On the Margins of Language, on the Margins of Truth: Rethinking French Horror through the <i>faux-documentaire</i>

In the 2021 special issue of French Screen Studies , guest editor Maxime Bey-Rozet articulates how Horror Studies in French cinema remains an understudied field—but one that is nevertheless starting to gain traction. My article adds to this small but growing scholarship by bringing into the conversation a (sub-)genre not mentioned in the issue—the faux-documentaire . Trickery and fakery are used to imitate documentary evidence and style, in the margins between “truth” and “fiction”. Yet, in imitating the documentary genre, the faux-documentaire here also imitates the Hollywood style of found footage films such as The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999). To make this claim, this article considers two found footage faux-documentaires by French director Fabien Delage: Cold Ground (2017) and 3:15AM (2018, an anthology that Delage contributed to and starred in).