The Latest V/H/S Installment Directors Explain Why Shaky-Cam Horror Remains 'Hard AF to Shoot'

Following the massive found-footage horror boom of the 2000s following The Blair Witch Project, the subgenre didn't fade away but rather transformed into new forms. Audiences saw the emergence of “screenlife” movies, newly designed versions of the found-footage concept, and ambitious single-shot films dominating the screens where shakycam shots and unbelievably persistent filmmakers once reigned.

A major outlier to this trend is the ongoing V/H/S series, a scary-story collection that spawned its own boom in brief scary films and has maintained 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, strung together with a wrapper story (“Diet Phantasma”) that involves a completely detached scientist leading a set 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 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 filmmaker Anna Zlokovic described first-person scary movies as “extremely difficult to shoot.” Her fellow filmmakers applauded in response. They later discussed why they feel shooting a first-person film is more difficult — or in one case, simpler! — than making a traditional scary film.

This interview has been condensed for concision and understanding.

Why Is Found-Footage Horror So Challenging to Shoot?

One director, director of “Home Haunt”: In my view the most challenging aspect as an creator is having restrictions by your creative ideas, because everything has to be justified by the person holding the camera. So I think that's the part that's incredibly tough for me, is to distance myself from my creativity and my ideas, and needing to remain in a confined space.

Alex Ross Perry, filmmaker of “Kidprint”: In fact told her this last night — I agree with that, but I also disagree with it vehemently 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 coverage are the identical. In conventional movie-making, the positioning and the coverage are diametrically opposed.

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

So once you know where the character goes, that's the filming — the lens doesn't shift left when the actor moves right, the lens advances when the person progresses. You shoot the scene once, and that's all — we don't have to get his line. It moves in one direction, it arrives at the conclusion, and now we proceed in the next direction. As a storyteller seeking simplicity, who hasn't shot a standard multi-angle shot in a long time, I was like, "This is great, this restriction actually is liberating, because you just need to determine the same thing once."

A third director, filmmaker of “Coochie Coochie Coo”: In my opinion the difficult aspect is the audience's acceptance for the viewers. Each detail has to feel real. The sound has to feel like it's actually happening. The acting have to appear believable. If you have an element like an grown man in a diaper, how do you sell that as plausible? It's absurd, but you have to make it feel like it fits in the world properly. I discovered that to be difficult — you can lose people really at any moment. It just takes one fuck-up.

Another filmmaker, director of “Diet Phantasma”: I concur with Alex — once you get the blocking down, it's excellent. But when you've got so many practical effects happening at the same time, and ensuring you're panning onto it and not fucking up, and then preparation attempts — you have a limited number of opportunities to achieve all these things correctly.

The filming location had a large barrier in the way, and you were unable to hear anyone. Alex's [shoot] sounds like very enjoyable. Our project was very hard. We had only 72 hours to complete it. It can be freeing, because with found footage, you can make some allowances. Even if you make a mistake, it was destined to appear like low-quality anyway, because you're adding effects, or you're using a garbage camera. So it's beneficial and it's challenging.

A co-director, filmmaker of “Home Haunt”: I would say establishing pace is very challenging if you're shooting primarily single takes. The method we used was, "Alright, this was edited in camera. There's this guy, the father, and he operates the camera, and that creates our cuts." That required a many fake oners. But you must be present. You really have to observe exactly how your scene feels, because what's going into the lens, and in certain cases, there's no editing solution.

We knew we only had a few attempts for each scene, because ours was highly demanding. We really tried to focus on finding varying paces between the attempts, because we didn't know what we were would achieve in editing. And the true difficulty with first-person filming is, you're having to hide those edits on shifting mist, on various elements, and you really never know where those edits are will be placed, and whether they're will undermine your whole enterprise of trying to feel like a fluid point-of-view camera moving through a three-dimensional space.

Zlokovic: You should try to avoid trying to hide it with digital errors as often as possible, but you have to occasionally, because the shit's hard.

Norman: In fact, she is correct. This is easy. Simply add glitches the shit out of it.

Paco Plaza, creator of “Ut Supra Sic Infra”: For me, the biggest thing is convincing the viewers believe the characters using the camera would continue, instead of fleeing. That’s additionally the most important thing. There are certain found-footage fields where I just cannot accept the people would continue recording.

And I think the camera should always arrive late to whatever's happening, because that occurs in reality. For me, the magic is destroyed if the device is already there, expecting something to occur. If you are here, recording, and you detect a sound and pan toward it, that noise is no longer there. And I think that gives a feeling of authenticity that it's crucial to preserve.

What's the One Scene in Your Movie That You're Most Satisfied With?

One director: The protagonist seated at a multi-screen setup of editing software, with multiple clips running at the same time. That's all analog. We filmed those videos days earlier. Then the editor processed them, and then we loaded them on four computers hooked up to several screens.

That frame of the person sitting there with four different videotapes playing — I was like, 'That is the visual I wanted out of this film.' If it was the only still I viewed of this film, I would be starting it right now: 'This appears interesting!' 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 three days of preparation to get to that shot.