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After the significant shaky-cam thriller surge of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't fade away but rather evolved into different styles. Viewers saw the rise of computer-screen films, newly designed versions of the found-footage concept, and ambitious single-shot films dominating the cinemas where unsteady footage and improbably dogged camera operators once reigned.

A significant outlier to this pattern is the continuing V/H/S series, a horror anthology that spawned its own surge in short-form horror and has kept the first-person vision active through seven themed installments. The latest in the series, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, features several shorts that all occur around the spooky season, strung together with a framing narrative (“Diet Phantasma”) that involves a brutally disengaged researcher leading a series of consumer product tests on a diet cola that eliminates the people sampling it in a range of messy, over-the-top ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s world premiere at the 2025 edition of Austin’s Fantastic Fest, each of the V/H/S Halloween filmmakers gathered for a question-and-answer session where director Anna Zlokovic characterized first-person scary movies as “extremely difficult to shoot.” Her fellow filmmakers cheered in reply. The directors later discussed why they feel filming a first-person film is tougher — or in one case, easier! — than making a traditional scary film.

The discussion has been condensed for brevity and clarity.

What Makes Found-Footage Horror So Difficult to Shoot?

One director, director of “Home Haunt”: In my view the most challenging thing as an creator is being limited by your artistic vision, because everything has to be motivated by the character operating 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 needing to remain in a box.

Alex Ross Perry, director of “Kidprint”: In fact told her recently — I agree with that, but I also differ with it strongly in a very specific way, because I really love an open set that's all-around. I found this to be so freeing, because the blocking and the coverage are the identical. In conventional movie-making, the positioning and the shots are completely opposite.

If the character has to turn left, the camera angle has to look right. And the fact that once you set up the action [in a first-person film], you have determined your coverage — that was so remarkable to me. I've seen 500 found-footage films, but until you film your first shaky-cam movie… The first day, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you understand where the character moves, that's the coverage — the lens doesn't shift left when the character goes right, the camera advances when the person progresses. You shoot the sequence once, and that's it — we don't have to get his line. It progresses in one direction, it reaches the conclusion, and then we proceed in the next direction. As a storyteller seeking simplicity, avoiding a traditional-coverage scene in a long time, I was like, "This is great, this limitation actually is freeing, because you only have to figure out the same thing once."

Anna Zlokovic, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: I think the difficult aspect is the audience's acceptance for the viewers. Each detail has to feel real. The audio has to seem like it's actually happening. The performances have to appear believable. If you have something like an adult man in a diaper, how do you make that as realistic? It's absurd, but you have to create the sense like it exists in the environment correctly. I found that to be difficult — you can lose the audience easily at any point. It only requires one fuck-up.

Bryan M. Ferguson, director of “Diet Phantasma”: I concur with Alex — as soon as you finalize the movement, it's great. But when you've got numerous practical effects happening at one time, and trying to make sure you're capturing it and not fucking up, and then setup takes — you only get a limited number of opportunities to achieve all these things right.

Our set had a large barrier in the way, and you couldn't hear anyone. Alex's [shoot] sounds like great fun. Ours was very hard. I only had 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 anyway, because you're putting filters on it, or you're employing a low-quality camera. So it's beneficial and it's challenging.

A co-director, filmmaker of “Home Haunt”: I would say finding rhythm is quite difficult if you're filming primarily single takes. Our approach was, "OK, this was filmed continuously. There's this guy, the dad, and he operates the camera, and that creates our edits." That required a many simulated single shots. But you must live in the moment. You really have to observe exactly how your scene appears, because what is captured by the camera, and in certain cases, there's no editing solution.

We knew we only had two or three takes per shot, because our film was highly demanding. We attempted to focus on discovering different rhythms between the attempts, because we didn't know what we were going to get in editing. And the real challenge with first-person filming is, you're having to hide those cuts on shifting mist, on various elements, 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 fluid first-person camera traveling through a realistic environment.

The director: You want to avoid trying to hide it with glitches as often as possible, but you must occasionally, because the process is difficult.

Her colleague: Actually, she's right. It is simple. Just glitch the shit out of it.

Paco Plaza, director of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the most challenging aspect is making the viewers believe the people operating the device would continue, rather than fleeing. That’s also the key element. There are certain first-person scenarios where I simply don't believe the characters would continue recording.

And I think the device should always be delayed to any event, because that occurs in real life. For me, the illusion is ruined if the device is already there, anticipating something to happen. If you are present, recording, and you hear a noise and turn the camera, that noise is no longer there. And I think that gives a feeling of authenticity that it's very important to preserve.

What's the Single Shot in Your Movie That You're Proudest Of?

One director: Our character seated at a multi-screen setup of editing software, with multiple clips playing out at the identical moment. That's completely practical. We shot those clips previously. Then the editing team treated them, and then we loaded them on four computers hooked up to four monitors.

That shot of the person sitting there with four different videotapes playing — I was like, 'This is the visual I wanted out of this project.' If it was the sole image I viewed of this movie, I would be starting it right now: 'This appears interesting!' But it was harder than it appears, because it's like multiple crew members activating playback at the identical moment. It looks so simple, but it took three days of preparation to get to that shot.