Find Your Way Through 13 Found Footage Horror Books
Found footage horror.
Think movies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.
But found footage horror stories also happen in written form: novels, novellas, and short stories.
Found footage horror adds an element of reality which makes such tales feel more plausible, in turn heightening the essential creepiness of the story. Photographs, videos, and written accounts give these stories a sense of happening as we watch them or read them.
If you’re after a scary read, find your way into one, or all, of these found footage horror books.
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Table of Contents
Episode Thirteen – Craig DiLouie
Found footage ghost horror
Fade to Black is the newest hit ghost hunting reality TV show. Led by husband-and-wife team Matt and Claire Kirklin, it delivers weekly hauntings investigated by a dedicated team of ghost hunting experts.
Episode Thirteen takes them to every ghost hunter’s holy grail: the Paranormal Research Foundation. This brooding, derelict mansion holds secrets and clues about bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s. It’s also famously haunted, and the team hopes their scientific techniques and high-tech gear will prove it.
But as the house begins to reveal itself to them, proof of an afterlife might not be everything Matt dreamed of. A story told in broken pieces, in tapes, journals, and correspondence, this is the story of Episode Thirteen and how everything went terribly, horribly wrong.
“Welcome to Foundation House.”
Found – Andrew Cull & Gabino Iglesias (editors)
Found footage anthology
Eighteen stories of found footage horror.
Featuring stories by Bev Vincent, Ali Seay, Holly Rae Garcia, Clay McLeod Chapman, Nick Kolakowski, Ally Wilkes, Alan Baxter, Tim McGregor, Jeremy Hepler, Angela Sylvaine, Josh Rountree, Donna Lynch, Kurt Fawver, Robert Levy, Joe Butler, Fred Fischer, Georgia Cook, and Aristo Couvaras. An anthology edited by Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias.
“You should put this book back, Return it. Forget about it. Don’t read it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Universal Harvester – John Darnielle
Psychological found footage horror
It’s the late ’90s, and you can find Jeremy Heldt at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. The job is good enough for Jeremy, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.
When a local school teacher comes in to return her copy of Targets, an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, the transaction jolts Jeremy out of his routine. “There’s something on it,” she says as she leaves the store, though she doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, another customer returns another tape, and registers the same odd complaint: “There’s another movie on this tape.”
As Jeremy and those around him are absorbed into tapes, they become part of another story, one that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost that they would do anything to regain.
“People usually didn’t say anything when they returned their tapes to the Video Hut…”
Be My Friend – Mique Watson
Psychological found footage horror
On March 14, 2010, 16-year-old Jacob Stewart vanished.
In the weeks following his disappearance, strange interactions he’d had with a mysterious online figure also known by the name Cronos came about.
This document is a collection of interviews, computer files, public news reports, and online speculation, as well as copies of Jacob’s online interactions with Cronos that were obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
What we hope to accomplish by bringing this case to light is to reignite the desire to find Jacob and Thomas … because they could still be out there.
“I knew something was wrong when Mom called me in the middle of the night.”
Skeleton Creek – Patrick Carman
Middle grade found footage horror – Book 1 of Skeleton Creek
Sarah and Ryan are in deep trouble… they’ve discovered a dark secret… something that everyone in their hometown of Skeleton Creek, Oregon, seems to want to keep from them. Why? It just doesn’t make sense. The answers are at the old, abandoned dredge.
The last time the two went out to the creepy dredge, Ryan ended up unconscious and in a cast at the hospital. Ryan is stuck at home, but Sarah can continue to solve the mystery with her new camera. Forbidden to speak with or contact Sarah anymore, they communicate through Sarah’s videos posted on her secret website.
“Read the Book. Watch the Videos. Uncover the Mystery.”
Experimental Film – Gemma Files
Psychological found footage horror
Former film teacher Lois Cairns is struggling to raise her autistic son while freelancing as a critic when, at a screening, she happens upon a sampled piece of silver nitrate silent footage. She is able to connect it to the early work of Mrs. Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, the spiritualist and collector of fairy tales who mysteriously disappeared from a train compartment in 1918.
Hoping to make her own mark on the film world, Lois embarks on a project to prove that Whitcomb was Canada’s first female filmmaker. But her research takes her down a path not of darkness but of light: the blinding and searing light of a fairy tale made flesh, a noontime demon who demands that duty must be paid. As Lois discovers terrifying parallels between her own life and that of Mrs. Whitcomb, she begins to fear not just for herself, but for those closest to her heart.
“In the end, you will always look at the thing you’re told not to just because it exists, if only to prove it exists.”
The Footage – Stuart James
Psychological found footage horror
Five years ago, a group of friends stayed in a lodge in Sheers Woods, Amersham, and never returned.
Their footage went viral overnight, becoming one of the most viewed clips on social media. The video documents their vacation, but their faces are blurred and their voices dubbed, leading many to doubt its authenticity.
Enter Jess Turner, an investigative journalist who has just landed her dream job and is eager to impress her new boss. Obsessed with the footage, she persuades him to email the new owner and secure her a stay at the lodge before it reopens to the public.
Against the pleas of her family and friends, Jess travels to the lodge alone. As she delves deeper, she uncovers a terrifying series of events straight out of her very worst nightmares.
