Living Dangerously: Found Footage Fiction

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, narco smugglers, and human traffickers. His personal war stories include performing humanitarian operations over Bangladesh, being deployed to Afghanistan, and a near miss being cannibalized in Papua New Guinea. His fiction and non-fiction has been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, The New York Post, The Financial Times of London, and Publishers Weekly. The American Library Association labeled him one of the Major Horror Authors of the 21st Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. A writer of more than 26 books in multiple genres, his military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war. Weston likes to be called a chaotic good paladin and challenges anyone to disagree. After all, no one can really stand a goody two-shoes lawful good character. They can be so annoying. It's so much more fun to be chaotic, even when you're striving to save the world. You can argue with him about this and other things online at Living Dangerously or on Facebook at Badasswriter. All content of this blog is copywrited by Weston Ochse.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Found Footage Fiction - Locus Magazine Article

I recently had an article published in Locus Magazine's Author's Round Table about Found Footage Fiction. For those who don't know, Locus is the industry trade magazine for authors of the fantastic. I thought I might post a teaser here so that you can see what it's about and if you want, follow the link to Locus Magazine. The essay includes discussion of author's Adam Neville, Marissa Pessl, and Gemma Files.

Despite the earlier revolting Cannibal Holocaust in 1980, The Blair Witch Project firmly established found footage as a film genre in1999. The shaky-cam unreliable narrator film about three students who disappeared in a Pennsylvania forest opened the door for the immensely popular Paranormal Activity franchise. Seeing events unfold on a second internal screen somehow made them feel more real to the viewer. The horror we felt while watching was predicated on the idea that the camera can’t lie. But could the same technique work in fiction?

How do you pull off found footage in fiction? In a film, it’s a film within a film. Can you have a book within a book? Can you layer real and fictitious secrets then reveal them through the aperture of a page? Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges did it in his 1940 story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. In the space of a short story, Borges creates varying layers of reality by providing real people and places and mixing them with fictional people and places, all based around a fictitious entry in the fictitious Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. In this case, one thing is less fictitious than the other, all of which is discovered by the characters in the story, which unveils, as it should, a mystery.

This unveiling of mysteries using fact and varying degrees of fictitious detail are the hallmark of found footage fiction (F3).