Review: The Blair Witch Project (1999)
There’s a moment in “The Blair Witch Project” when I had to think of the Brady Bunch. Perhaps I’d been primed by the main characters singing the Gilligan’s Island theme as they go off into the woods, but there’s a moment evocative of Bobby picking up the tikki doll in the Hawaii episodes. Bad stuff is going to happen, though maybe not with anyone losing it on a surf board.
Despite this, “Blair Witch” does generally go against the standard horror movie cliches. No deadly glitter of steel reflecting off a knife or axe, no false scares when the rattling in the woods turns out to be a bunny, no real shocks when the false scares turns into the lull before the storm. The movie’s frights work through the ominous buildup of information, and suggestive noises in the night. Little gore is used, and what gore we do see is ambiguous. The creepiest Lovecraft stories I’ve read works similarly: much time is spent telling the dark history of this quiet house in, say, Providence, and only then do we venture inside.
“Blair Witch”, however, and despite the hype, really isn’t the scariest movie ever made. Or at least I didn’t find it that way. Maybe I couldn’t suspend disbelief sufficiently — I kept thinking that this was a problem that could have been solved with a GPS unit, a pair night vision goggles and some clue — and, yes, there are creepy moments with the barely audible children’s voices and the grove full of wood figures, and the quick vision in the cellar for some reason sticks in my mind, but I’ve seen scarier X-Files. Hell, the “Return to the Cathedral” and “Bonehoard” levels in the computer game “Thief” were creepier, at least until I figured out that my fire arrows work really well against the undead. Other people have used “Blair Witches” techniques of creepiness, and have done it better. I still think “The Shining” is the scariest movie I’ve seen. Give me the two dead girls and redrum any day.
Besides background and creepy noises, the other major part of this movie is watching the lost hikers freak out as they slowly realize that they’re lost and that there’s something in the woods with them. I admire how well done this was. There’s genuine fear in their faces at points. The film’s publicity campaign stresses how much of this was ad libbed, with actors put out in the woods with relatively minimal instructions, and the directors and crew trying to scare the hell out of them in the middle of night. “Method directing”.
There’s an interesting article in Salon about the film makers [1]. Basically, the author accuses the film makers of violating the relationship between them and their actors, fundamentally not trusting them to act. The purpose of this, apparently, was to make everything “real”. The film makers decry standard film making for that art’s ingenious fakery. Ironically, the signature scene in the film, when Heather is looking into the video camera and weepingly apologizes to everyone, must have been a scene that was relatively scripted, compared to the strategy of rousing up the actors, disorientating them and forcing them to run through the woods.
It’s also ironic, then, that the publicity surrounding this movie is constructed as it is. This campaign is all wonderful fakery, aimed at obliterating the line between reality and fiction. Partially to invoke the backstory, so necessary to the film’s creepiness, in the lobby of the Angelika, where I saw the movie, are a number of nice vitrines illustrating the film’s background, including a museum-like write up of the Blair Witch legend, the film canisters for the missing hikers’ backpacks, and so on. We won’t mention the websites (though this article does [2]) (Snopes has provided a short deconstruction of the “facts” of the piece [3].) They purposely blur the film’s background into our hazy memory of childhood ghost stories: I had thought “Blair Witch” had something to do with the actual legend, centered on New Jersey or Pennsylvania or such (I was probably mixing the Bell Witch [4] with the Jersey Devil [5]). True, it’s in the spirit of the “mockumentary”, but I don’t believe anyone else, not “Spinal Tap”, not “Dadetown”, has gone to such an extent.
I’m reminded of the excellent book, “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders” [6], which describes Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology [7], a sort of piece of performance art dedicated to evoking the delicate, momentary weightlessness of wonder: wonder whether that exhibit is real, and wonder that it could possibly be real. “The Blair Witch Project” doesn’t go much into wonder, however, and doesn’t venture that far into fright.
[1] http://www.salonmag.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/07/14/blair_essay/index.html
[2] http://www.salonmag.com/tech/feature/1999/07/16/blair_marketing/index.html
[3] http://snopes.simplenet.com/horrors/ghosts/blair.htm
[4] http://www.ghosts.org/bell.html
[5] http://www.serve.com/shadows/jd.htm
[6] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679764895/o/qid=931978762/sr=8-4/002-7638729-7343234
[7] http://www.mjt.org/index.html