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YouTube ‘found footage’ docs: urban legends in their own words

From bogeyman memes to Trump fans, film-makers are mining user-generated video to examine complex online ‘truths’

Is a documentary still a documentary if no original material has been shot for it? Some intriguing new releases comprising “found” YouTube clips and other online video ephemera suggest it definitely is. The resulting films can be profound and disturbing comments on how our obsession with online video is creating subcultures where myths and legends are shared and amplified. What’s really true in the “real” world doesn’t matter.

Dan Schoenbrun’s A Self-Induced Hallucination delves into the phenomenon of Slenderman, a shadowy fictional figure that started as an internet meme and is linked to some very real violence, notably the attempted murder of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin in 2014. Making a film about Slenderman isn’t an original idea: there’s a feature coming out in August, and HBO released the documentary Beware the Slenderman in 2016. Schoenbrun’s film is clever in being about the phenomenon itself, featuring an array of YouTube videos where freaked-out contributors riff on Slenderman’s significance in their life. Some have drunk the Kool-Aid and see its influence everywhere, delivering rapturous whispered monologues. Others are sceptics, or are disturbed by the reaction to Slenderman rather than the character himself.

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