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It was Halloween night 1938. Across the nation, a smattering of people tuned their radios to the Columbia Broadcasting System to hear:

“ANNOUNCER: The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

[musical interlude]

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity.

[static]

REPORTER: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed… Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top. Someone or… something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous discs… are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be…

[shouting]

PHILLIPS: Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake! Now it’s anohter one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful.

[static]

REPORTER: Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from Mars.”

What happened next has gone down in the annals of history as a legendary hoax-- this silly radio play based on a classic science fiction novel by H.G. Wells had fooled the nation into thinking we were under attack by alien invaders. Mass hysteria ensued. The incident was shrouded in controversy, and was seen as an embarrassment to everyone involved.

But really, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t. The seeds laid by this simple radio drama in 1938 not only launched the long and illustrious career of Orson Welles, but was also a landmark moment for the horror genre.

One of the reasons horror is such a powerful, visceral method of storytelling is that it, at its core, is about articulating societal anxieties like world war and transforming them into memorable experiences in a way few other genres can-- they’re thrilling, they make your brain chemicals go into overdrive, and most importantly, they simultaneously give viewers a moment of escapism, AND a sense of mastery over their own fears. 

But the War of the World’s broadcast changed the way that we interact with these kinds of stories: by presenting horror with a semblance of realism, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. And this inspired generations upon generations of others to follow in those footsteps: to flirt with the illusory nature of truth.

__

After the release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999, found footage became an easy way to make a horror movie with little directing experience on a microbudget. With the accessibility this provided and the sudden influx of consumer grade production tools, the market over the past 20 years has become oversaturated with seemingly low effort, low quality found footage movies. As a result, a lot of people have written off the genre entirely. 

Well, today I’m here to tell you that found footage is good, actually. Not only did the genre not start with The Blair Witch Project, it actually stems from roots laid by a Danish silent film made one hundred years ago, and has a long and storied history throughout the 20th century. So join me as I explore how this genre has evolved through the years, delve into the fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of these films, and recommend some underrated gems that might just change your mind about found footage. 

I’m your host Leighton Gray. And this is Deep Cuts.

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Of course, the reputation of the War of the Worlds broadcast precedes it. But the so-called mass hysteria caused by the broadcast has been greatly exaggerated. As 

the very salty announcement the station played once an hour after the broadcast stated, there were multiple disclaimers during the program cautioning that the show was fiction. 

“For those listeners who tuned in to Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast from 8 to 9 pm Eastern Standard Time tonight and did not realize that the program was merely a modernized adaptation of H. G. Wells' famous novel War of the Worlds, we are repeating the fact which was made clear four times on the program, that, while the names of some American cities were used, as in all novels and dramatizations, the entire story and all of its incidents were fictitious.” 

Further, the broadcast had stiff competition. The most popular radio program in the country, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, was airing at the exact same time. So a very small portion of people heard the broadcast in the first place.

The book War of the Worlds was the first piece of fiction about alien invasions, and spawned an entire genre of science fiction due to its popularity at the time-- and this incident only added to its reputation. And despite Orson Welle’s statement at the time that “If I’d planned to wreck my career, I couldn’t have gone about it better.” within two years the infamy this broadcast provided allowed him to make what is considered one of the greatest movies of all time, Citizen Kane.

Certainly, a small percentage of actual listeners were fooled, the station received a lot of calls, cops did storm the production studio, but it was not nearly the nationwide panic people have since made it out to be. Let’s take a listen to this interview with Orson Welles and H.G. Wells recorded on the second anniversary of the war of the worlds broadcast-- the first and only time the two met.

“H.G. Wells: Well, I’ve had the ah, series of the most delightful experiences since I came to America. But the best thing to happen so far has been the meeting of my little namesake, Orson. I find him a most delightful carrier— he carries in his name with an extra “e” that I hope he drops sooner or later. I see no sense in it. [laughs] And ah, I’ve ah, and I’ve known his work long before he made this ah, sensational, Halloween, ah, spree. Are you sure there was such a panic in America or was it just some of your Halloween fun?

