Matt has been writing for MovieWeb since 2021, specializing in horror, animation, and 80s and 90s films. He obtained his first degree in Media Writing from Greenwich University.
In relation to the course, Matthew spent some time writing as an intern for music and lifestyle magazine Guestlist.
Matthew also has a Masters degree in Marketing and has worked several PR jobs where writing duties included creating press releases, quotes and byline-articles.
While certainly not the first movie to use ultra-realism and found footage to enhance its horror, when The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999, it changed the genre forever. Perfecting the format, it proved that a microbudget horror movie based around suggestion and the illusion of authenticity could generate enormous profits and ignite public fascination while simultaneously influencing dozens of movies in its wake, including REC, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity.
Interestingly, The Last Broadcast, released just one year prior, adopted many of the same techniques and thematic ideas, yet failed to make anything close to the same cultural impact. Overshadowed by timing, distribution and a rapidly changing media landscape, it has been largely erased from the conversation surrounding the rise of found footage horror.
Found Footage as an Idea Rather Than a Movement
Prior to The Last Broadcast, audiences had certainly encountered the idea of found footage as a technique, but not as a repeatable genre. The most notable of these early experiments is Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 ‘video nasty’ Cannibal Holocaust, which, like The Last Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project, follows a lost film team making a documentary in the wilderness, and the subsequent discovery of their footage. Made for around just $100,000, it leans heavily into exploitation and shock tactics that, while earning it a strong cult following over the years, proved far too extreme to establish any kind of mass appeal.
Other equally niche movies, including America’s Deadliest Home Video and Man Bites Dog, toyed with similar ideas, but it wasn’t until The Last Broadcast that found footage was presented as investigative evidence rather than spectacle. Told in a pseudo-documentary and unfolding through archival interviews and grainy camcorder footage, it tells the story of a crew investigating the mythic Jersey Devil in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, who ultimately meet their own chilling fate.
Unlike the confrontational extremity of Cannibal Holocaust and Man Bites Dog, its restrained, documentary-style realism provided The Last Broadcast with far more potential for mainstream appeal. Made on a shoestring budget of just $900, and edited on a desktop computer using Adobe Premiere 4.2, it was praised for its innovative, low-cost techniques and genuine scares and was a box office success, grossing around $4 million worldwide – an especially impressive figure considering its miniscule production costs.
‘The Blair Witch Project’ Marketing Campaign Remains One of the Greatest
Less than a year after the premiere of The Last Broadcast, another pseudo-documentary, found footage film about a team who meet their demise while investigating a local myth, was released and went on to become one of the most financially successful and talked about horror movies of all time. The movie was, of course, The Blair Witch Project – a film hailed as a milestone in independent cinema and the definitive found footage horror, grossing a phenomenal $248 million on an estimated budget of just a few hundred thousand dollars. It overshadowed The Last Broadcast in every conceivable way possible, but whether this disparity can be solely attributed to quality remains debatable. The key difference is not found in the caliber of the story, acting or format – the most apparent distinction lies in marketing.
Both productions were forced to operate with limited funds when it came to their releases and promotion. The Last Broadcast’s marketing was modest and traditional, relying on limited festival screenings and small-scale distribution with little fanfare. The Blair Witch Project, on the other hand, made the ingenious decision to harness the power of the internet during its early era of mainstream adoption. The film’s creators transformed the promotional campaign into part of the overall experience, immersing audiences into the mystique of the movie, using the internet’s capabilities to blur the lines between fact and fiction. In the process, they created a viral hype around the movie in a way the world had never seen before.
Bringing the story to life with online reports of missing actors, fabricated ‘evidence,’ expanded background on the Blair Witch legend, and ‘real-life’ clips from the events of the movie being drip-fed online, the internet became a hotbed of rumors and speculation surrounding the authenticity of the movie. Much of which was sparked and encouraged by the filmmakers themselves on early forums and chat rooms. As a result, audiences around the world flocked to theaters in droves to watch the movie, with many watching multiple times, in search of hidden clues and evidence to further fuel their theories.
Two Found Footage Innovators, One Legacy
Both The Last Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project took a concept that had been floating around for decades and wrapped it neatly into an easily consumable package. By finding ways to take advantage of their limited budgets, these found footage horrors feel authentic, raw and immersive. Relying on psychological tension and ambiguity over glossy effects or complex storytelling, they proved that simplicity can be just as effective in invoking terror.
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Despite the proximity of their releases, only one was hailed as a groundbreaking game changer – credited with a legacy that inspired dozens of movies that followed and changed the way marketers approach the internet to promote movies. The other fell by the wayside, overshadowed by its successor, becoming an intriguing footnote in the evolution of the found footage genre – a story of what could have been had it reached the right audience at the right time.
The Last Broadcast Like TV-14 Horror Mystery Release Date October 23, 1998 Runtime 86 Minutes Director Stefan Avalos, Lance Weiler Writers Stefan Avalos, Lance Weiler Cast See All David Beard Lance Weiler Stefan Avalos Jim Seward
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