THE OUT-OF-FRAME OF FOUND FOOTAGE

Horror film theory that focuses its account on the semantic content of the image reduces the cinematic experience to the effect of structures of representation, further buttressing the hierarchical paradigm of cognition ‘making sense’ of affect. However, if we examine the ways in which horror film often works against privileging this meaning-making, we can find productive gaps that destabilise this hierarchy. Found footage horror film's common withholding of key information which would allow meaning-making to occur requires that we reassess its imagery for affective resonances that support this reframing of the corporeal interface as the basis for our engagement. In doing so, we find that, within these films, an affective surplus is often generated by that which we specifically cannot see: the out-of-frame.

Horror film, as a genre, has a long history of manipulating the viewer through the unseen (although sometimes heard) presence of that which is out-of-frame. Found footage horror specifially manipulates the intensity of its sounds and images through the freedom it possesses to exploit the out-of-frame more fully, a freedom granted by its realist form: given that it purports to be a document assembled from previously recorded footage, the repeated failures to ‘properly’ frame the content being recorded can often be ascribed to the exigencies of the horrific situation. Given that they are often fleeing from a monster, the camera operators within the film are largely forgiven for not carefully composing their frame. The out-of-frame of found footage horror highlights the embodied response of the viewer, as it engenders an intense sensory engagement, one that the viewer may less keenly feel when watching content that safely positions the frame within a larger diegetic world that is, in a sense, known.

Cognitivist understandings run counter to this stance. Carroll and Seeley, for instance, recognise framing as the process by which the filmmaker ‘[enhances] the perceptual salience of elements within depicted scenes’.