Orson Welles: I think that’s the nicest thing that a man from England could possibly say about the men from Mars. I think it’s awfully nice to say that not only I didn’t mean it, but the American people didn’t mean it.

H.G. Wells: That was our impression in England. We had articles about it and people said ‘you haven’t heard of Halloween in America when everyone pretends to see ghosts?’

Interviewer: Well the ah, there was some excitement caused, I really can’t belittle the amount that was caused, but I think the people got over it very quickly, don’t y—

Orson Welles: What kind of excitement? Mr. H.G. Wells wants to know if the excitement wasn’t the same kind of excitement we extract from a practical joke where someone puts a sheet over his head and says ‘boo’— I don’t think that anybody believes that individual is a ghost, but we still scream and yell and rush down the hall. That’s just about what happens.

Interviewer: That’s a very excellent description—

H.G. Wells: I mean, you aren’t quite serious in America yet. You haven’t got the war right under your, ah, chins, and the consequence is that you can still play with ideas of terror and conflict.

Interviewer: Do you think that’s good or bad?

H.G. Wells: I think it’s a natural thing to do til you’re right up against it.”

As the Welleses say, the reporting on the story was what was more widespread, and caused a moral outrage over falsehoods being depicted as truth. Which makes sense, because the idea of a radio program causing riots to break out in the streets is a fantastic story-- so it completely scans that the cultural consciousness has inflated this tale to mythic levels. 

As we move through this chronology, we’ll see this happen a LOT. The discussion over the ethics of presenting fiction as fact, even tenuously, continues to roll through the same cycle over and over. This episode is about found footage. But it’s also about the nature of controversy, and how that controversy propels and organically markets these stories in a way that just doesn’t happen with other media. 

So, without any further ado, let’s follow H.G. Well’s advice and get into “a bit of Halloween fun.”

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Haxan

Nanook of the North, a 1922 silent film by American director Robert Joseph Fla-herty, is commonly credited as the first feature-length documentary. The film follows the struggles of an Inuit family attempting to survive the unforgiving climate of the Great White North. The movie was a commercial success and to this day is considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time. 

But while Fla-herty was capturing snapshots of daily life in the Canadian Arctic, across the world in Denmark a filmmaker by the name of Benjamin Christiansen was poring over occult books. On a trip to a Berlin bookshop, Christiansen discovered a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum-- a comprehensive text covering the history of witch hunts and demonology. This sparked an obsession. He spent the next two years exhaustively researching witches and synthesized his 60 primary sources into the first true docudrama: Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages.

The black and white silent film combines educational explanations of history with live action dramatizations of the topics covered. While not found footage in the traditional sense, I consider it foundational to the found footage subgenre due to the groundbreaking combination of horror and documentary that would inspire later filmmakers to fuse the two to create horror mockumentaries.

Haxan was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made at two million Swedish kroner, and it shows. The movie utilizes stop motion animation, historical wood etchings, innovative reversals of footage, genuinely impressive practical creature effects, special effects makeup, and elaborate costumes. Double exposure techniques are used to represent ghosts leaving their corporeal bodies, with one particularly striking sequence showing witches flying through town and into hell on broomsticks and tridents. All narration is of course presented through text, and each cut back to footage feels shocking, adding to the unsettling atmosphere. Different prints of the film have included a variety of classical pieces, one even including a narration by William S Boroughs. 

The movie is striking even today. A horse skeleton shrouded by cloth wanders through hell. Women dance, laughing, on the cross. Women are not only naked, but have sex with demons. They feast on dead babies that they hoist by their ankles. Women literally kiss satan’s fetid ass. So, perhaps unsurprising considering a 2020 movie that showed Satan getting his salad tossed by a bunch of elderly women would cause an outcry, Haxan was promptly banned in many countries for gore and “depictions of sexual perversions.” One critic argued that even showing it in the “enchanted world of a movie theater” was totally obscene and that it should instead be locked up away from public view. 

Worth noting is that there’s a piece of imagery repeated several times-- one of the devil rapidly churning butter while watching naked women. Yes, it looks as sexual as you’re imagining. And it’s not just included to be a dirty joke either. 

