Found footage horror films feature diegetic camera operators that will usually become the victims of whatever antagonistic force they are recording during the events of the narrative. Since Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Mike Williams went camping in the woods of Maryland in The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999), the found footage narrational technique has become ubiquitous in the horror genre. Found footage horror films are perfect examples of what Thomas M. Sipos calls “pragmatic aesthetic … when a filmmaker puts technical and budgetary compromises to artistic effect” (29). Although the diegetic camera technique affects the way that viewers recognise and empathise with all of these victims, the ways that these operators use their cameras is often different. Therefore, there is a need to construct a taxonomy of how these victims use their diegetic cameras. This taxonomy will classify the different kinds of camera-operating victim characters in found footage horror films: amateurs, students and cinematographers. The different ways that camera operators approach cinematography must be carefully constructed in the opening scenes of the film in order to prime the viewer for a particular experience, and for a particular form of what I have previously labelled “mediated realism” (Turner, Found Footage 9). Amateurs, students and cinematographers have varying degrees of interaction with their profilmic subjects, and there are therefore varying degrees to which they are recognised as characters by the viewer. The more vocal they are as off-screen characters, the more the viewer is required to imagine off-screen space.

In order to create and elucidate this taxonomy, it is first necessary to consider some key theoretical notions.