Films: 1990s
(1999) The Blair Witch Project
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
The Blair Witch Project
Director: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez
Release: 1999
A runaway success, "The Blair Witch Project" is perhaps the first meta-movie, in which its marketing, origin, presentation and Internet presence intertwined to redevelop the concept of horror film as pop-culture phenomenon.
"The Blair Witch Project" was marketed by producers to the Cannes film festival (and later to general audiences) as real footage, supposedly found months after its documentary principles had disappeared into the Maryland woods.
The stylistic choices of writers/directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez fall under the umbrella of cinema verite, matching truth-on-film cousins "Haxan," ( Benjamin Christensen, 1922 - from which "The Blair Witch Project" takes the name of its production company: Haxan Films), "Medium Cool" (Haskell Wexler, 1969) and even "This is Spinal Tap" (Rob Reiner, 1984) in its quest for deceptive rawness.
The effect was profound.
Not only did "The Blair Witch Project" capture the collective imagination of late 1990s audiences with its post-grunge indie aesthetic, it made those audiences physically react to what they saw on screen. "The Blair Witch Project" was film-as-amusement-ride, in some cases causing motion sickness.
The narrative is deceptively simple.
Joshua Leonard, Heather Donahue and Michael Williams (all played by actors of the same name) gather on an October weekend in Maryland to make a black and white documentary about local legend, the Blair Witch.
The witch is said to have appeared to townspeople in the woods since the 17th century, and has, according to some, driven selected residents mad. A local serial killer in the 1940s blamed the Blair Witch for his child-killing spree and now, Burkittsville folk stay out of the hills and grow impatient with tourists who would pursue the gruesome story.
Nevertheless, the trio hike into the woods.
They're lost almost from the very start, and much of the stomach churning tension in "The Blair Witch Project" stems from the vulnerability and frayed nerves of three twenty-somethings, who aren't really sure they like each other at all. The trio grapple with the sudden and vital dependency they must place on one another while tempers and sanity come unraveled as the rain and waning sunlight thrust them into a scenario of live-or-die wilderness survival.
Beyond the very real threat of exposure, hunger and increasing mental instability, there is the possible reality of something supernatural in the woods.
Whether a function of their macabre project and their untenable situation, or an actual haunting, the three wayward filmmakers are caught in an apparently endless cycle of discovering strange piles of rocks and twisted stick figures, followed by nighttime visitations by something in the woods. Sometimes they hear footsteps, sometimes they hear children's voices.
Finally, the hints of pursuit become actual when one of them disappears (or is taken away) during the night. Teeth and what seems to be a human tongue are subsequently delivered in a bundle of sticks and cloth.
The remaining two find themselves walking circles through the cold and not-so-empty woods, coming back to the same stream over and over until the ultimate encounter with an abandoned house covered in strange symbols and children's' handprints.
Part of the brilliance of "The Blair Witch Project," beyond its skillful interplay of 16 millimeter and video footage, adroit and panic-tinged improvised acting, and genuinely it spooky premise, is that it reveals nothing. In some ways, the Blair Witch is a McGuffin, driving Heather to slightly lie about map positions, Mike to undermine the project out of fear and frustration, and maybe (just maybe) Josh to crack and become dangerous himself.
"The Blair Witch Project" asks its audience to wonder if the human factor is more sinister than the supernatural. Without ever tipping their hats, the Myrick and Sanchez suggest that Heather has been duped, led astray by her male companions in the woods and ultimately killed in the house by her betrayers.
Speculation aside, the camera never illustrates that moment or proves the origin of Heather's horror. The woods are reacted to, and the actors performance to the darkness focuses the audience on shadows, black space and feeble circles of flashlight on trees. Even when something happens to the principles, it happens to them while they hold cameras. Nothing is explicit, the camera goes wild and then a tilted section of floor jiggles and buzzes in the lens.
Thematically, Myrick and Sanchez have constructed an interestingly dark twist on the independent artists of the flannel decade. Heather, Josh and Mike visually signify the typical college indie of the 1990s. Their attire, their hair and their attitudes are steeped in the DIY aesthetic, and their pretensions at serious, serious art, regardless of its ludicrous subject matter, are gently mocked as Heather solemnly intones the legend of the Blair Witch to the camera from caves and gravestones.
What happens to them is a kind of condemnation. Their independence and their precocious young-adulthood are stripped by the elements of the outdoors and by the suspected intrusion of something truly evil and malevolent into their world.
Swiftly, under the pressures of the unreal world into which they enter, their self-assured coolness is reduced to teary, angry, snot-soaked on camera confessions to mother. They are revealed as no more than children, and they are caught in a world of phantoms that sound like children, phantoms who taunt them from outside their womb-like tent.
Heather, Josh and Mike, if they are truly together, form a kind of surrogate family, struggling to get back to that symbol of adulthood, that threshold of independence - the car.
But they must take their punishment. As a legend, the Blair Witch is a kind of vengeful nature mother, endlessly persecuting the innocent, and the not-so-innocent. If the trio commit punishable crimes in the woods, they are the crimes of a careless and ignorant children - knocking over stone piles or stealing a "trinket" (as Mike accuses Heather).
The Blair Witch descends and the hand in the cookie jar is devastatingly slapped.
To remove "The Blair Witch Project" from history, Myrick and Sanchez have made what could be termed, in a kind of retroactive leap, a "pre-9/11 film."
Ultimately, it is a reversal of expectations that undoes Heather, Josh and Mikes. Over and over again, they tell each other that the danger cannot be real, as they are in the United States and nothing is very far away in their country.
In a sense, the trio are encountering a patriotic crisis, a dissolution of expectations and presumptions fed to them by elementary school history teachers. The Blair Witch represents a new and naked existence, in which homeroom, the prom and a waiting room at Mom's house are crumpled up and thrown in the trash. Nothing will ever be the same again.
While they find a house, they cannot find home. The structure, a gutted memory of some family that once lived there and not much more, is a corrupt goal. Mike and Heather race into it, however, hoping for a reunion with Josh. What they find instead is trickery (human or ghostly). They end up trapped and destroyed by their choice to default to the ingrained child-impulse to run into the house when things become dangerous. This time, the neighborhood bully, the child molester, the wicked teacher, waits inside. There is no door to slam, no relief within the bedroom fortress. There is only the final transformation from entitled child to captured prey.
The Blair Witch, whatever its origins, seals the fate of three American children, products of an immediate gratification age, reducing them to flickering warnings against presuming one's place in a safe and protected world.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