Butter and milk were cornerstones of medieval diets, and women were relegated to milking and churning to produce it. But more than that, butter and milk represented a person’s material and mortal wealth, going as far to be conflated with one’s personal happiness. So there was this idea that if you were taking butter from other people, you were really taking their happiness. A so-called “devil’s milkmaid” was a woman who was blamed for using sorcery to steal the milk from neighbor’s cows and have all the butter to herself. 

It’s indicative of the witch hunt mindset that women were blamed for a natural side effect of poverty, poor health, and harsh conditions, and this is precisely the point Haxan seeks to make.

Remember Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The VVitch? Eggers has gone on the record saying it’s directly inspired by Haxan. There’s the famous line uttered by Black Phillip:

Black Phillip: What does thou want?

Thomasin: What canst thou give?

Black Phillip: Would thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

-- it’s not just because, yknow, butter is good, but a representation of Thomasin choosing to take her happiness and freedom by force.

All of that to say that the influence of the movie isn’t just so enduring due to the genre-defining format-- the strength of it is based in research and the strong symbolism and themes throughout. When we talk about a piece of media being “timeless”, that’s usually what it comes down to. When there’s a humane core to a piece of cinema, people will always be able to relate to it. 

Speaking of which and getting a bit nerdier about film history, the extreme and emotionally raw close ups of old women in Haxan also inspired Carl Theodor Dreyer to incorporate them into his own work-- most notable in his classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which in turn has influenced countless filmmakers. 

Haxan is absolutely worth checking out, and I’ll discuss its relevance more later when we get to talking about The Blair Witch. If you want to see it, Haxan is public domain, so you can watch the whole thing on Youtube.

There are a few more cultural stepping stones that set the stage for future found footage films, so let’s touch on those a bit.

Night of the Living Dead

George Romero’s iconic 1968 Night of the Living Dead has influenced the genre in innumerable ways that I’ll likely cover in a future episode of Deep Cuts, but notable to the found footage genre is its incorporation of fake news footage covering the zombie outbreak. This lent a level of realism to the movie much in the same way the original “breaking news” framing the War of the Worlds broadcast did, as the language of breaking news was something that hadn’t previously been riffed on within horror films. Shit’s scary. Check it out: 

“ANNOUNCER: —These reports, as incredible as they seem, are not the results of mass hysteria. First eyewitness accounts of this grisly development came from people who were understandably frightened, and almost incoherent. Officials and newsmen at first discounted those eyewitness descriptions as being beyond belief. However, reports persisted. Medical exams of some of the victims point out the fact that some of them had been partially devoured.

I think we have some late word just arriving and interrupt to bring this to you—

This is the latest disclosure in a report from National Civil Defense Headquarters in Washington. It has been established that persons who have recently died have been returning to life and committing acts of murder.”

Cannibal Holocaust

Quick content warning for this next segment for mentions of rape, graphic violence, and animal cruelty. If any of that’s a no-go for you, skip to [timestamp]. Otherwise, enjoy, you sick freaks.

Mondo Cane- italian for “a doggish world”-- was a 1962 documentary about various “shocking” cultural practices from around the world that launched a new genre-- the shockumentary, often referred to as mondo movies. These movies simply contained a series of vignettes with little to no narrative, such as a woman breastfeeding a piglet, or dogs being slaughtered for food-- unlike a true documentary, the intent isn’t to educate; it’s to provoke. 

As you can probably imagine, many of these mondo films that are focused on non-Western cultures are wildly racist, misrepresentative, and ethnocentric. Later iterations in the genre include the more infamous shock series Faces of Death and Traces of Death. 

Nearly 20 years after the release of Mondo Cane, Italian director Ruggero Deodato was inspired by this shockumentary style of filmmaking, finding it a ripe opportunity for the horror genre. And so, in 1980, Deodato  released one of the most controversial films of all time and the first proper found footage movie: Cannibal Holocaust.

