Scrolling through YouTube late at night, you stumble upon a video titled “Real Ghost Caught on Camera.” The thumbnail shows a grainy, dimly lit hallway, and the video has millions of views. Intrigued, you click on it. The footage begins with a shaky handheld camera, as the person behind it whispers about strange noises they’ve been hearing in their house. The camera pans around the darkened room, capturing every creak and shadow. Suddenly, a door at the end of the hallway slams shut on its own. The person gasps, but instead of running away, they move closer, the camera trembling in their hands. As they approach the door, it slowly creaks open, revealing an empty room. Suddenly, a pale ghostly face peers around the door and quickly ducks away again out of view.  The camera operator screams and quickly runs into the room.  Quick blurry shots follow as the person filming whips the camera around inside the room to show there is nobody in the room or hiding behind the door.  

This is just a typical example of the many “paranormal” videos typically found on YouTube and other video sharing platforms.  While many rightly view these clips as fake, there are also huge numbers of people online that are convinced that real paranormal activity has been caught on camera, seemingly blind to the very clearly staged nature of the events captured.  This article will explore the reasoning for why so many people, particularly on social media, are prepared to believe such obviously staged paranormal content.

Found Footage

In 1999, the release of The Blair Witch Project in cinemas effectively launched the “Found Footage” genre of horror movies, as it has since come to be known. Due to the (at the time) innovative shooting style and viral marketing campaign – which leaned heavily into presenting the events portrayed as real, with fabricated news stories presenting the three lead actors as missing film students – many cinemagoers were convinced the creepy events portrayed on screen were real. With its tiny $60,000 budget, this modest indie movie became one of the most profitable movies of all time, ultimately grossing more than $248 million. This in turn encouraged studios to release countless copycat efforts, to varying degrees of success.

Praise for movies in the genre was not universal, however. A common criticism among audiences was that the genre’s filming style – typically filmed from the perspective of one or more characters holding video cameras – stretches credibility. Instead of running away, these people continue to film events, often up to and including their own demise. In order to maintain the illusion, scriptwriters will often insert sequences where characters remember to pick up their camera and start filming the latest threat to life and limb. Sometimes they try to come up with a narrative reason for this apparently irrational behaviour; mostly they don’t bother and just hope the audience is willing to go along with it. Ultimately, the gimmick that was intended to make the horror on screen more immersive by placing the audience in the shoes of the characters is the thing that took many filmgoers out of the experience.

Later efforts in the mid to late 2000s, such as Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity franchise, attempted to overcome this challenge by using plot elements to justify a reason to have a number of statically placed cameras in the location at the centre of the events on screen, mimicking methods of placing locked-off cameras in strategic positions to maximise coverage during real paranormal investigations.  By using a suitable backstory for their placement- such as the family trying to capture unexplained activity within their home – the presence of cameras becomes a little bit more plausible.

The success of the Paranormal Activity franchise revived the Found Footage genre after a lull in popularity since The Blair Witch Project’s release, which coincided with the rise of social media video sharing platforms like YouTube. Suddenly, budding content creators looked at the success of the likes of Peli and began to believe they could emulate that success. It was found that through relatively simple techniques and video editing software that was becoming commercially available to the masses, similar effects could be achieved from home, and the use of the static view of a stationary camera made editing techniques- such as masking and key framing to insert or remove elements into the picture- much simpler to execute. Some of these efforts by amateur creators produced some impressive effects which can be quite convincing to those without knowledge of such techniques.

Around the same time these videos were on the rise, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Vine, and later TikTok were gaining prominence, and with them, social media “influencers”. Influencers were gaining huge online followings by documenting idealised versions of their day-to-day lives. People were becoming accustomed to the idea of always having a camera ready to document events, helped along by the almost universal adoption of smartphones. Now almost everyone from primary school kids to their grandparents always had a high-quality video camera in their pocket, ready to record anything and everything. In short, the idea of documenting and sharing the minutiae of our everyday lives was rapidly becoming normalised.

