The McPherson Tape and the Beginnings of Found Footage

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4 years ago

A Brief History of the Genre and Why The McPherson Tape is the First of its Kind

Released in 1989, The McPherson Tape (also known as UFO Abduction) is an underground film about alien abduction. The film has a fascinating past including conspiracy theories surrounding it and is a very early example of found footage. In fact, one could argue (and I do) that it is the first found footage film.

So, I can’t really discuss The McPherson Tape without first going into the beginnings of found footage, which is one of my favorite genres and something I love to talk about.

The Roots of Found Footage

The found-footage genre is built on the conceit that the movie was filmed not by a traditional, omniscient director, but by a character that exists within the film’s world—and whose footage was discovered sometime after the events of the film.
Scott Meslow, “12 Years After ‘Blair Witch’, When Will the Found-Footage Fad End?” The Atlantic (January 6, 2012) http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12-years-after-blair-witch-when-will-the-foundfootage-horror-fad-end/250950/

1980’s Cannibal Holocaust is widely regarded as cinema’s first found footage film. Directed by Ruggero Deodato, Holocaust is an Italian exploitation film about an anthropologist who goes into the Amazon jungle in search of a missing documentary film crew who had been filming a cannibal tribe. For the most part, Holocaust is done in traditional narrative format. It’s a movie-within-a-movie, with about half of the film being the lost footage from the documentary crew. Therefore, Holocaust uses found footage as a plot point.

Stylistically, Holocaust doesn’t resemble “found footage” as we’ve come to understand it today. It’s most associated with horror but has been used outside of it. The most well-known example of such a film is 1999’s The Blair Witch Project.

Blair, presented as recovered footage of a missing documentary crew, popularized found footage and sparked a trend that has never gone away. The film establishes some typical elements of found footage film: The style is raw and low budget, the camerawork is all handheld, and the acting is improvised and natural. Many would say it’s the definitive found footage film.

Of course, Holocaust deserves praise and recognition for the use of found footage; it is one of the most famous films to employ the technique, and the first to heavily on it. However, Holocaust also lives in infamy: It features real acts of animal cruelty, in which a turtle and a monkey are killed on camera, and the human violence, including sexual violence, depicted on screen was so graphic and realistic that following the release the director was actually charged with murder. Many people thought Holocaust was an actual snuff film. Deodato even had his unknown actors sign a contract agreeing to hide for a year following the movie’s release, but brought the actors to court to prove they were still alive. The film was put on the UK’s Video Nasties list, and banned in numerous countries. Holocaust remains one of the most controversial films ever made, its popularity mostly limited to cult film fans and horror aficionados, for it understandably puts off many people. Admittedly, although I’ve seen the movie a few times in my teens and early 20s, I didn’t want to re-watch Holocaust for this post. If you’re curious about the film but don’t want to watch animal cruelty, there are edited versions available.

The Forgotten Film

Often left out of conversations about the genre’s roots is that Cannibal Holocaust is actually not the earliest film to use found footage in the narrative. The use of recovered footage is seen even earlier in Caltiki, The Immortal Monster, which was released in 1959! Famed Italian director Mario Bava was the film’s cinematographer, and also did a large portion of its directing. Given the film’s ties to Bava, it’s surprising that Caltiki has been so seemingly overlooked. In the black and white sci-fi horror film, a missing scientist’s camera is found in a Mayan temple, and the team watches the silent footage. It’s a brief scene, but remarkable. To my knowledge, this is the first use of “found footage” in cinema. Please let me know if you’ve seen an earlier example!

Before The Blair Witch Project, there was The Last Broadcast

Another found footage film released a year before Blair didn’t become nearly as popular or had the same kind of cultural impact. This film is The Last Broadcast, which was stylistically similar in that it was recovered film footage. The plot is somewhat similar as well: Broadcast’s story focuses on a missing public access television crew who had gone into the woods searching for the Jersey Devil.

Although released a year earlier, The Last Broadcast didn’t have the impact that Blair would. The reason why Blair stood apart from The Last Broadcast is obvious: It separated itself from any other film at the time because of its viral marketing campaign. Blair’s campaign included reaching people on the street via rumors and missing person flyers, but by far the most important element was the website. With the Internet still in its relative infancy, Blair struck at the perfect moment for a digital grassroots campaign. We’ve since grown accustomed to the online presence of films and studios – today, everyone has a website, a Facebook, or a Twitter. But in 1999, this simply wasn’t the case. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, who directed and edited the film, smartly exploited the web in a way that had never been done before and has been mimicked since. It paid off. As everyone is well aware, Blair became not only a mainstream success but a pop culture phenomenon.

For those interested, I recommend The Last Broadcast. I watched it not that long after its release but forgot about the film entirely until about a year ago when I stumbled upon it for free on Tubi. I find it an enjoyable slice of 90s nostalgia.

The McPherson Tape: The First Found Footage Film

As discussed, various films have helped shape the genre. But in considering what film most closely resembles the way we understand “found footage” to be today, Dean Alioto’s The McPherson Tape must be given its due. It is my opinion that McPherson is the first true found footage film. I’m sure some horror fans would disagree with me, citing to Cannibal Holocaust, and that’s fine. But hear me out: The McPherson Tape is composed of entirely discovered footage that was shot in a first-person POV, with amateur aesthetics, and discovered and edited by a person (or persons) unknown. Blair also contains these elements, which are now essential to found footage films, yet The McPherson Tape predates it by a decade.

I’ve watched The McPherson Tape a few times now, and it’s truly one of my favorite movies. I think it holds up as a good movie and one that deserves more recognition. I rewatched it for this post, choosing the Director’s Cut.