The name immediately grabs you with how sensational it is. The original title, The Green Inferno, was deemed not shocking enough. Of course, Eli Roth later used the name in his 2013 soft-remake of the movie where a bunch of SJWs get owned in the rainforest for wanting it to get conserved or whatever. I’m kidding, but Roth has stated in interviews that he made it as a response to liberal Twitter activism. The movie is not very good. But I digress.

Cannibal Holocaust follows a search into the Amazon rainforest for a crew of NYU students who travelled there to film a shockumentary in the style of Mondo Cane on the local indigenous tribes, the Ya̧nomamö and the Shamatari --who, by the way, are real tribes, neither of which actually practice cannibalism, and whose communities were actively harmed by their regressive depiction in Cannibal Holocaust.

Anyway, both the film itself and the film within the film engage in the same egregious racism and focus on shock value that Mondo films are known for-- in fact, Deodato specifically sought out Riz Ortolani to compose the score for his film after being impressed with his work on Mondo Cane.

As the search team, led by a professor of anthropology, unearths the footage of the crew that they’ve now discovered was murdered, they find that the filmmakers were just as, if not more despicable and violent than the natives. Upon their return to New York, the professor shows the footage to the executives who originally intended to screen the documentary. They promptly decide that it must be destroyed. The last moments of the movie show the professor leaving the studio, lighting his pipe, and saying perhaps my favorite final lines of a movie ever:

[sound of footsteps, lighter sparking]

“I wonder who the real cannibals are.”

With a small budget of $200,000 (equivalent to $400,000 now, about the budget of Napoleon Dynamite) Deodato was inspired by the cinema verite movement-- a style of documentary filmmaking that places a heavier focus on the filmmaker and presence of the camera, rather than quiet observation. This led to him forgo his typical steadicam, and instead use a camera held on the shoulder along with shaky movements. And thus, the signature low-budget, shakycam, handheld style of modern found footage was born.

Considering that it’s banned in 50 countries, Cannibal Holocaust is a family friendly romp with something for everyone: amputations, castration, cannibalism (obviously), one of the most banging theme songs ever, a woman impaled on a pole from her ass to her mouth, rape, gang rape, more rape, people burning alive, bone thrones, an abortion, decapitation, and perhaps most famously, 7 counts of real life animal abuse.

These include: a coati killed with a knife; a tarantula, boa constrictor chopped up with machetes, 2 squirrel monkeys decapitated so as to eat their brains; and a pig shot in the head at point blank range.

Finally, a tortoise gets decapitated, it’s limbs torn off, and all of its entrails removed. The turtle scene lasts for a gratuitous 1:08, with lots of slimy close ups and swelling music. It’s like. It’s difficult to watch to say the least, and genuinely one of the more disturbing things I’ve seen.

All that to say: Cannibal Holocaust has earned its controversial reputation. Ten days after a successful premiere in Milan, the film was seized by the Italian courts under obscenity laws. The courts took it a step further, (and completely convinced by the special effects in the film), charged Deodato with murdering four actors on camera. If convicted, he faced life in prison. 

Prior to filming the movie, he required his then mostly unknown American actors to sign a contract. The first clause stated that the actors were required to drop out of circulation for one year, disappear from the film world, have no contact with other producers, and couldn’t be involved in any other films or commercials. Deodato admits that he did this in the hopes it would lend to the credibility of the film. Of course, he didn’t expect to be put on trial for murder.

Because all of the actors save for a few were across the globe and now contractually flying under the radar, it was difficult to track them down. But they were found relatively quickly. Further, the court was so convinced by the effect of the woman impaled on a stake that Deodato had to fully break down the effect-- it was accomplished by having the costume designer for the movie sit on a bicycle seat while balancing balsa wood in her mouth. She was then covered in blood. Deodato remarked that he was impressed she was able to stay so still. 

Thus, Deodato’s name was cleared-- for the murders at least. Still facing charges of obscenity, Deodato required a team of 7 lawyers to defend him. Ultimately, he received a suspended sentence for 4 months, a $300 fine, and the film was permanently confiscated and banned from selling abroad.

Of course, Deodato continued to sell copies of the film across the world illegally, and it became popular (and very bannable) internationally. In fact, it was the second highest grossing movie in Japan in 1983. Right behind E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Great double feature there.

