"At one point in Rob Reiner's seminal 1984 mockumentary, "This Is Spinal Tap," Michael McKean's pretentious rock star declares, "I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human than someone who doesn't believe anything."
The line does a fine job of summing up mockumentaries as a genre, which poke fun at real-life phenomena and events through seemingly "realistic," faux-documentary film techniques. This art form has been around in a major way since 1938, when Orson Welles read a fake radio news broadcast adapted from H.G. Wells' alien-invasion tale "War of the Worlds" and convinced many Americans that little green men had in fact touched down on Earth. Since then, film versions of mockumentaries have built upon that dynamic, blurring the line between real-life sensationalism and pointed, fictional comedy."
