The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text: Part 10: The Blair Witch Project

To say that The Blair Witch Project was a phenomenon on its initial release is to understate it. Horror films don’t often cross over into the mainstream, but when they do they tend to do so big. Like The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense and Halloween, The Blair Witch Project became one of those films that transcended cross over hit status and simply became something that everyone saw.

As is often the case this is a matter of timing as much as anything else. The Blair Witch Project was released at the tale end of the independent cinema boom, perhaps the only time that multiplex audience were down right used to seeing semi improvised films without name actors on the big screen, but before the digital boom, which would have almost certainly seen it diluted among an oversaturated market and sold directly to its niche. As it was it was one of the first times that a film was sold via new fangled Viral Marketing, with the film’s online presence nearly as famous as the movie itself.

To the delight of Urban Legend enthusiasts everywhere, The Blair Witch Project presented itself less as a movie than as an alternate reality. The website leading not to standard press kits but to faked police reports and a convoluted mythology only slightly in evidence in the film. That the Blair Witch was real was played with a straight face until the film was long in theaters.

The Blair Witch Project was of course also responsible for repopularizing the found footage conceit. This movement has resulted in some extraordinarily bad films, the worst of them probably being George Romero’s woeful Diary Of The Dead and the unbelievably bad The Fourth Kind. Films that for some have retroactively tainted The Blair Witch’s Legacy (This is setting aside the vocal minority who declaimed the film as a con job on its first release).

This is unfair for any number of reasons. Not least of all that The Blair Witch Project is hardly responsible for the found footage subgenre. People love to point to The Last Broadcast, about a public access TV Crew lost and killed in The Pine Barrens as the film that Blair Witch “ripped off”. These theories usually don’t mention that The Last Broadcast is an  unwatchably bad movie. A much clearer line of ancestry can be drawn to the infamous Cannibal Holocaust, whose director was forced to produce his cast in open court in order to prove that he hadn’t simply murdered them. (And no matter what IMDB had to say for a time, things never got that far for the crew of the Blair Witch). You can even draw the line further back to Charles B. Pierce’s pseudo documentary The Legend Of Boggy Creek, which despite it’s mostly clumsy production draws a few moments of eeriness from the stillness and isolation of it’s deep back wood’s setting that are comparable to Blair Witch.

In any case, after a few big hits like Cloverfield and The Last Exorcism, a distaste for these movies has grown, The Outlaw Vern may have summed it up best when he stated, “These are videos I like films.” Continued success of The Paranormal Activity franchise aside, last year’s Apollo 18 and this years The Devil Inside, which has had audiences booing the film nation wide, are perhaps the final straws that sends the subgenre dormant again.

However, two things immediately become apparent when you compare Blair Witch to its inferior progeny. A) That Blair Witch unlike its descendants, despite its loose improvisatory style, is a very constructed film and B) Blair Witch is something that could actually pass as a documentary.

 Now it’s true that the likes of Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield, present themselves as raw home video. Still the unspoken conceit in these films is that someone has edited or at the very least assembled what we are watching. This is an agreement rarely honored by the filmmakers but it is central to The Blair Witch. As is the critical decision to have two camera’s in play thus providing two different simultaneous points of view and allowing for matching reverse shots. (Another crucial difference is that it makes the reason its characters won’t put the damn camera down one of psychology rather than plot convenience).

In other words, the footage in Blair Witch does legitimately look like something that was made, found and put together. It is an artifact, and the story it tells is a terrible one. In other words as Stephen King said, “One thing about Blair Witch: the damn thing looks real. Another thing about Blair Witch: the damn thing feels real.”

The Damn thing does feel real. The film starts with a group of college aged kids going off to make a documentary about an urban legend in a nearby rural area (And let me just say As someone who has spent a fair amount of time on independent film shoots that start out in cheerful bonhomie and end with everybody hating each other and wondering why they came, Blair Witch gets the dynamic just right).