Cannibal Holocaust & the Video Nasties

But that illegal sale of Cannibal Holocaust in the United Kingdom ended up being so popular that it kicked off the nationwide moral panic about “video nasties”, which I’m gonna take a moment to tell you about now.

So, the sudden proliferation of VCRs and home video in the early 80’s caused a problem: major studios didn’t want viewers to watch their releases at home due to fears that it would hurt box office numbers. In fact, in a 1982 hearing on whether home video should be illegal, head of the MPAA Jack Valenti stated, “The VCR is to the American film producer… as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” Okay!

With the major studios clearly not on board-- people adapted, and the VHS market was flooded with whatever distributors could get their hands on for cheap-- softcore porn, indie films, and especially obscure horror and exploitation flicks, with some of the earliest best sellers being I Spit on Your Grave and Sam Raimi’s classic The Evil Dead.

And because VHS rental was such an emergent market, there were almost no regulations on the content-- think of it like pre-Hays code Hollywood, the anything-goes period in the 30’s before the MPAA was established, where the new phenomenon of talking pictures could get away with sex, drugs, violence, swearing, and god forbid-- strong female characters. In short, video cassettes were so new that people didn’t even know they had pearls to clutch about it.

So with no big Hollywood celebrities to hawk, distributors had to resort to promoting their movies by being as sensational as possible. Distributors like Go Video hacked together crude cover art of gore, demons, decapitated heads, heaving bosoms and the like, along with titles like The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein and SS Experiment Camp. They advertised their tapes in the backs of magazines with much the same treatment.

So when distributor Go Video got their hands on the rights to Cannibal Holocaust, they were stoked-- what could be more attention grabbing than a title like that?

Of course, a lot of things. So to drum up some controversy (and thus, media coverage), Go Video decided to hit up infamous conservative activist and crusader against obscenity, Mary Whitehouse. They wrote an anonymous letter complaining about how disgusting this awful movie Cannibal Holocaust was, and helpfully included a screener of the tape for Whitehouse’s viewing pleasure. And the ploy worked-- just a little too well.

Sure, the tapes were suddenly flying off shelves, but this exposure became the lynchpin for the UK’s campaign against so-called video nasties. Several years later, the cover art of the tape-- featuring a heavy quote-unquote savage eating human flesh-- would be used to prop up the Daily Mail’s “Ban the Sadist Videos!” campaign, that ran with the headline “The rape of our children’s minds.”

Parliament member Graham Bright even claimed:

“If anyone can stand up and defend the sort of horrific scenes that I have had to see, and other members of parliament have had to see, I believe they’re living in a different world to that world I live in. I believe that research is taking place and it will show that these films not only affect young people, but I believe they affect dogs as well.”

So be careful kids, don’t let your dog catch you watching Nightmare on Elm Street or they WILL come to you in the night and feast on your soft cartilages. 

For some political context here, in the years leading up to this controversy, the conservative Tory party came to power with the election of Margaret Thatcher. This ushered in an era of “the tough law and order party” and a return to traditional moral values-- and by finding a moral issue to campaign against and stamp out, it would be the proof in the pudding that the Tories meant business. 

In 1983, Thatcher used the campaign against video nasties as a kind of social reform to prop up her re-election campaign, and it gave the Conservative party the most decisive victory since the Labor Party’s in 1945. The video nasties became a scapegoat indicative of what the conservative party saw as the moral decline of the nation, the bad influence of Americanized media, and oh god won’t someone PLEASE think of the children and their delicate little eyes! It was a way to make a vague cultural anxiety into something tangible to attack and destroy. 

This led constabularies, especially the very Christian aligned Greater Manchester Police, to raid video shops and seize any tapes that seemed obscene or suspicious. They were pretty indiscriminate about their choices and pulled anything that raised an eyebrow-- once seizing a copy of Dolly Parton’s musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Sam Fuller’s wartime drama, The Big Red One, thinking both were pornos.

