This study concerns a the dark, sensorial epistemologies emerging from intersections of documentary and horror cinema. From the ineffable subjects of horror documentaries and pseudo-documentaries, to the obsessive chroniclers of mockumentary horror cinema, the films examined here express generalized millennial and 21st-century archival anxiety around an unsettled and unsettling hypermediated reality. Part I focuses on gothumentaries, nonfiction works evoking the Gothic’s unreadable subjects and undetected realities. Case studies show key documentary films such as Capturing the Friedmans, Cropsey, and The Hellstrom Chronicle bringing Gothic-horror tropes and conventions to bear upon documentary subject matter to produce skepticism of American environmental, social, and national stability from the 1970s onward. Part II explores mockumentary, fake found-footage, and screen life horror cinema that turns to strategies of documentary and factual discourse to express an archival anxiety around human interaction with recording technologies. Case studies of pivotal films such as The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, Lake Mungo, Unfriended, Sickhouse, and We Are All Going to the World’s Fair turn to Gothic reflexivity as a way of expressing the subject’s relationship to, and experience of, a modernity that overwhelms in terms of its immensity, speed, and recordability.
Kristopher Woofter, PhD, is a faculty member of the English Department at Dawson College, Montréal. His recent publications include the collections Shirley Jackson: A Companion (2021), American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (2021) and The Weird: A Companion (2025). He is editor of the journal Monstrum.
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Archival Anxiety: Horror, Documentary, and the Record-The Monkeyshines Reels; Part I-Gothumentary: Horror Discourse Meets Documentary Desire; Chapter 1. Presencing American History and Resisting Documentary “Capture” -Capturing the Friedmans, General Orders No. 9, Wisconsin Death Trip; Capsule I-Homo Sapiens; Chapter 2. Gothic-Horror Epistemology: The Questing “I”/Eye of Gothumentary -Cropsey; Chapter 3. Radical Diversion: Attractions Politics in the Horror Pseudodocumentary -The Hellstrom Chronicle; Capsule II Interceptés; Part II -Shoot the Dead: Archival Anxiety and Mockumentary Horror; Chapter 4. Archival Anxiety as a Subject Position in Mockumentary Horror Cinema; Capsule III-David Holzman’s Diary; Chapter 5. Fake Found-Footage Horror Cinema: Archival Anxiety and the Camera Chronicler -The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, Home Movie; Chapter 6. Cybernatural: Screenlife Horror and Hypermediated Reality -Unfriended, Sickhouse, We Are All Going to the World’s Fair; Chapter 7.-Horror Mockumentary as Spirit Cinematography- Lake Mungo; Epilogue: Archival Anxiety and Hyper-Sensorial Eco-Horror-Leviathan, The Outwaters; References; Index
