The Greatest Sci-Fi Found Footage Movies

It’s quite possible that we’ve touted Frankenstein’s Army more times than anyone but director Richard Raaphorst himself. But we absolutely love this bonkers approach to creature features.

The plot—a group of Russian World War II soldiers stumble across the monstrous creations of a German madman—is less important than the insanity that comes from it.

Karel Roden’s mad scientist is creating steampunk-ish zombies with giant pieces of machinery attached to reanimated corpses. And that’s where the admittedly ill-conceived (within the narrative) first-person P.O.V. comes in handy.

Much of the sci-fi found-footage movie feels like a gleefully trashy video game that would rather have fun than change the face of cinema. It’s like a 90-minute horror attraction at Universal Studios.

With films like Diner and The Natural on his resume, director Barry Levinson never seemed like the kind of guy who would get into sci-fi found-footage movies.

But he combined the two for his 2012 thriller The Bay, which had about as much marketing going for it as your average snuff film.

Part of the problem with The Bay, which centers on an ecological disaster facing a Maryland town, is that it’s told through a variety of different people’s perspectives, which doesn’t create the most cohesive storyline.

But some of the vignettes where things go sour are truly horrifying and combine to form an outlandish, but still considerable, cautionary tale about how we treat the environment.

One of the most underseen indie sci-fi flicks of the last decade, Matthew Avant’s 2009 head-scratcher Lunopolis is the macro equivalent of falling into a black hole of Wikipedia and YouTube searches, where one thing leads to another and to another.

By the time you get to the end, the beginning is a distant memory. The sci-fi found-footage movie follows two documentary filmmakers as they stumble upon a device that launches them into a mystery-filled world that will have you looking at the moon in a completely different way.

Lunopolis is a perfect example of how to structure a faux doc, as it builds its conspiratorial house of cards and then flips the table around. Why aren’t there more movies like this?

The feature debut for Josh Trank, Chronicle essentially adds the sci-fi found-footage approach to a superhero origin story, or supervillain, depending on who’s side you’re on.

Turning Michael B. Jordan and Dane DeHaan into big-screen stars, this flick works wonders when it comes to making the impossible look like it’s really happening, which is largely what makes Chronicle such a good time, even when it isn’t necessarily doing anything too interesting story-wise.

Plus, Trank and screenwriter Max Landis give DeHaan’s character (the one recording things) the good notion to telepathically hold the camera wherever he wants, which allows for more than just straightforward direction.

Perhaps the most obscure entry on this list, the 1998 made-for-TV movie Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County legitimately has some of the most unsettling sequences in any alien abduction flick. Debuting on UPN (!!) in 1998, this pic focuses on a family’s Thanksgiving dinner that gets interrupted by an extraterrestrial presence outside, with the whole thing being recorded on a VHS camera.

While the performances are grating and full of repetitive hollering, writer/director Dean Alioto masterfully utilizes his super-limited budget and lack of special effects to create moments where viewers start to question their sanity right along with the characters on screen.

Because it predated The Blair Witch Project by a year, combined with inter-cut footage of cops and others talking about the tape, some viewers were deceived and thought everything was real. War of the Worlds this isn’t, but it’s a damned good time nonetheless.

Incident at Loch Ness has one of the most intrinsically intriguing storylines of any movie I’ve ever watched. Legendary director Werner Herzog plays himself in creating a documentary about finding the Loch Ness monster in Scotland, while sceenwriter and director Zak Penn plays himself as a producer who is putting together a documentary about Herzog making his documentary.

And behind all the twisty character interplay on the boat, viewers are never allowed to forget that people should always think twice about how badly they want to find something. It’s the perfect film for skeptics and believers alike.

Another example of a movie that works every penny of its limited budget, Sebastián Cordero’s Europa Report mixes the solitude of deep space and the excitement of discovery for an excitingly tense trip through our solar system.

In this sci-fi found footage movies, a crew of international astronauts are headed out to try and find life on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, with everything played out through the many cameras within the ship.

An intelligent and never excessive look at what makes humans tick, Europa Report is a slow burn that pays off in spades, assuming you’re not hoping the last ten minutes turns into James Cameron’s Aliens.

The second feature for current Planet of the Apes franchise helmer Matt Reeves, Cloverfield began life as a locked-up secret inside J.J. Abrams’ magic box of mystery, and then blew up the box office with its incredibly engaging first-person take on a monster attack in a big city.

This is large-scale madness on a completely human level, which is what this sub-genre should try to aim for more, instead of just an assembly line of characters going into the woods with cameras.

Full discretion, Cloverfield does fail for me on the human level, as I hate all of the characters wholeheartedly, but they’re worth ignoring to get to the beast.

Yes, I realize that trolls as a species fall into the fantasy camp, but Norwegian director André Øvredal’s internationally acclaimed Trollhunter is far more of a documentary-style creature feature than say, a relative of Willow. In the film, a motley crew of students get more than they bargain for and get caught up in a bunch of troll killing.

While not a perfect movie, Trollhunter boasts gorgeous locations, enjoyably unsettling CGI, and a unique sense of humor that gets viewers on board with these characters, rather than wanting them to die at every step. With giddily massive monsters that get the perfect amount of screen time, this movie puts every Bigfoot flick and their ilk to shame.

On the flip side of scale-conscious films like Cloverfield and Trollhunter, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s 2007 Spanish horror [REC] sets all of the increasingly maddening mayhem inside of an apartment building that gets quarantined after an outbreak of a zombie-like virus.

With an atmosphere so thick that it almost stinks, [REC] pushes viewers into the loud and vicious carnage almost immediately, filling its brief 78-minute runtime with more genuine scares than any film I can think of since The Exorcist.

The camera here, whatever one’s argument about its continued use, is often choreographed perfectly with whatever makes everyone scream, and the in-your-face stunts and practical effects are top notch. While its sequels have dipped in quality, [REC] remains a triumph in sci-fi/horror, and one of the best found-footage flicks out there.