We all got duped.
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00:00 The one reassurance you get when you finish a particularly scary horror movie is that
00:04 it's okay because it's not real.
00:06 Monsters and ghosts and the undead can't haunt you because they don't exist.
00:10 So actually, it's pretty horrifying when you're then led to believe that the risks
00:14 you see are all too real, and the events you watched unfold on screen could happen to you
00:18 at any time.
00:20 So I'm Amy from WhatCulture, and here are 10 Horror Movies That Were Scarier For Making
00:24 You Think They Were Real.
00:26 10.
00:27 Lake Mungo In the decade-plus since its release, Australian
00:30 mockumentary Lake Mungo has become a cult classic.
00:33 It depicts a family attempting to come to terms with the death of their daughter, Alice.
00:37 Ever since her drowning, the family home has taken on a lingering ghostly presence.
00:42 Despite being unabashedly supernatural in nature, the film is constructed so as to appear
00:46 real, using lo-fi video sources for the most part to capitalize on the eerie ambiguity
00:51 of the imagery.
00:52 Between the convincing performances of the cast and the spot-on docu-style format, Lake
00:56 Mungo locks viewers in an anxious vice grip all the way to its gut-wrenching conclusion,
01:00 ending with a haunting closing image which, while being objectively a work of fiction,
01:04 is sure to linger in the mind long after.
01:07 Though the film didn't have any sort of Blair Witch-esque marketing campaign pushing
01:11 it as a real documentary, the technical and psychological plausibility of the piece make
01:14 it feel real even in its more outlandish moments, and it's all the more chilling as a result.
01:19 9.
01:20 Cannibal Holocaust The infamous film follows a group of American
01:23 anthropologists who head into the Amazon rainforest to locate a missing film crew.
01:27 As you can imagine, this doesn't go well for them, and upon its release, many believed
01:31 that Cannibal Holocaust was in fact a snuff film.
01:34 This was largely a result of not only the film's believably gritty visual style and
01:38 stunningly realistic gore effects, but also the fact that the cast had to sign contracts
01:42 saying that they wouldn't appear in anything else until a year after the film's release.
01:46 The film's director was subsequently brought into court in Italy on charges of obscenity
01:50 and murder, requiring him to get the actors to come together for a TV interview and confirm
01:54 their living status.
01:56 In addition to this, he also had to show the court how certain special effects, namely
01:59 the impalement scene, were achieved without harming anyone.
02:02 Though the director was eventually cleared and sanctions against the film were lifted,
02:06 Cannibal Holocaust remains hugely controversial today due to its real depictions of animal
02:10 slaughter, and four decades on, it's not lost a shred of its queasy believability.
02:14 8.
02:15 Noroy the Curse Noroy the Curse is an expertly constructed
02:18 mockumentary revolving around the disappearance of documentary filmmaker character Masafumi
02:23 Kobayashi as he makes his latest film.
02:25 While the cast mainly consists of actors who'll be relatively unknown to Western audiences,
02:29 the movie doesn't need big stars to give it value.
02:31 In fact, the film's realism benefits from its unknown cast.
02:34 The film's production values feel entirely faithful to what you'd expect to see in an
02:38 actual documentary.
02:39 Even with a beefy two-hour runtime, most of Noroy is defined by its thick atmosphere and
02:44 lo-fi chills rather than over-the-top scare sequences.
02:47 This is to the extent that, if you stumbled across the movie on the TV in the early hours
02:50 of the morning, you'd be forgiven for assuming it was an actual true crime doc.
02:54 7.
02:55 Paranormal Activity It cannot be underestimated just how buzzed
02:58 about Paranormal Activity was ahead of its 2009 release.
03:02 Marketed on the strength of its minimalist style, defined largely by handheld camera
03:06 work and static night-vision surveillance footage, critics gladly dubbed the film the
03:10 new Blair Witch Project.
03:12 And in a way, they were right.
03:13 Although there's no denying that audiences have become decidedly savvier to the tricks
03:17 of the genre in the decade between these two movies, Paranormal Activity nevertheless felt
03:21 like a horror film for the YouTube generation, especially with the characters' obsessive
03:25 focus on self-documentation as they investigate a possible supernatural presence in their
03:29 home.
03:30 Though most rational viewers will eventually appreciate the increasingly reality-breaking
03:33 set pieces to be acts of artifice, for a great deal of its runtime, the minimalism on offer,
03:38 defined by ambient creaking noises and subtle movements in the frame, is eerily relatable
03:42 to anyone staying up in the early hours.
03:44 Fix.
03:45 Poltergeist To be clear, Tobe Hooper's 1982 horror masterpiece
03:49 Poltergeist is not a found-footage film or a mockumentary.
03:52 It is an actual piece of typical narrative horror filmmaking.
03:55 So whilst nobody watching believed it was real in a documentary style, the story surrounding
03:59 Poltergeist's production has nevertheless made it the most believably cursed horror
04:03 film in history.
04:04 The curse is largely centered on the unexpected deaths of two young actors from the original
04:08 movie in the years that followed.
04:10 22-year-old Dominique Dunne, who played the Freelings' daughter Dana, was strangled
04:13 to death by her ex-boyfriend mere months after the film's release.
04:17 And 12-year-old Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne in all three films, died of a bowel
04:20 obstruction several months before Poltergeist 3's premiere.
04:23 The urban legend surrounding the curse only grew in more recent years, when it was revealed
04:28 that the crew used real skeletons for the sequence in which Diane Freeling is dragged
04:31 into the family's swimming pool and encounters a bunch of skeletons.
04:35 Whilst conventional logic of the world around us says that these happenings were nothing
04:38 more than a spooky coincidence, that doesn't stop many fans from believing the curse to
04:42 be true.
