A key characteristic of found footage horror – and an element that is central to its appeal – is its tendency to blur the line between reality and fiction. In Chapter 2, for instance, I discussed how Cannibal Holocaust played with this line to such a degree that audiences questioned the truth status of its narrative. The films that form the focus of this chapter – Diary of the Dead, The Bay and The Conspiracy – also adhere to this subgeneric feature, most notably through their inclusion of actuality footage in their opening frames. Among the first scenes in Diary of the Dead, for example, Deb – the protagonist – narrates over real-life footage of violence and looting from around the world; she explains, ‘This is what we were getting from the news networks’ and in doing so begins to frame her documentary as the converse ‘truth’. The Bay, meanwhile, begins with a montage of images and clips, including authentic news broadcasts relating to then recent environmental oddities bearing the logos of well known news networks such as CNN. These broadcasts include a 2011 incident where millions of dead fish washed up at Sebastian Inlet State Park in Florida, and when over a thousand blackbirds seemed to spontaneously perish and fall from the sky in Arkansas that same year: both of these events baffled scientists. This montage in The Bay ends with a title card that reads ‘Those events were covered by the media. The following story was never made public.’ The implication present in both Diary of the Dead and The Bay is that although the mainstream media is reporting on some events, a specific ‘truth’ in both narratives is being withheld from the general populace. This is also discernible in the first sequence of scenes in The Conspiracy. Opening with images that gaze up at huge buildings framed by beautiful clear blue skies, the voice of a man – who we are later introduced to as Terrence, a conspiracy theorist – is heard before we are shown he is in a busy metropolitan street using a megaphone. The man urges us to realise that