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After this shoddy premise comes waffling in, we're left with the cold realization that the next 20 to 40 minutes of screentime will be devoted to giving the audience a vast opportunity for reflecting on the $9 they just spent to watch a fake home movie. By the middle of the second act you begin to realize that what you're actually seeing is a calculated swindle where the evil studio genie switched "tension" with "nothingness" under the false flag of realism. But the actual reality here is that a film shot on a $2,000 digital camera in a single house where nothing happens 80 percent of the time can somehow make hundreds of millions of dollars for this sharted-out effort.

Paramount Pictures

Spine-tingling.

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In any other industry, this would be considered a crime. An inferior product half-heartedly passed off for the real thing, like a vendor selling pirated DVDs and "Moakley" sunglasses on the street. If movies were cars, then found-footage is like a rusted '93 Volkswagen Rabbit that doesn't go over 30 mph and costs as much as a 2015 Passat. If someone tried to peddle that hogwash under any other circumstances then we'd send this grifter pariah up the courthouse steps to be hung unceremoniously as a stark warning to other snake-oil fabulists. But instead we pay out, film after film, like a gambling addict pounding through scratchers at a 7-Eleven.

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Why? Because some part of us needs the rush of a horror film so bad that we're willing to sit through hours of utter mediocrity in the hopes of finding the one part that scares us. Maybe it's time we start demanding a better quality high, instead of sucking out gutter swill. Otherwise, before we know it, every film will look like it was made by that insufferable plastic bag kid in American Beauty.

David was really dead this whole time. Give him your undivided attention on Twitter.

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