The Impulse to Document

Late on the afternoon of July 13th, 2024, in a field near the town of Butler, Pennsylvania, former US President and current (at the time) presumptive Republican Party Presidential Nominee Donald Trump was delivering a speech at one of his customary open air campaign rallies. Six minutes into his speech, eight shots rang out as a gunman opened fire from a nearby rooftop, causing minor injury to the candidate, serious injuries to two bystanders, and tragically killing another person in the spectator stands. The gunman himself was killed by law enforcement in the moments after opening fire.

In the aftermath of this incident, much of the commentary focused on the political motivations and reactions of the press and public at large. However, analysis of crowd reactions noted something concerning. From the moment the gunshots rang out, and through the chaotic and no doubt terrifying moments that immediately followed- among the bystanders ducking for cover or attempting to flee, a not insignificant number of people in the crowd instead stood upright, completely exposed in the open, mobile phones held high to document the chaos.

This is not necessarily a new phenomenon. More than two decades earlier, French filmmaking duo the Naudet Brothers were in the middle of shooting a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a group of New York Firefighters early in the morning of September 11th, 2001. When the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, the brothers followed the firefighters into the towers and captured the horrifying events of that day almost in their entirety. Despite the clear and terrifying amount of danger they faced, especially after the first tower collapsed, they continued to film.

It could be argued that the Naudet Brothers are journalists and filmmakers, and it was their professional instincts that kept their cameras rolling, but other incidents seem to back up this trend among the general population. The 2020 Ammonium Nitrate explosion in Beirut and the 2024 Crocus City Hall mass shooting in Russia are other recent examples where people in the midst of terrifying events continue to film in the face of life-threatening danger.

Other less high stakes incidents demonstrate similar behaviour.  It is now almost a given that any rock or pop concert will have a significant number of people in the audience watching almost the whole show through the screen of their smart phone, rather than living in the moment and experiencing it.  These examples may speak to a larger cultural transformation that is becoming more prevalent in recent years—the act of capturing events on camera no longer feels like a choice; to many, it has become an impulse.

Creator’s Tactics – Leveraging Realism

In the digital age, this impulse to document and share moments, even in the face of extreme danger, has become a societal norm. This behaviour has become so ingrained in modern life that it’s almost reflexive—like a new layer of behaviour on top of our evolutionary instincts of fight or flight. This shift reflects how deeply social validation and the need to feel connected have become wired into our psyche. The act of sharing might feel like a way to assert control or make sense of chaos, but it also raises questions about how technology is reshaping our priorities and instincts. If this trend continues, it could have implications for how we respond to emergencies or even how we define “normal” behaviour in high-stress situations.

Over recent years, fake paranormal content using handheld cameras has become increasingly prevalent on social media, shot in the same style as the cinematic offerings in the Found Footage genre.  This time, however, viewers appear less likely to question the plausibility of why the protagonist is even filming.  People might no longer ask why someone would use their phone to film themselves investigating a strange sound in their house or a possible intruder, instead of using the same device in their hand to call the police. Suspicious framing, which just so happens to centre an object in view just before it levitates across the room, goes unaddressed by people accustomed to seeing carefully curated vlogging footage by social media influencers.  Even sceptics – self-styled “debunkers” – will almost always completely overlook this in favour of speculation over technical aspects of an alleged piece of hoax footage.  The general populace’s capacity for critical thinking seems to have developed a blind spot in this regard.

Final Thoughts

The influence of social media and the impulse to document every moment, even in the face of danger, has significantly shaped our perception of reality. This cultural shift has blurred the lines between fiction and reality, particularly in the realm of paranormal media. The normalisation of documenting events has led to a society where people are less likely to question the backstory as to why someone might be filming at a given time, and this is something that content creators have been able to exploit.

As we continue to navigate this digital age, it is crucial to reflect on how these changes impact our behaviour, our understanding of events, and our ability to discern truth from illusion. The prevalence of fake paranormal content on social media further complicates our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction.

Thanks for reading.  Do you agree that audiences today have become desensitised by the volume of self-shot footage on social media?  Leave a comment below to tell me what you think.