The Blair Witch Project Review
by Gary Jones (gary AT bohr DOT demon DOT co DOT uk)November 22nd, 1999
The Blair Witch Project (6/10)
In 1994, three young and inexperienced documentary film-makers set off into the Maryland woods to investigate the story of the Blair Witch, a creepy figure of local folklore, said to be responsible for disappearances and deaths over several decades. All that was ever found of them was the footage they shot. This material was edited and the result is presented here. It tells the remarkable story of how they became lost in the forest and were tormented by strange unseen forces. There's one often-overlooked aspect of this spooky tale that's worth bearing in mind... it's not true. Let's just let that sink in a moment. It's a story. They made it up. It didn't happen.
Some low-budget films have a structure or technical approach which flows from a single cost-cutting idea. The excellent 1998 Canadian science fiction film Cube was set in a huge maze of interconnecting cubic rooms. A set was constructed of one such room, 18 feet on a side, and that's where the whole film was shot. The Blair Witch Project takes a similarly simple and retrospectively obvious idea to make a virtue of necessity: the whole film is presented as the edited footage shot by the three documentary makers and all this material was recorded by the three actors playing the documentary crew. The actors were given a 16mm film camera, a Hi-8 video camera and sound recording equipment, and each day they were given some minimal direction and left to improvise a day's shooting. The footage was collected at the end of each day in exchange for food and the next day's story line. The real film-makers crept around the actors' tent at night producing scary noises and preparing strange artifacts for the increasingly uncomfortable cast to discover the next day. The originality of this idea has been questioned, with films such as Cannibal Holocaust and The Last Broadcast cited as earlier examples of the mockumentary approach to horror movies.
The nature of the film lends itself to confusion about the reality of the events depicted. When we see tired, hungry, cold and scared characters on the screen, we are watching actors, but we are watching tired, hungry, cold and scared actors. Many people seem to have had a problem grasping the idea that the film is a work of fiction. Feeding off the pre-millennial appetite for spooks and demons, the film-makers deliberately fostered this confusion by using the actors' names - Heather, Michael and Josh - for the characters and presenting the film as a true story in promotional material. The official web site, for example, provides extensive "factual" background material on the (completely made-up) Blair Witch story and the unfortunate trio. The story is also presented as truth in many of the unofficial web sites which fuelled interest in the film. These sites were supposedly produced by fans of the movie, but it has been suggested, although the film- makers deny it, that some were actually professionally-produced publicity sites masquerading as fan sites.
There is no violence or gore in the film (apart from a small lump of unidentifiable bloody matter), no special effects and no visible monsters or spooks - the story is told purely through the reactions of Heather, Michael and Josh to what goes on around them. The three performances are convincing, but it is hard to know to what extent we are watching acting or a recording of three very uncomfortable people. The story goes that the actors had to sign releases indicating that they would not hold the film-makers liable for any psychological damage they might suffer as a result of the harsh shooting conditions. In order to see the performances, of course, the characters had to film each other when they might have been expected to have more important things to do, such as make their documentary, find their way out the woods, or run around screaming. This is explained by the pushy Heather, who does much of the most personally intrusive filming and claims to want to record their experiences as well as make a documentary. I wasn't really convinced by this explanation, but how else could we have a movie to watch?
The film has so far made around $140,000,000 in the US - not bad for a movie that cost around $40,000 to make (although the distribution company that picked it up spent an extra $100,000 on the film, mainly on improving the sound quality). It is hard to know what the film's writer- directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez can do next. They have made one of the most successful films of all time, and the money people will be throwing cash at them, yet they've made an unrepeatable freak of a film, with no evidence that they will have a clue about how to make another movie.
The Blair Witch Project is a triumph of marketing, and raises some interesting issues about what's real and what isn't in movies. The technical approach is novel, but this in itself isn't enough to sustain a feature film. There are a few creepy moments, and a the final scene is pretty chilling, but the scariest film ever made? Hardly. When the making and marketing of a film is more interesting than the film itself, you know there's something wrong.
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Gary Jones <[email protected]>
Homepage: www.bohr.demon.co.uk
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