04:43 5.
04:44 The Last Broadcast
04:45 The Last Broadcast is a fan-footage mockumentary released the year prior to The Blair Witch
04:49 Project, and though certainly lacking the same scrappy commitment to plausibility as
04:53 its successor, it is nevertheless a deeply unsettling piece of filmmaking.
04:57 The film investigates the murder of a TV crew who head into New Jersey's Pine Barrens in
05:01 order to hunt down the mythic creature known as the Jersey Devil.
05:04 It thrives on the strength of its authentic, lo-fi documentary style, taking full advantage
05:08 of its minimal resources to muster an all-encompassing eerie atmosphere.
05:12 Though the film was widely criticized for its twist ending, which lifts the mockumentary
05:16 veil for a shocking meta-twist, everything leading up to that point was a shockingly
05:20 persuasive piece of investigative journalism.
05:22 4.
05:23 Ghostwatch
05:24 On Halloween night 1992, the BBC broadcast the exceptionally well-crafted TV movie Ghostwatch,
05:30 which presented itself as a legitimate news-style investigation of a supposedly haunted English
05:35 house.
05:36 The film's success is largely a result of its production values, which feel entirely
05:40 consistent with what audiences expected from actual BBC News broadcasts.
05:44 The film cuts between studio footage of well-known BBC presenter Michael Parkinson and a supposedly
05:49 live broadcast from the house itself, where an assortment of increasingly bone-rattling
05:53 scares take place.
05:54 Aided by the extremely strong performances of the central cast and a faultless presentation,
05:59 the BBC ended up receiving 30,000 phone calls from distressed viewers, causing a tabloid
06:04 wildfire in the days that followed.
06:06 Ghostwatch was so effective that the Beeb refused to re-air or release it on home video
06:10 for an entire decade, and in the years since, its esteem has grown as one of the most ingenious
06:15 blurrings of fact and fiction in TV history.
06:18 3.
06:19 Guinea Pig 2 - Flower of Flesh and Blood
06:22 The Japanese Guinea Pig franchise is infamous for its revoltingly realistic depictions of
06:27 torture and murder.
06:28 Rangers found footage intended to document the extent to which human beings can tolerate
06:32 pain.
06:33 The series remained controversial throughout its six-movie run, but never more so than
06:37 with the release of 1985's Guinea Pig 2 - Flower of Flesh and Blood.
06:41 Though the sequel was directed by Hideshi Hino and adapted from his own manga, the sequences
06:45 of a woman being drugged, kidnapped, and dismembered by a psychotic samurai were nevertheless deemed
06:50 horrifyingly believable - enough so to get the attention of the FBI.
06:54 The film was investigated by the FBI after, out of all people, Charlie Sheen brought it
06:58 to their attention, thinking that it was a snuff film that depicted real murder.
07:02 The authorities eventually dropped their investigation after viewing a "making of" documentary
07:06 confirming the contents to be fabricated, but even so, it's easy to see why Sheen felt
07:10 compelled to contact them.
07:12 Given that Guinea Pig 2 could easily pass muster as a terrifying real snuff film today, almost
07:16 three decades ago, there was far less of a reason to be skeptical.
07:20 2.
07:21 The Blair Witch Project
07:22 The legacy of The Blair Witch Project truly cannot be underestimated.
07:26 Released in 1999, it's largely accepted to be the father of modern-day found-footage
07:31 film.
07:32 It followed three student filmmakers - Heather, Michael, and Joshua - as they headed into
07:35 the Burkittsville, Maryland woods to investigate the mythical Blair Witch.
07:38 For audiences of the time, The Blair Witch Project represented a practically unfathomable
07:42 level of gritty authenticity.
07:44 From the highly believable trio of actors, the rough-hewn digital camera work, and highly
07:49 minimalist approach to scares, everything slotted into place to make the end result
07:53 just believable enough.
07:54 Aiding things immeasurably was the movie's ingenious marketing campaign, focused on a
07:58 website that claimed that the cast members were missing for real, while the actors maintained
08:02 a low profile ahead of the film's release.
08:04 The film's ambiguity only makes it that much more believable as a piece of actual found-footage,
08:09 and arriving as it did shortly before internet adoption enjoyed a worldwide uptake, it was
08:13 able to play its clever trick on the world largely unimpeded.
08:16 1.
08:17 Antrim - The Deadliest Film Ever Made
08:20 Antrim is a mockumentary about a supposedly lost, cursed 1979 film which contains subliminal
08:26 images and sounds.
08:27 It's supposedly linked to the deaths of almost 90 people, apparently as a result of the secret
08:32 messages coded within.
08:33 The bulk of the so-called documentary is composed of Antrim itself, which the documentary crew
08:37 receives a copy of, and though the resulting footage is undeniably unsettling, the true
08:42 genius here is in so believably framing this mockumentary as an objective account of a
08:46 supposedly real piece of lost media.
08:49 This resulted in many social media users believing that 1979's Antrim is completely real, and
08:54 ultimately speculating on whether or not the movie's subliminal messaging - which largely
08:58 consists of signs and sigils - genuinely actually led to anyone's death.
09:02 Though it's ultimately a well-executed gimmick above all else, it's impressively effective
09:06 for such a modern movie, especially with regard to the period detail and grotty visuals of
09:11 the Antrim faux film itself.
09:13 And with that, we've reached the end of this list of 10 Horror Movies That Were Scarier
09:16 For Making You Think They Were Real.
09:18 Did you fall for any of these?
09:19 Don't worry, we won't judge.
09:20 Let us know in the comments down below.
09:21 And remember to check out WhatCulture.com for more lists and articles like this every
09:25 single day.
09:26 As always, I've been Amy from WhatCulture, and I'll catch you next time.