Expanded Mockuworlds: Mockumentary as a Transmedial Narrative Style

As noted by Henry Jenkins, the notion of transmedia storytelling was first introduced in the public debate in relation to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s mockumentary The Blair Which Project (1999), whose release was preceded and followed by a vast number of texts (e.g. a website, a television program, a book, a CD, magazine articles and a filmic sequel) each providing the viewer/reader with an insight on a diverse part of the happenings related to the three students’ disappearance. However, this is not the only example of a transmedial world that sprung from a filmic mockumentary. Many are the cases where, following in the path traced by Myrick and Sánchez, the narrative of a filmic mockumentary has been expanded on other media, especially on the web and/or on a social medium. Mostly conceived as part of a marketing strategy that aims at “authenticating” the film as a documentary by showing that the events and characters in it depicted have left traces also in other media, the products therefore created are something more than simple paratexts of the movie to which they are related. They are fully-fledged prequel or sequel of the film, as they each at the same time contribute in developing its story but are self-contained. Through the depiction of some exemplar cases (such as those of Cloverfield and Nothing So Strange), this paper intends to argue that, if it is not unusual to incur in film-based transmedial mockuworlds, it is due to mockumentary being a narrative style characterized by a strong adaptability to different media, in virtue of the fact that it is possible to vest a fictional story in the semblance of a documentary simply by recurring to those elements that the viewer/reader recognizes as veridictive marks of the medium to which the product is destined.