Remember those vids you took with your phone and forgot all about? Well, that’s a new(ish) genre that’s making Hollywood millions with a series of projects in the new – let’s say it all together now – “found footage” category of filmmaking, examples of which you’ve already seen.

Remember ‘Cloverfield’ where a bunch of gorgeous wealthy kids recorded scenes of their wonderful life then recorded a big old monster over it?

No, I don’t remember much about it either, but it was a big hit at the time. (What do we think of her boots in this pic? Hot or shot?) How about ‘Paranormal Activity’ where footage was found that showed what happened after the spooky thing came into the bedroom (or was it always already there?) And how about one of the earliest examples – yep – ‘The Blair Witch Project’ which scared the crap out of us using stick figures and snotty noses? Or go back even further to ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ (1980)? No, maybe better leave that last one out…

(This is actually from ‘Blair Witch 2′ but it looks spookier than shots from the original.)

Now, the glorious Weinstein Company has snapped up ‘Wanted’ director Timur Bekmembetov‘s low budge ‘Apollo’ project for a March release. This film holds that manned Apollo missions didn’t stop with Apollo 17 like folks think.

(Working title: ‘Apollo Ex Vee Eye Aye Eye’)

But SFX specialist Roland Emmerich said bye-bye to his found footage project called ‘The Zone’ even though the outer space/alien low-budget thriller was supposed to start shooting next week. (Stopping something that close to shooting is generally a really bad sign, often indicating there’s a lack of faith in the production from the finance folks. Seems that the low budget of $5m, as opposed to Emmerich’s usual $100m and a release date close to ‘Apollo XVIII’ put a stop to it, but, you know, those are all rumours.)

Now there’s a similar project called ‘Dark Moon’ which is, yes, about a black ops mission to check out classified moon missions. This one’s written by Joe Carnahan‘s former assistant Olatunde Osunsanmi, who wrote the dreadful and dreadfully over-hyped alien schlockfest ‘The Fourth Kind’ which is also a found footage film.

So, what will these found footage films show us? What’s out in space?Aliens? A big black obelisk? Designer knitwear?

Until someone finds the freakin’ footage, we’ll never know.