The newest nightmare from the mind of prolific horror short director Isaac Rodriguez, The Cop Cam puts the viewer in the eyes of a police officer investigating what appears to be an abandoned home. As the officer explores he starts to suspect that the home may not be as abandoned as it initially appears. As the name suggests, the short is shot entirely through what we’re lead to believe is a body cam, a clever use of modern technology to both give the video that grit that has made the found footage genre so popular, along with lending it a veracity that many found footage films lack.

Rodriguez is able to leverage the realism of the genre while sidestepping the trope of the found footage protagonist that keeps holding up their Steadicam while being chased by an axewielding
psychopath. Coming in at just over 2 minutes in length, the film wastes little time in building tension and developing a sense of dread at what awaits our faceless protagonist around the next corner. The short is not without its issues, given its short length there is little time to really set the scene and the climax plays out in a fashion that is not uncommon for shorts of this nature.

Horror fans won’t have much trouble guessing where this one is going, but that doesn’t mean they won’t have any fun getting there. Rodriguez’s third horror short in as many months and his thirteenth since starting his Youtube channel back in 2015, CopCam along his prior film Face Swap show a great deal of promise
and a shrewdness for using technology to explore new avenues of fear.