***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard
Directed & written by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez
1999
87 min R
So this weekend I finally saw “The Blair Witch Project.” 6 years after its first release, it’s easy to see why “Blair Witch” was such a sensation, so easily parodied, and then, ultimately, something of a pop culture joke. The movie is elegant in its simplicity, and brilliant in that we slap our foreheads and exclaim “why didn’t someone think of this before?” It is an entire feature made out of a fear of the dark, of strange sounds in the distance, of how you can’t see far in the woods, and of watching our rational preconceptions begin to break down in the face of inexplicable terror. It’s proof that the suggestion of the monster is always more terrifying than the monster itself.
Yes, it’s also a fiendishly ingenious technical stunt, in which 3 actors, 2 cameras, a tent, and some woods are used to make a movie that isn’t just compelling and scary, but was a huge smash. We hear people talking about how evil the woods are, then the kids enter the woods, lose their way, and hear something in the distance. We wait with baited breath for minute after silent minute for something to jump out. It’s so simple, why didn’t someone think of it before?
At the same time, “The Blair Witch Project” is inherently just a little bit silly. It’s the kind of stunt that can only be pulled about once every 20 years or so. Perhaps this is why M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village,” which uses the same approach of minimalist, suggestive terror, was met so coldly.
“The Blair Witch Project” adapts one of the classic tactics of horror stories, in which we find the journal or final log of someone who has vanished, for the video age. The footage of three student documentary makers who disappeared in a Maryland forest has been found. They were making a film about the Blair Witch, a local legend about a malevolent spirit of the woods. All this is explained by a few title cards, and “Blair Witch” is the “reconstructed” footage of their doomed expedition. The three students (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams) are city kids with heavy backpacks, who enter the small town that used to be Blair with cocky attitudes and jokey grins. They interview the locals, and then enter the forest, where they hear strange sounds, see strange things, and the less said by me, the better.
One of the great things about their interviews with the townspeople is how all the stories of the forest spirit seem to conflict. Dates don’t add up, no two people remember things the same, and everything they say sounds half-forgotten from a childhood bedtime story. Every creepy or even off-kilter thing that has ever happened in Burkittsville-formerly-Blair is attributed to the Blair Witch. Locals are vague about whether she was from the colonial era, or she killed a search party in the 1820s, or if she can fly, or if she had something to do with a serial killer who may or may not have existed in the 1940s, or if two hunters disappeared. We watch the students gawk over the inconsistencies of what they hear, dismiss one old woman as a “lunatic,” and wonder if any of their subjects are flat-out lying to them. The DVD extras carefully deprive the movie of this fascination by linking all the old tales together, which is kind of a bummer, but they also include revealing tidbits about how the cast members achieve their raw, primal performances.
The documentary feel of “The Blair Witch Project” is so dirty, wet, and authentic that some early audiences actually believed that what they were watching was real. Naming the fictional film students after the actors who played them, and other aggressive pre-release marketing techniques like the TV spot “Curse of the Blair Witch,” contribute to the gimmick’s effectiveness. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez were no doubt pleased to be mentioned in the same sentence as Orson Welles, who fooled so many with his “War of the Worlds” broadcast.
Myrick and Sanchez use a simple method to differentiate between what the students hope to use for their assignment (black & white 16mm) and what they’re shooting for their own amusement (color Hi8 video). The low-fi approach helps permeate everything, even before we enter the woods, with a sense of dread and unease. It’s easy arithmetic: because we see home movies of real people on video, not on film, we’re more likely to believe something that looks like VHS than a big Hollywood production. The woods stretch endlessly, monotonously, foreboding. Shooting downward as our protagonists walk along is a mindbogglingly easy way to create suspense. Any moment, our camera operator could look up and see something awful.
If the film’s climax, in which our protagonists charge around with their cameras out, seems farfetched, that could be explained in the dialogue “I’m scared to close my eyes, and I’m scared to open my eyes.” The camera, as mentioned earlier in the movie, acts as a filter, making what’s seen through it less threatening. More extravagant explanations could be that the characters have descended into an Ahab-style madness, in which, beyond all reason, they simply MUST keep shooting. Perhaps their madness is so great that they need objective evidence to comprehend their experience; this produces a delightful irony, in that they seek evidence of sanity by insane means. Whatever the case, there’s something classically iconic about these muffled, heavily-clothed figures charging around the darkness with cameras in the place of rifles. It doesn’t make sense, but it looks great. Fellini would be proud.
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