Because there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to these decisions, retailers asked for some form of warning about what content and titles were in violation of the rules. And so, the Director of Public Prosecutions released the now infamous list of 72 films they believed to violate the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, as well as 82 other films that they probably couldn’t prosecute but that could still be confiscated under less severe charges.

The DPP list of video nasties is an awesome watchlist for any fan of horror. Along with Cannibal Holocaust, it includes a lot of really great stuff- like The Last House on the Left, Dario Argento’s Tenebrae, Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, The Hills Have Eyes, The Thing, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Xtro, and probably my favorite movie ever, Possession (1981). It’s pretty telling that the list includes some of the most innovative and classic pieces of horror cinema-- they were so inherently transgressive that the government felt the need to get rid of ‘em. And that’s art, baby.

Pretty much all of these bans were later reversed, allowed to be released with cuts made, or unable to be prosecuted. And that’s the story of how the first found footage film about cannibals in the jungle led to a huge political overhaul in the United Kingdom. Isn’t that wild?

As a final note before we move on-- I’m someone who was once called “a harvester of sorrow” and am just generally an embarrassing edgelord. So I often go into overhyped controversial movies expecting to be underwhelmed. I went into Cannibal Holocaust with low expectations, and I have to say: it’s as disturbing as everyone says it is, full stop. It was made 40 years ago and it’s still wildly upsetting with convincing effects that absolutely hold up. I recommend it as a piece of film history and if you’re in the mood for something depraved, but if you’re at all squeamish, I’d definitely stick to reading the Wikipedia plot synopsis for this one. You’ll get the point.

The next 9 years were quiet on the found footage front. Until an American director named Dean Alioto set out to make what he described as ‘The War of the Worlds’ on videotape. We’ll be back after the break.

UFO Abduction

The year was 1989. UFOlogists across the country were baffled by a rare, mysterious videotape that was circulating through the community. Referred to as The McPherson tape, the 45 minutes of distorted home video depicted a children’s birthday party interrupted by a power outage. Upon investigation, the family members come across a downed alien spaceship and capture footage of small grey aliens. The family is terrorized until their home is invaded and they’re seemingly abducted. The tape ends.

It became notorious enough that the short lived paranormal investigation show Encounters: The Hidden Truth covered it in a segment: 

“JOHN MARSHALL: It’s easy to understand why people would enjoy hoaxing UFO encounters— what isn’t easy to understand is the way they do it.

SANDRA GIN: Our UFO hoax hall of shame is full of cases in point. And we admit— even we were fooled.

DONGO: When I first ran across the tape I was invited over to a friend’s house who said he had a very interesting UFO abduction tape.

GIN: Tom Dongo is a top UFO researcher and author based in Sedona, Arizona. He believed the tape was genuine.

DONGO: I was stunned, shocked by what I saw. I felt the tape might be real because it fit in so well with many UFO aliens and incidents I know of. It fit in very well, in fact, almost too well. I thought no one could fake something like that.

GIN: After spending 3 months checking with UFO researchers worldwide, Dongo was unable to find anyone else who had seen the video, and he was unable to locate another copy.

DONGO: It began to seem even more obvious to me that it possibly was entirely an authentic video. And someone, namely possibly the government, was trying to grab all the copies that were out there.”

Funnily enough, despite the director revealing that it was a found footage movie he made on a budget of $6,500.00 with the aliens played by little girls in masks, some UFO enthusiasts insisted that this was part of a campaign of disinformation against the UFO disclosure movement. 

“WARE: I have been studying UFOs for 42 years and I’ve got a pretty good track record.

GIN: Retired US Army colonel Don Ware spent his career working closely with military intelligence.

WARE: I thought that it did not have the appearance of being a scripted production. Because everyone was talking at the same time and you couldn’t understand what they said. The people on camera did express a great deal of emotion. If they were actors, they ought to get an Oscar, or an Emmy.”

While this does sound pretty ridiculous, people were so unfamiliar with this style of filmmaking at the time that they didn’t have reason to believe it was a work of fiction. A bootleg copy of the original tape (which was mysteriously destroyed in a fire) was circulated without opening or closing credits, only further adding the illusion. 