Now, they’re coming for her.
“Everyone says its cursed. Are you sure you want to go in there?”
The Supernatural Enhancements – Edgar Cantero
Gothic found footage horror
Months after the last of the Wells sons jumped out of his bedroom window in Axton House (forgetting to open it first), two strange Europeans arrive in Virginia to take possession of the estate.
A. is the 23-year-old unforeseen scion, and Niamh is the mute punk teen girl he refers to as his associate or his bodyguard. Both are ready to settle into their new cushy lifestyle, and the rumors about the mansion being haunted add to their excitement. But ghosts are not in any way the deepest secret of the house.
Through journals, letters, security footage, audio recordings, and ciphers, A. and Niamh delve into Wells’ dubious suicide, the secret society he founded and its mysterious Game — a “bourgeois pastime” of global proportions.
“Worst beginning ever written.”
Ring – Koji Suzuki
Supernatural horror – Book 1 of Ring Trilogy
Asakawa is a hardworking journalist who has climbed his way up from local-news beat reporter to writer for his newspaper’s weekly magazine. A chronic workaholic, he doesn’t take much notice when his seventeen-year-old niece dies suddenly – until a chance conversation reveals that another healthy teenager died at exactly the same time, in chillingly similar circumstances.
Sensing a story, Asakawa begins to investigate, and soon discovers that this strange simultaneous sudden-death syndrome also affected another two teenagers. Exactly one week before their mysterious deaths the four teenagers all spent the night at a leisure resort in the same log cabin.
When Asakawa visits the resort, the mystery only deepens. A comment made in the guest book by one of the teenagers leads him to a particular vidoetape with a portentous message at the end:
“Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now.”
Video Palace: In Search of the Eyeless Man – Dr Maynard Wills
Urban legend found footage horror anthology
Explore the world of Maynard Wills, PhD, professor of folklore and fan of the podcast, Video Palace. The podcast followed Mark Cambria, who along with his girlfriend Tamra Wulff, investigated the origins of a series of esoteric white video tapes. Cambria went missing in pursuit of these tapes, but not before hearing whispers of an ominous figure called the Eyeless Man.
Fascinated by the podcast and Cambria’s disappearance, Wills embarks on his own investigation into the origins of the tapes and the Eyeless Man, who he believes has lurked in the dark corners of media culture and urban legends for at least seventy-five years. As part of his study, he has invited popular writers of horror and gothic fiction to share their own Eyeless Man stories, whether heard around the campfire or experienced themselves.
“I only wish he were still able to enjoy these indulgences.”
The Root Witch – Debra Castaneda
Witch found footage horror
It’s 1986. Two strangers, hundreds of miles apart, grapple with disturbing incidents in a one-of-a-kind quaking aspen forest.
Knox is a new Forest Service ranger assigned to a vast, remote territory in Utah.
Sandy is a producer fighting for her place in a tough TV newsroom.
Both have heard about the shadowy figure believed to menace visitors to the forest. When a man disappears and reports of the Root Witch begin coming in, Knox and Sandy are plunged into a living nightmare.
Their lives converge on Halloween. Sandy sends a news crew to investigate the sightings. But when the team goes missing, and a shocking video surfaces revealing the ghastly truth, Knox and Sandy face the biggest decision of their lives.
“The trunks were white, and the leaves never stopped rustling. A ghost forest.”
Asylum – Madeleine Roux
Supernatural found footage horror
For sixteen-year-old Dan Crawford, the New Hampshire College Prep program is the chance of a lifetime. Except that when Dan arrives, he finds that the usual summer housing has been closed, forcing students to stay in the crumbling Brookline Dorm. The dorm was formerly a sanatorium, more commonly known as an asylum. And not just any asylum – a last resort for the criminally insane.
As Dan and his new friends start exploring Brookline’s twisty halls and hidden basement, they uncover disturbing secrets about what really went on at Brookline … secrets that link Dan and his friends to the asylum’s dark past. Because Brookline was no ordinary asylum, and there are some secrets that refuse to stay buried.
Featuring found photographs from real asylums.
“They built it out of stone – dark gray stone, pried loose from the unforgiving mountain.”
Scanlines – Todd Keisling
Urban legend found footage horror
In 1987, Congressman Benjamin Hardy III died by suicide on live television amidst accusations of political corruption. Years later, rumors of a recording surfaced among VHS trading groups and urban legend chat rooms. Dubbed the “Duncan Tape,” after the deceased cameraman who attempted to sell the video, the rumors allege that anyone who watches the tape is driven to suicide.
Or so the story goes. In truth, no one has ever seen the supposed Duncan Tape, presumably because it doesn’t exist. It’s a ghost story perpetuated on the forums and chat rooms of the internet, another handful of bytes scattered across the Information Superhighway at blistering 56K modem speeds.
For Robby and his friends, an urban legend is the last thing on their minds when a boring Friday night presents a chance to download porn. But the short clip they watch turns out to be something far more graphic and disturbing, and in the coming days, they’ll learn even the most outlandish urban legends possess a shred of truth.
“He’s here again. Inside this time. Covering the windows didn’t work.”
Published: 14 June 2024
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