Snapshot is an inventive British found-footage horror movie from Joseph Archer and Cathy Wippell, filmed through a Victorian pinhole-camera perspective.
Found footage has been done in just about every format imaginable, but Snapshot has found a particularly strange way of approaching it.
The new British indie horror movie from Joseph Archer and writer Cathy Wippell is presented as footage recorded in 1888, using a fictional early moving-image camera to document events in Victorian London, where the entire movie is built around the limitations of the technology available in its period setting.
That means Snapshot doesn’t look like a conventional found-footage movie either – Archer shot the film in a circular 1:1 frame designed to resemble a pinhole camera, giving the image the appearance of something genuinely captured through an early photographic device.
The restricted frame changes how the audience sees the action, with people and locations frequently appearing only at the edges of the image or disappearing completely beyond the camera’s limited field of view.
The fictional footage supposedly comes from an amateur inventor named Tamworth, who has developed a primitive moving-image machine with wax cylinders attached for recording sound, where the resulting material is later presented as recently uncovered footage from 1888, creating the central conceit that the audience is watching a lost piece of early cinema.
The film uses that setup to tell a horror story around Jack the Ripper, but the filmmakers aren’t simply recreating the historical murders – the footage centers on an all-female ghost-hunting society that believes the killings are being committed by something supernatural.
Cathy Wippell plays Minnie, one of the women involved with the group, alongside Hazel Rogers, Lydia Helen, Nadia Lamin and Rosie-Bella Johnson, while Tom Stourton provides the voice of Tamworth, the man supposedly operating the camera.
The movie was made independently through Silicon Gothic, the production company founded by Archer and Wippell, with the filmmakers deliberately using the horror genre to explore modern issues through historical settings.
The production has already attracted attention on the festival circuit – Snapshot had its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August 2026 before screening at FrightFest, with further festival appearances following its Edinburgh debut.
The movie also picked up international sales representation from Alief, which acquired worldwide sales rights ahead of its Edinburgh and FrightFest screenings.
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