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After the significant found-footage horror surge of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't fade away but rather transformed into new forms. Viewers saw the rise of “screenlife” movies, newly designed versions of the first-person perspective, and showy one-take movies largely taking over the screens where unsteady footage and improbably dogged filmmakers once ruled.

A major outlier to this trend is the ongoing V/H/S franchise, a horror anthology that spawned its own boom in short-form horror and has kept the first-person vision active through seven seasonal releases. The latest in the franchise, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, features five shorts that all take place around Halloween, connected with a framing narrative (“Diet Phantasma”) that follows a brutally disengaged scientist leading a series of consumer product tests on a soda drink that eliminates the people sampling it in a range of messy, extreme ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s global debut at the 2025 version of Austin’s Fantastic Fest, all seven V/H/S Halloween filmmakers assembled for a post-screening Q&A where director Anna Zlokovic characterized first-person scary movies as “hard as fuck to shoot.” Her fellow filmmakers applauded in reply. The directors later explained why they believe filming a first-person film is more difficult — or in one case, easier! — than making a conventional horror movie.

The discussion has been edited for brevity and understanding.

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

Micheline Pitt, co-director of “Home Haunt”: In my view the most challenging thing as an artist is having restrictions by your artistic vision, because each element has to be justified by the character holding the camera. So I believe that's the thing that's hard as fuck for me, is to distance myself from my creativity and my ideas, and having to stay in a box.

Another director, filmmaker of “Kidprint”: I actually told her this last night — I agree with that, but I also differ with it strongly in a particular way, because I really love an open set that's 360 degrees. I discovered this to be so freeing, because the blocking 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 camera angle has to face right. And the reality that once you set up the action [in a first-person film], you have determined your shots — that was so amazing to me. I've seen numerous found-footage films, but until you film your initial shaky-cam movie… The first day, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you know where the character moves, that's the coverage — the camera doesn't shift left when the character goes right, the lens moves forward when the person progresses. You film the scene one time, and that's all — we don't have to get his line. It progresses in a single path, it reaches the end, and then we proceed in the following path. As a frustrated narrative filmmaker, who hasn't shot a standard multi-angle shot in years, I was like, "This is great, this restriction proves freeing, because you only have to figure out the identical element once."

A third director, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: I think the difficult aspect is the suspension of disbelief for the audience. Each detail has to appear authentic. The sound has to seem like it's genuinely occurring. The acting have to appear believable. If you have an element like an adult man in a diaper, how do you make that as realistic? It's ridiculous, but you have to make it feel like it fits in the world properly. I discovered that to be difficult — you can lose the audience easily at any point. It only requires a single mistake.

Another filmmaker, creator of “Diet Phantasma”: I agree with Alex — as soon as you finalize the movement, it's excellent. But when you've got numerous physical effects happening at one time, and trying to make sure you're capturing it and not fucking up, and then preparation attempts — you have a limited number of time to get all these things right.

Our set had a large barrier in the path, and you couldn't hear anybody. Alex's [shoot] seems like great fun. Our project was very hard. We had only three days to do it. It is liberating, because with first-person filming, you can take certain liberties. Even if you do fuck it up, it was going to look like trash regardless, because you're adding effects, or you're using a garbage camera. So it's good and it's bad.

A co-director, co-director of “Home Haunt”: In my view establishing pace is quite difficult if you're filming primarily oners. Our approach was, "OK, this was edited in camera. We have a character, the dad, and he turns the camera on and off, and that creates our edits." That required a lot of fake oners. But you really have to be present. You need to observe precisely your shot feels, because what is captured by the camera, and in some instances, there's no cutting around it.

We were aware we only had a few attempts for each scene, because ours was very ambitious. We really tried to focus on discovering varying paces between the attempts, because we were unsure what we were would achieve in post-production. And the true difficulty with found footage is, you're needing to conceal those edits on moving fog, on all sorts of stuff, and you really never know where those edits are will be placed, and if they're going to betray your entire project of attempting to create like a seamless point-of-view lens traveling through a three-dimensional space.

Zlokovic: You want to avoid concealing it with digital errors as much as you can, but you have to sometimes, because the shit's hard.

Her colleague: In fact, she is correct. It is simple. Simply add glitches the content out of it.

Another filmmaker, director of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the biggest thing is making the viewers accept the people using the device would persist, rather than fleeing. That’s additionally the most important thing. There are some found-footage fields where I just cannot accept the characters would keep filming.

And I think the camera should consistently arrive late to any event, because that happens in real life. For me, the illusion is ruined if the camera is already there, anticipating something to occur. If you are present, filming, and you detect a sound and pan toward it, that noise is no longer there. And I think that creates a feeling of authenticity that it's very important to maintain.

Which Is the One Scene in Your Movie That You're Proudest Of?

One director: The protagonist seated at a multi-screen setup of editing software, with multiple clips running at the identical moment. That's completely practical. We shot those clips days earlier. Then the editing team processed them, and then we loaded them on four computers hooked up to several screens.

That shot of the character sitting there with multiple recordings playing — I was like, 'This is the image I wanted out of this project.' If it was the only still I viewed of this film, I would be pressing play immediately: 'This looks cool!' But it was harder than it appears, because it's like multiple art people pressing spacebars at the same time. It looks so simple, but it took several days of preparation to achieve that image.