How the Found Footage Festival Beautifully Excavates the Remains of the VHS Era

When Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher walk onto stage and say they’re about to show some video footage, there’s no telling what you’re about to witness. For the creators of the Found Footage Festival, every evening engagement is an opportunity to shock, awe, confound and occasionally terrify an audience—but mostly to laugh.

In one video, an irate Winnebago salesman rants endlessly, seemingly suffering an existential crisis during a disastrous sales shoot until he explodes in a fountain of hilariously articulate profanity. In another, a yoga guru teaches his audience how to lose weight via wide-eyed, maniacal, hyena-like laughter. In still another, a bald, heavyset man named Frank Pacholski clad only in an American flag speedo and domino mask dances lasciviously in front of a handful of confused and terrified-looking senior citizens, in what will go down as one of the most bizarre public access programs of all time—even by Los Angeles standards. Dredging up such artifacts out of the depths of obscurity is all in a day’s work for Pickett and Prueher.

“Basically what we’re doing is a guided tour through a very well curated collection of unintentionally funny videos,” says Prueher, who began collecting with Pickett in the early ‘90s after discovering a particularly absurd McDonald’s janitorial training video in Stoughton, WI. “They come from an era where there was sort of a naive innocence about the format, and it was really affordable for mom and pop operations, and people who had no business behind or in front of a camera, to make videos. There’s something endearing about that, but there’s also something really cathartic about sitting in a dark room and watching them projected on a big screen in a context they were never intended to be seen in.”

That “live on stage” element is what makes the Found Footage Festival hum—the shared experience of uncovering relics from a bygone era that now seem hilariously earnest in retrospect. The clips get big laughs because they both take us back to the point of their creation but are simultaneously relatable to every audience member who may have been made to watch training videos in a break room, or spent a dull weekend at an aunt’s place as a child, watching cheaply produced Christian Bible tracts. Pickett and Prueher have simply taken those experiences and condensed them into a much more powerful and streamlined distillate; a potent cocktail of the most bizarre moments of the VHS era, strung together into eight feature-length volumes to date. The final product is an endless parade of genuinely fascinating weirdos and unforgettable individuals.

“We have this insatiable curiosity about people,” says Pickett. “Who are they, and what is the story of how they ended up in these weird videos? We try to investigate the answers to these questions whenever we can, because it’s the human interest part that drives us. Hopefully it comes across that we’re not mean spirited, because we genuinely love these clips and these people.”