Archival Anxiety in Documentary and Mockumentary Horror

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by Kristopher Woofter

Type

Studies

Subject

Genre > Documentary

Keywords

documentary, horror

Publishing date

2026 (April 07, 2026)

Publisher

Anthem Press

Collection

Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 278 pages
6 x 9 inches (15.5 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-83999-588-0

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the Author:
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.

Press Reviews:
"This is truly adventurous, wonderfully teachable scholarship. Woofter’s selection of case studies is as innovative as his desire to reframe the relationship between horror and documentary films. In artful prose, Woofter demonstrates how his new concept of ‘Gothumentary’ structures cinema from its beginnings and continues to shape its transformations today." ―Adam Lowenstein, author of Horror Film and Otherness, Director of the Horror Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh, USA.

See the publisher website: Anthem Press