Flak Magazine: Review of The Blair Witch Project, 7-20-99

The Blair Witch Project is, as all have said, very frightening. Considering its mass-market appeal, however, it's even more notable as being, with respect to narrative, the most experimental, thought-provoking film that much of its audience will have ever seen.

Both a bone-chiller and a mindbender, the film (perhaps unwittingly) brings to the surface fundamental questions about how and why cinema works as a storytelling medium, questions buried so deeply in so many films that viewers never think to ask them. The result of this interplay between horror and convention-bending is a film that will doubtless have you anxiously reminding yourself "It's only a movie" much more frequently than any other genre flick in years.

The set-up is simple: Three students disappear while making a documentary about an alleged supernatural menace in the nearby woods. The Blair Witch Project is cut together solely from the footage they shot, found a year after they vanished.

It's a brainiac idea, executed par excellence by directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. In fact, they went still farther: The cast — Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams — not only shot the footage themselves (with a 16mm camera loaded with black-and-white film, a Hi-8 camcorder and a digital audio device), but were only given character sketches and basic backstory as their script. From the outset, then — starting with interviews with planted "citizens" of the fictional town of Burkittsville, Md., and then heading into the forest — we know almost as little as the characters who serve as our only eyes and ears, and the characters know almost as little as the actors.

Those in the know are the crew, who used GPS technology to track the actors and orchestrate events and scenes into which they could lure them. Indeed, the cast and crew rarely interacted — the only direction given to the actors was in the form of slips of papers delivered with that day's rations. Based on the revelations and guidance these contained (which couldn't be shared with the others), the actors improvised their whole performance from the dialogue on down. (In the film, there's an altercation over a map one day and its resolution the next, and I'd wager the actor whose character was at fault didn't know that was so until after the initial altercation was filmed.)

What we see, then, are genuine reactions — anger, consternation, shock. It's more than method acting. It's method cinematography.

In its sustained tone of unease, gradual prominence of the supernatural and constant variations on madness and interpersonal distress, The Blair Witch Project is most reminscent of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, but still very different. Like The Shining, any definite explanation for what happens and why remains maddeningly irresolute, and both movies are uncommonly scary because they lack that assurance that a logical and neat conclusion, no matter how contorted, can provide. Instead, evil becomes abstract and inescapable, defiant of natural law and irreducible to a single bad person or wrong action.

But The Shining at least had the satisfaction of its great Grand Guignol moments, where The Blair Witch Project has far less overt (but only somewhat less effective) chills : The supernatural scares come from static elements like sticks, stones, the very slightest blood and a hair-raising wall treatment. And where Kubrick had such control over his films that he seems to have been able to direct the very way snow fell, Myrick and Sanchez's film couldn't be more extemporaneous.

One scene that stands out is early on, when the students are interviewing a Burkittsville mother about the legend of the Blair Witch, which, it should be noted, gained its bogeyman notoriety through stories of snatching children. As the woman tells her tale in very vague terms so as not to say disturbing things in front of the toddler she's carrying, that child becomes increasingly agitated and tries to get her mother to stop telling her story. It's a scene so finely shaded and subtle that I couldn't believe it when the filmmakers revealed to Raygun that it was entirely unplanned. The child wasn't directed or even aware what was going on — it just reacted as if preternaturally aware of the menace of the fictitious Blair Witch.

Now that's spooky.

Just as spooky, and perhaps just as unintended, is the actual experience of watching the movie. The Blair Witch Project will have a long life on video, and although that may seem appropriate given the film's low-fi origins, it should be seen in a theater, preferably one that's at least half-empty, and preferably without any previews beforehand.

That's because the film's very physical nature helps distance it from other movies. The Blair Witch Project's conceit is pretty tricky — if these characters are being pursued and threatened by this witch, why not just shelve all of the movie gear and run? (The problem on our end being, of course, that what they don't shoot, we can't watch.) The filmmakers give the characters an entirely believable justification — Donahue speaks of the camera being a "reality filter," meaning so long as she looks through it, there's a wall between her and the horror of her situation. Reflecting this, the film looks as if reality has been filtered in and out of it and finally reconstituted into something that, unlike practically any other horror movie, is not clearly a fiction.

Right out of the gate, you'll notice that the movie is shot flat — that is, roughly as wide as it is tall — and so in most theaters, the areas of the oblong movie screen on either side of the image will be blacked out, like a kind of inverted letterbox. This both distinguishes the film from its full-screen, more movie-like contemporaries and draws attentions to the proxemics of the theater — two actions which will cause viewers to reconsider just what it is they're watching.

Moreover, the low quality of the video equipment, particularly the camcorder, is so exaggerated by the image's enlargement onto 35mm and then onto the screen that it takes on an eerie otherworldliness. One shot that appears in all the publicity is a close-up of a stocking-capped Donahue crying as she films herself. It's strangely gripping onscreen; video's inherent awfulness blanches all the contrast out of the picture and presents instead splotches and blobs meant to resemble a face. In a movie low on special effects, Myrick and Sanchez have created a look and mise-en-scene that innately distort reality ... but, then, don't all filmmakers do the same, regardless of whether we notice?

Also unusual is the film's constant use of point-of-view. It's not a new technique with respect to horror films — it's very popular in slashers to make you complicit with the killer — but I'm not aware of another mockumentary take on horror, and the format is compelling. Beyond forming instant and strong sympathies with character you may not otherwise like, the point-of-view approach also means that you're (often literally) as in the dark as the characters, and tens of seconds will pass (which is an eternity onscreen) in complete blackness as you hear only labored breathing or distance footfalls on dead wood. Less has not been this much more in a horror film for years. Who knew that, at the end of the millenium, eliciting fright could really be no more difficult that blacking out a theater and playing sounds of breaking twigs? — and there's little question that those bumps in the night will make you crawl out of your skin. The movie exploits our fear of being cut off from the luxuries of our civilization to the fullest extent.

All of these things draw attention to the artifice of movies to an extent that, for those who've never really thought about it but let this film engage them on that level, may be somewhat uncomfortable. The most critical aspect is the film's editing. The students disappeared, so they didn't cut down their supposed 20 hours of footage into this 82-minute movie. By prompting the audience to ask, "Who did?" — and did so very well, for both story comprehension and maximum thrills — the movie may cause many to acknowledge the potential of editing, which is so deeply ingrained into our cultural and aesthetic grammar that it's difficult not to underestimate its power to shape our thinking. While and after watching it, you want to know: Where's the rest? What was left out? Who makes the call? Who's telling the story if a movie's not presented in point-of-view? Just who narrates movies?

These are questions that Myrick and Sanchez probably had no intention of asking — they just wanted to make a scary movie, and they've done so with gusto. But they're presenting this film to a generation and a culture well-serviced by a film and television industry whose ability to manipulate their customers is most secure when no one poses and ponders these very basic questions about the nature of the movies. The Blair Witch Project will shut many eyes in terror, but it may open as many more in wonder at the possibilities and magic of the movies.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)