In 1938 Orson Welles created a genre of entertainment which doesn’t really have a name that encompasses everything it entails. The “fiction-as-reality” genre. The most famous examples of that are the fake documentaries, mockumentaries, seen in Christopher Guest films and TV shows like The Office. In the 1980s and 90s, TV found a small niche in fake news broadcasts (Special Bulletin (1983), Ghostwatch (1992), and Without Warning (1994)).
The genre didn’t really reach mainstream popularity until The Blair Witch Project (1999) popularized the found-footage subgenre and movie studios realized they could make horror films for pennies. Most of what has been said about Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds didn’t happen. Newspapers at the time told of mass hysteria and panic in the streets, but there is little proof of that happening.
The fact that this genre originated with folklore and urban legends goes without saying. The difference is that urban legends are stories of things that have happened (and might happen to you), while the fiction-as-reality genre is you watching it happening live or watching the footage of it happening.
When thinking about urban legends, one might think of the woman who had a cyst filled with spiders, a traveller seeing “welcome to the AIDS club” written on a bathroom mirror after a one-night stand, or the call coming from inside the house. Most tropes had their day in the sun (or night in the dark) and then something new came up. A more persistent trope throughout the latter half of the 20th century was the one with aliens. People seeing UFOs or being abducted was all the rage, even before The X-Files. Most of the “Alien Greys” stories are reimagined folklore involving hidden people, or as we call them in Iceland, Huldufólk. But I could write essay about that (and I did when I was a university student).
This lengthy intro is just to cement how much Dean Alioto hit the nail on the head when he made UFO Abduction, aka The McPherson Tapes, in 1989. In it, he combines the urban legend that had people run scared of the greys and the found footage technique, and he did it when most people had never seen or heard of such a thing as a “found footage” film.
Shot on a handheld video camera, Alien Abduction shows us home footage of a family that is celebrating a birthday. When the electricity goes off and the boys see weird lights in the sky, they go to investigate and find a spaceship. What’s outside of that spaceship? Yeah, the greys. They rush back home to their family but the aliens follow. What follows are intense 50 minutes of a family stuck in a house in the woods while being stalked by the scariest creatures ever (I am terrified of the greys).
In 1989, most people had just seen their own family’s handheld footage or short segments on the news and maybe on America’s Funniest Home Videos or COPS, both began airing that year. We, here in 2026, have obviously watched an unfathomably amount of handheld footage since it’s always calling us through our mobile gadgets. That’s what is so impressive, because Alioto nailed all the things we hate about them. The cameraman is always breathing way to loud, he has a real hard time keeping his hand steady and pointing at the interesting thing, and no matter what is happening, somebody is in the background yapping about something nobody cares about.
The film nails reality. The family knows there are aliens outside, but they still talk about school grades, how bad the coffee is, and “well, it’s time we head home.” I think COVID showed us how good we are at just ignoring the stark reality we are facing, and this family does it in spades.
The actors are fantastic. I believed every character completely. They aren’t hamming it up or awkward, they legitimately all look and feel like this is real footage of them. And they weren’t given an easy task. In one scene, the brothers are discussing how much their mom drinks and bam, alien spaceship. I could name a few A-list actors that wouldn’t be able to pull this off.
The mood captured is eerie and intense. I’ve watched over 20k films and seen almost every horror film ever made, very few get my heart racing as this one does. The film was probably shot on VHS or VHS-C (the smaller tapes) and the quality is exactly that. It’s grainy and dark and it makes the film work so well. We can’t see anything clearly, so our mind fills in the blanks. Pareidolia makes sure we put alien faces in every window and dark corner. Most of the time we don’t even know what the characters are reacting to, and it works.
Also, it has kids. Like I always state, kids are fucking creepy. One of them draws the face of a grey because she saw one in the window. Didn’t tell anyone about it, just went all spooky like kids do.
In 1998, Alioto remade UFO Abduction for Showtime to discredit the original film which was real found footage film of alien abductions. That’s actually a real conspiracy theory. In reality, Showtime gave him lots of money to update it and he even got a few actors that viewers might recognise.