Ultimately, the movie is underwhelming and not really worth watching. However, a decade later and a year before Blair Witch, Alioto remade the film with a larger budget for United Paramount Network, then renamed to Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County. I actually recommend this one highly, it expands on the original story and has some wonderful creepy moments. It’s one of the few horror movies I’ve seen that involves an entire group of people getting possessed. A little girl runs around with a shotgun. It’s dope.

You would think that having a remake in the same style would clear up any misconceptions about the original tape, but it only exacerbated some people’s belief that the previous McPherson Tape was real. 

“GIN: But truth is in the eye of the beholder, and even though Dean Alioto confessed, Tom Dongo still has his doubts.

DONGO: There’s really something inside me that really is not convinced that parts of it are not real. I have a feeling that still, parts of that video might be 100% authentic.

GIN: Don Ware thinks Alioto might have a secret agenda.

WARE: I am not convinced that the video is a hoax because I know that our government policy is to insert disinformation into every major UFO case or released document.”

Maybe it was. Maybe this guy is on to something.

Ghostwatch

On Halloween night 1992 at 9 pm, BBC One aired a live broadcast of a paranormal investigative team searching a Northolt home after reports of a spirit banging on the pipes. The program features an investigation into the Early household, which has been plagued by strange sounds, poltergeist activity, and the presence of a ghost the young daughters have nicknamed “Pipes.”

Hosting the program was iconic British talk show host Michael Parkinson, who provided a more skeptical view to the happenings at the supposedly haunted Early household. On site with the Early family was BBC’s popular children’s show presenter Sarah Greene. Her husband Mike Smith supervised the team of parapsychologists on deck to answer calls from the audience, who could dial the on-screen number to share their own encounters with ghosts. 11 million viewers, many of whom were children, tuned in for the live broadcast. 

But Ghostwatch wasn’t live. And it wasn’t real, either.

Though the program was preceded by a warning that the following was a work of fiction, many viewers took the events of Ghostwatch at face value. It might be difficult to imagine in the age of social media and fake news, but at the time it caused a huge controversy that ultimately led to the death of a teenager. 

Essential to the verisimilitude of the broadcast is an understanding of why viewers accepted it as truth. The BBC in 1992 was a bastion of classy and impartial reporting and nearly universally viewed by the population of the UK. Even the writer of the program, Steven Volk, acknowledges that the public trust in the BBC brand was essential to the effectiveness of the program. He says had the special aired on Channel 4, it would not have been nearly as effective.

Allow me to give a brief summary of what occurs in Ghostwatch-- There was a certain jocular, skeptical tone to the beginning of the broadcast. The presenters play pranks on each other and joke around as they delve into the strange occurrences at the Early home. The first 45 minutes are uneventful as the presenters try to puzzle out what could be causing the haunting. As the story progresses, things begin to unravel. Viewers call in to the line to report sightings of Pipes in the footage and poltergeist activity in their own homes. Sarah Greene is dragged off screaming into the cupboard where pipes the child molester supposedly lived. The program closes with the cops arriving at the Early household and the cast fleeing the studio as Pipes wreaks havoc, exploding lights and ultimately possessing Michael Parkinson, who addresses the camera in the ghost’s voice.

“PARKINSON: Th- this camera is still- I don’t know which one is working. I mean, there are no cameramen. It’s difficult to know if anyone’s still with us. If they are, this is the scene in the studio, this totally deserted studio. The autocue is working…

[Parkinson’s voice slows and changes to a demonic tone as cats begin to yowl.]

PARKINSON: Round and round the garden… like a teddy bear… [indistinguishable] Fee fi fo fum…

[cats scream]”

The broadcast ends.

An important thing to note here is that “Pipes,” the fictional ghost, is genuinely frightening. Pipes has no eyes, a long black gown, a deformed face that had been eaten off by cats (hence the yowling from the clip), and a sordid history of being a notorious child molester who committed suicide at the Early home due to demonic possession. He can often be spotted, unacknowledged, in the background of many shots in the special. 