Like other found footage movies that would come after it, The McPherson Tape begins with some introductory text. This opening describes Project Blue Book, which was the code name for investigations conducted by the US Government concerning UFOs and aliens. (Yes, Project Blue Book was a real thing.) The footage that follows is “uncut video footage” of a UFO abduction that took place on October 8th, 1983, during a child’s birthday party. The text refers to the incident as the North Woods UFO Case 77.

Alioto plays the character Michael, who is behind the camera recording the events. His niece is the birthday girl. What I like about the film is that without wasting time, we get a nice sense of the family dynamics, which brings an immediate believability to the footage. Shortly after Michelle blows out her birthday candles, there is a sudden power outage. While checking the fuse box, the young men of the family – all brothers – notice some weird lights in a neighbor’s yard. They seek the source of the lights and come upon a spaceship and its occupants.

No more will be said regarding the plot. You can watch the film to see how the events play out. What’s more fascinating is what happened following the film’s release. Or, more appropriately: The film’s non-release.

Fact or Fiction?

The McPherson Tape never had a legitimate release because the distributor had a fire at their warehouse, and the original tape was destroyed. After the fire, Alioto figured all was lost and wanted to move on with his career. But a few copies of The McPherson Tape had luckily been sent out to video stores as promotional material, and their survival ensured the film would have its place in cinema history.

Unbeknownst to Alioto, someone edited out the credits, and copies of the film began circulating among UFO enthusiasts. The film became a bit of an underground phenomenon. Five years after the film was made, Alioto found out that his film was shown at the world’s largest UFO convention, the International UFO Congress Convention. Bizarrely, a retired Lt. Col. had confirmed the footage was authentic.

Unsurprisingly, many people truly believed The McPherson Tape was real.

“When I first ran across the tape I was invited over to a friend’s house who said he had a very interesting UFO tape. . . I was stunned—shocked, by what I saw. I thought the tape might be real because it could fit in very well with so many UFO alien incidents that I know of. It fit very well in fact—almost too well. I thought no one could fake something like that. […] It began to seem even more obvious to me that possibly it was an entirely authentic video, and someone, namely, possibly the government was trying to grab all the copies out there.”
UFO Researcher, Tom Dongo, on Encounters

Encounters TV segment

Word of the film’s popularity among UFO believers attracted the attention of the media. In 1994, Fox channel’s Encounters ran a segment about the film and its following. Alioto used this as an opportunity to debunk the film once and for all, clarifying that it was a work of fiction that he made. In his interview for Encounters, he called it a “huge compliment” that people could believe his movie was actual documentation of alien abduction.

To this day, however, there are still people out there who think The McPherson Tape depicted true events. For them, that the film’s master tape was lost in a fire was too coincidental. Alioto has even been accused by people of being a part of a disinformation campaign. During the Encounters segment, UFO Researcher and Lieutenant Colonel Donald Ware (Ret), stated, “I am not convinced the thing is a hoax because I know that our government policy is to insert disinformation into every major UFO case or release the document or possibly every home video that gets on the market. The reason is to keep the public from getting too excited about our alien visitors hence the sticker is on the back of the videos saying this is a dramatizing which allows people not to accept it if they don’t have to.”

Truthfully, I’m sympathetic to the believers. Because Alioto had an interest in alien abduction – reportedly, reading Whitley Strieber’s Communion gave him the inspiration – he was familiar with abduction stories and had a good sense for constructing a believable one. Alioto researched descriptions of aliens based on abductees’ testimony, which served as the basis for his creature design. The opening cards describing the film as evidence from Project Blue Book give the film credibility. Impressively, The McPherson Tape was shot entirely in one take — although due to poor lighting, some of it was reshot and then edited in — which heightens the realism. The film featured no-name actors. For such a low-budget feature – the film was made for about $6,500 – these actors were convincing in their roles. Their characters’ reactions felt genuine and the conversations flowed naturally, often overlapping, which isn’t common in movie productions. There aren’t any fancy effects, and the low-quality 8MM footage helps disguise the fact that the spaceship was homemade. And with the film’s runtime of just over an hour, it doesn’t waste its minutes or has an excess of story.

But the most convincing argument for the film’s authenticity was that the footage had seemingly come out of nowhere. No one had made a movie quite like The McPherson Tape before. For a long time there was no original source traced. Not many people had seen it or had copies. Remember that found footage had never been done like this before, and so there wasn’t a precedent.

Finding New Audiences

In 1998, an Alioto-directed remake of The McPherson Tape was released to television. Titled Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, the film stirred up controversy yet again, with many viewers believing the pseudo-documentary to be authentic. In an interview with slashfilm.com, Alioto stated: “News channels did exposés on the movie, and people started believing that the original VHS footage was real, and that the government had hired me to make the TV remake as part of a disinformation campaign to discredit the original.”

The McPherson Tape has since been legitimately released by Vinegar Syndrome thanks to the American Genre Film Archive and Bleeding Skull. And also thanks to the bootleggers who put the film online, which allowed Alioto to rip his own movie. Although the master tape had been destroyed in the fire, Alioto still had all the original footage. When he found a copy of his movie on YouTube, he ripped it and then re-cut the film to match.

While the film may not have experienced the kind of immediate success as The Blair Witch Project, it has achieved a success unique to itself. Personally, I’m charmed by The McPherson Tape and did find it unsettling on my first watch. Today’s audience who might be burned out by found footage films could find it corny or unremarkable. But I think what those people should remember is that when this movie was made, there wasn’t anything else like it. Before The McPherson Tape, there was no found footage film in which a character was yelling to another, “Put down the camera!” So forget for a moment that you’ve seen this style done before, and simply appreciate The McPherson Tape for its historical significance in cinema.