As Blair Witch flops, is the found-footage horror film over?

A reason why Blair Witch, the sequel to 1999 film The Blair Witch Project, didn’t do well in the cinemas may well be because it arrived too late, when the genre had already been wrung out by films like Paranormal Activity. Photo: TGV

Now that Blair Witch, the abysmal shaky-cam horror sequel that no one was waiting for, has come and bombed, you might be tempted to say that a certain genre is ready to lay down and die.

But you’d be wrong. In the mega­plex, of course, the found-footage horror film enjoyed a quick rise, a brief reign, and (now) a spectacular fall.