Too little attention is paid to just how effective these early scenes are. They set the tone just right, with the friendly chatting New Englander’s, some plants and some real townspeople, (so much more effective than the standard glowering “townsfolk with a secret” might have been) slowly spelling out their doom. One of the best and not often remarked upon, parts about The Blair Witch that adds to this feeling of reality, is just how fractured the mythology is. It’s never clear just what the story of The Blair Witch even is. Even setting aside such anecdotes as the fisherman’s claim to see “a white mist” there are at the very least four competing urban legends at work here. The disappearance and reappearance of a girl near the turn of the century who claimed to see the witch, a child murdering man who at one time lived in the woods, the appearance and disappearance of unidentified bodies at Coffin Rock, and town eccentric Mary Brown’s description of  an encounter with “a woman covered in horse fur”. (Note that her description of the witch does not match the one supposedly given earlier by the missing girl.) These competing stories told with varying amounts of good humor, (a woman with a child merrily chuckles that she “Believes enough not to go up there” while a fisherman who is the last person encountered before the crew heads in the wilderness stops just short of giving the standard “You’re doomed,” speech, while his friend claims the whole thing is a crock) tell us two things.  That these stories having been passed around the community for a good long while have probably fractured and caused competing myths to sprout up and a fair amount of bullshit to creep in (note that all their interviews are anecdotal, they never delve into old news reports or other sources that could be considered objective). But secondly it brings to mind the old parable of the elephant and the blind men. It gives the feeling that the characters and the townsfolk are only pecking around the edges of something larger. Something that all the stories are only glances at.  Something too horrible to face dead on.

At first the film switches between portions of the documentary and home movie behind the scenes footage, as the crew interviews locals, shoots landmarks and eventually moves into the woods. As the direness of the situation gradually mounts and what was supposed to be one night of camping in the woods turns into six grueling never ending days, the crew fractures, first into bickering then into serious infighting and finally and most horribly into a numbed, elliptical, borderline nonsensical collapse. It’s as if the film itself is having a nervous breakdown.

It’s only fitting. The woods themselves, through which the kids find themselves stuck in endless directionless loops, recall Lovecraft’s famous Non Euclidian Geometry and the architecture of Hugh Crane. There is the feeling that being within the woods of Burkitsville and the vicinity of The Blair Witch is like being trapped within a mind that is unwell. The rules of day to day reality simply do not apply. The characters find themselves walking in odd perpetual loops, passing the same landmarks again and again, the cemetery they are trying to reach stays just on the horizon never getting any closer, the wilderness shrinks and expands seemingly at will. What hope do you have when south will not stay south? It preys on the minds of the characters as well as the viewer. As the good natured banter first dries up, then curdles into bickering and then finally turns into a kind of half coherent mumbling stream of conscience that is only this side of sane (“I’m going to wash my hands now, just washing my hands, going to wash my hands”). No amount of parody can make Heather’s final monologue as she begs for absolution anything less than chilling.

Things disintegrate rapidly from there. The Blair Witch has developed an unfair reputation for not showing anything, or to revisit a metaphor, “Being all sizzle and no steak.” While it’s true that we never see the titular character, what we do glimpse seems bad enough. The days are bad (truly Blair Witch is comparable with The Innocents for being a masterwork of daylight horror) and the nights, where they are assaulted by strange sounds and sights from all directions, are worse. In the film’s most famous scene, it’s imagery explicitly recalling Karl Edgar Wagner’s brilliant Sticks, they come across a series eerie stick figure totems left hanging in a grove. Three rock cairns appear outside their tent and after child’s handprints are clearly seen beating against the sides of their tent one of their number finds his gear slathered in a kind of slime. Later he disappears and a bloody pulp of… something is found wrapped in his shirt like a gift. It’s one of the films few graphic moments and yet stands as one of its best moments of suggestion. Just what did Heather find? Tradition would say Tongue and Teeth (and tradition does count, needless to say this is about as mythic as horror films get), the popular answer on the internet seems to be Josh’s severed genitals, but you never see it clearly. Heather does though, and whatever it is it’s bad enough so that when the end finally does come a few scenes later, there is a terrible acceptance about it, a terrible feeling as Heather and Mike huddle together and share some final cigarettes with the solemnity of prisoners on death row. Not an acceptance that deadens the horror as her terrible shrieks that serve as soundtrack for the last ten minutes of the film testify, but the numbing despair of a cow on its way up the ramp of a slaughter house. When it becomes all too clear that there is no exit.

Blair Witch is without a doubt the best horror film of the nineties. One that reaches past horror and revulsion and into terror. It ended a decade of low notes on a high one.