The BBC had reservations about airing the program, debating internally whether they should pull it altogether. They went forward, and soon their worst fears about the broadcast  would be confirmed. The BBC and papers across the country were inundated with calls from outraged parents, condemning the broadcast for duping the public. Tabloids pounced on the opportunity to go after the BBC with claims of exploiting children and lying to the public. It was a disastrous embarrassment. 

The very real psychological effects of the broadcast on children only compounded the controversy. Two cases of ten year old boys being diagnosed with PTSD in the wake of the broadcast are recorded, with one reporting distressing symptoms of ‘banging his head to remove the thoughts of ghosts’ that required him to be committed to an inpatient unit for 8 weeks.These were the first ever cases of a television program causing PTSD, with several other cases purportedly caused by Ghostwatch cropping up in the years to come. 

Children weren’t the only ones affected. Adult viewers reported sleeping with the lights on. One viewer who was 25 years old at the time says “I felt literally sick with fear, standing in the corner of the room, peeking out between my fingers, thinking ‘All my life I wanted to see a ghost, and now there is one on the fucking TV!’ Two thoughts raced around my head-- was it only me who was seeing this? And worse, could ‘Pipes’ see me?” But this was far from the worst of it.

For days after the broadcast, Martin Denham, a neurodivergent 18 year old factory worker with a mental age of 13, was obsessed with Pipes the ghost. He became terrified of the noisy pipes in his own home. 

On November 5, five days after the broadcast, Denham hanged himself from a tree. The suicide note found in his pocket simply read: “Mother, do not be upset. If there is ghosts I will now be one and I will always be with you as one. Love Martin.”

Of course, Martin’s mother blamed the BBC for her son’s death. Denham’s parents worked with the Broadcasting Standards Commission to scrutinize the BBC’s approach to airing such disturbing content. The BSC ruled that the broadcast was wildly irresponsible, and forced the BBC to issue a formal apology.

The power of Ghostwatch lies in how it was presented: through live television. As philosopher Martin Mcluhan posits, “the medium is the message” --had the special been presented explicitly as fiction or released on DVD, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it 30 years later. So many of the most effective elements of the program boil down to exploiting the way we interact with the language of broadcast television-- such as the call-in line, the suggestion that the live viewing audience has created a ‘national seance’, and the clever gaslighting of the viewer by repeatedly showing the ghost in backgrounds of shots, then replaying the footage without him there. Truthfully, it’s a brilliant production that feels vastly ahead of its time. For those interested in checking it out for themselves, it’s available to watch for free on Archive.org. I can’t recommend it enough. 

Ghostwatch was aired on the BBC just once and never again on British television due to it being promptly banned for a decade. This of course backfired because parents of anxiety stricken children couldn’t rewind the show to prove to their children the events weren’t real. Those who worked on the program struggled through the backlash, particularly with the death of Martin Denham.

Touching the similar instigating social issues that have inspired horror media for decades, the creators of the program cite the footage of the Iraq and Gulf wars being presented on the news as detached tales of heroism and spectacle as an inspiration for Ghostwatch. The producers even took advantage of burgeoning infrared camera technology viewers were used to seeing exclusively in Gulf War coverage to add tension to the climax. Ruth Baumgarten, a producer of the show, stated in regards to the war footage, “I thought, how real is this? How much does what we want to see manufacture what is made? The denouement of Ghostwatch is: ‘There is a collective wish to see this.’”

Yet again, found footage as a medium gets to the core of the voyeuristic nature of the horror genre. Though potentially unbelievable and surely impossible to replicate in the age of social media, Ghostwatch represents a bygone era of horror filmmaking that directly influenced the found footage movies to come. 

Thus far we’ve talked about aliens, cannibalism, more aliens, and corrupting our poor dogs with horror, so now feels like a good spot to wrap up before we get into the meat of this story. Tune in next time for more behind the scenes stories of lesser known found footage movies and a very, very deep dive into the production history and cultural ramifications of The Blair Witch Project. So--

*loud noise*

Ah! What was that? 

Ok, false alarm, it was my dog. Anyway, bye everyone, and thanks for joining me on this episode of Deep Cuts!

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