz and distortion of audio tapes, and primitive digital editing techniques so unsettling, well before its current popularization on social media. Broadcast couldn’t be a bigger departure from what people typically consider “cinematic.” Half of the time, it’s hard to make out exactly what we’re seeing or hearing. There’s even a subplot about cleaning up a destroyed digital image to help solve part of the mystery! In its use of consumer-grade tech, Broadcast becomes all the more relatable. If it was filmed with anything better, this movie wouldn’t be nearly as immersive.

The Last Broadcast isn’t your average found-footage film. It’s presented as a fake documentary that explores the mystery of a group of reality filmmakers that went missing after venturing into the New Jersey Pine Barrens in search of the Jersey Devil, only for one person to come out alive. The movie combines interview clips, voice-over narration, and a heap of stock footage to better bring its documentary style to life. Everything is understated in the best way possible. All of the characters rattle off monotone, cold monologs as they try to uncover what really happened to the victims. Broadcast has such a chilling and procedural feeling. They all want to do this case justice, but everyone has such a defeated effect. It’s almost as if a case that’s this dark just refuses to be solved, and everyone circling it knows it — whether they want to admit it or not.

This is a found-footage movie though, right? It can’t all be interview clips, can it? Well, Broadcast often cuts back and forth between this documentary-style framework and the footage that was shot by the missing filmmakers. Because of this, the first-person, handheld stretches of The Last Broadcast actually feel like real footage that was found at the scene of horrific events. The cast is full of unknowns (including the directing duo as the hosts of a paranormal-themed reality show, “Fact or Fiction”), so like the cast of The Blair Witch Project (also made up of actors who were unknown at the time), the characters feel like real people. You couldn’t pull this off if somebody like Brad Pitt was running around with a VHS camcorder! These performances are as natural as they come. This is especially important when it comes to the movie’s horror set pieces.

In many found footage films, everyone tends to overact the most once the scary stuff gets going. In Broadcast, as things are turning sour for the “Fact or Fiction” gang, they kind of laugh everything off. They seem to know that every paranormal occurrence or legend that they cover is fake, so when things start getting weird out in the woods, they take it as a funny coincidence. In the case of The Blair Witch Project, it works when the trio is spooked by running across piles of rocks, but it’s also nice to see a found footage movie where the characters don’t think much of the obvious warning signs that are coming their way. It feels like how a couple of real-life, twenty-something bros would react in this circumstance. Then, when things get truly awful, it’s just like real life in that the characters only have a moment to react before the worst hits.

‘The Last Broadcast’ Becomes a Traditional Movie in Its Most Terrifying Scene

The most disturbing sequence comes at a point in which the movie completely flips the script and actually… plays out like a normal film. Yeah, third-person narrative and all. It would be spoiling things by jumping too far into the actual weeds, but just know that there’s a fantastic couple of minutes when Broadcast is no longer a found-footage movie nor a fake documentary. The story choice here might not work for some, but if it does, it’ll stick with you for a while.

Despite being one of the more immersive entries in the found-footage subgenre, The Last Broadcast has fallen out of the conversation of the great movies in its lane. The Blair Witch Project was released only a year later and shattered both this movie’s box office and critical reception. You’d be lying if you said that Broadcast was a better movie, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a solid experience in its own right. They might share aesthetics, and similar locations, and both be incredibly bleak experiences, but The Blair Witch Project never feels as The Last Broadcast does. Found footage is all about fully immersing viewers into the story. The Last Broadcast isn’t as acclaimed as the phenomenon that hit theaters a year later, but you’ll have a hard time finding any movie in this subgenre that commits to the bit as well as this one does.

The Last Broadcast is available to watch on Tubi in the U.S.

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