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After the significant found-footage horror boom of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the category didn't fade away but rather evolved into new forms. Viewers saw the emergence of computer-screen films, newly designed interpretations of the found-footage concept, and showy one-take movies dominating the screens where unsteady footage and improbably dogged camera operators once reigned.

A major exception to this pattern is the continuing V/H/S franchise, a horror anthology that created its own surge in short-form horror and has maintained the first-person vision alive through multiple themed installments. The eighth in the series, 2025’s V/H/S Halloween, includes several shorts that all take place around Halloween, strung together with a framing narrative (“Diet Phantasma”) that involves a completely detached researcher conducting a set of product experiments on a soda drink that eliminates the people sampling it in a variety of messy, extreme ways.

At V/H/S Halloween’s global debut at the 2025 version of the Fantastic Fest film festival, all seven V/H/S Halloween filmmakers gathered for a post-screening Q&A where filmmaker Anna Zlokovic described found-footage horror as “extremely difficult to shoot.” Her co-directors cheered in response. They later discussed why they feel shooting a first-person film is more difficult — or in some instances, easier! — than making a conventional horror movie.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Why Is First-Person Scary Movies So Challenging to Film?

One director, 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 person operating the camera. So I think that's the part that's hard as fuck for me, is to separate myself from my creativity and my ideas, and needing to remain in a confined space.

Another director, director of “Kidprint”: In fact told her this last night — 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 360 degrees. I found this to be so freeing, because the movement and the filming are the same. In conventional movie-making, the positioning and the coverage are diametrically opposed.

If the character has to turn left, the camera angle has to look right. And the reality that once you block the scene [in a found-footage movie], you have determined your shots — that was so amazing to me. I have watched 500 first-person movies, but until you shoot your first found-footage project… Day one, you're like, “Ohhh!”

So once you understand where the character goes, that's the filming — the camera doesn't move left when the actor moves right, the lens advances when the character moves forward. You shoot the sequence one time, and that's all — we avoid capture individual dialogues. It moves in a single path, it reaches the end, and then we proceed in the following path. As a storyteller seeking simplicity, avoiding a traditional-coverage scene in a long time, I was like, "This is cool, this limitation actually is freeing, because you just need to determine the same thing one time."

Anna Zlokovic, director of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: In my opinion the hard part is the audience's acceptance for the audience. Each detail has to feel real. The sound has to feel 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 plausible? It's absurd, but you have to make it feel like it fits in the environment correctly. I discovered that to be difficult — you can lose the audience easily at any point. It just takes a single mistake.

Another filmmaker, creator of “Diet Phantasma”: I concur with Alex — once you get the blocking down, it's excellent. But when you've got numerous physical effects occurring at the same time, and ensuring you're panning onto it and not making errors, and then preparation attempts — you have a limited number of opportunities to get all these things correctly.

The filming location had a large barrier in the way, and you couldn't hear anybody. Alex's [shoot] sounds like very enjoyable. Our project was very hard. We had only three days to do it. It can be freeing, because with first-person filming, you can make some allowances. Although you do fuck it up, it was going to look like low-quality anyway, because you're putting filters on it, or you're using a garbage camera. So it's beneficial and it's bad.

R.H. Norman, filmmaker of “Home Haunt”: I would say establishing pace is quite difficult if you're filming primarily oners. Our approach was, "Alright, this was filmed continuously. There's this guy, the dad, and he turns the camera on and off, and those are our cuts." That required a lot of fake oners. But you must be present. You need to see 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 ours was very ambitious. We really tried to concentrate on finding varying paces between the attempts, because we didn't know what we were would achieve in editing. And the real challenge with found footage is, you're needing to conceal those edits 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 entire project of trying to feel like a fluid first-person lens moving through a realistic environment.

Zlokovic: You should try to avoid trying to hide it with glitches as much as you can, but you have to sometimes, because the process is difficult.

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

Another filmmaker, creator of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the biggest aspect is making the viewers accept the characters using the camera would persist, rather than fleeing. That’s also the most important thing. There are certain found-footage fields where I simply don't believe the characters would keep filming.

And I think the camera should always be delayed to whatever's happening, because that happens in reality. For me, the illusion is ruined if the camera is already there, anticipating an event to occur. If you are here, filming, and you detect a sound and turn the camera, that noise is no longer there. And I think that gives a feeling of truth that it's very important to maintain.

Which Is the One Scene in Your Movie That You're Most Satisfied With?

One director: Our character seated at a four-monitor deck of editing software, with four different videos playing out at the identical moment. That's completely practical. We filmed those videos days earlier. Then the editor processed them, and then we put them on multiple devices connected to several screens.

That shot of the person positioned there with multiple recordings running — I was like, 'This is the image I wanted out of this film.' If it was the only still I saw of this movie, I would be starting it immediately: 'This looks cool!' But it was harder than it looks, because it's like multiple art people activating playback at the identical moment. It looks so simple, but it took three days of planning to get to that image.