THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT
Scarier than feelng a flock of lobsters swim up your shorts
Dang. Wish I'd taped that "Curse Of The Blair Witch" thing off of the Space channel last night.
When I took a course on fantasy fiction, one assignment was to write a paper on the difference between horror, terror, and what Stephen King calls "the gross-out". I'd never read the famed essays by esteemed New Englanders written on the topic at the time, so I just went with my understanding of it - the gross-out is how one CAN arrive at horror - that is, the reaction to what is happening. And horror is in turn a method by which one CAN arrive at terror - that is, the reaction to what MIGHT happen. Terror, by necessity, works with the imagination; to spell it all out for you brings it back to horror again.
Anyway, I think I got a B on that paper. And that brings us to The Blair Witch Project, which might not go for much in the horror department (as I've tried defining above), but is nevertheless a really terrifying movie.
The hype for this movie has been just insane - pretty big for a major studio project, nigh-unheard of for an indie flick. I don't think even Pulp Fiction got this kind of buzz. I already mentioned that lineup the other day, an unheard-of thing 'round these laid-back parts. The question we've all been wondering is, of course, does it let us down? Or do we yet again have to ask ourselves, "Why did I fall for that?" And when are people going to stop asking me if it's really based on real events?
I, for one, was not let down. Neither was the guy who ran from the theater in the film's final moments, or the lady behind me who was crying. Man, I wish I was un-jaded enough to have a reaction to a movie like that! Wow!
You hear a lot of "has a documentary-like feel" tossed around low-budget horror movies; this is not a comparison I'm fond of or apt to use. The movies this description is often attached to tend to be stylized enough that they become a sort of "slick" of their own. Maybe not like big-budget Hollywood slick, but I can't look at The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Evil Dead and for a moment think that this is anything other than a movie.
The Blair Witch Project, however, actually takes the form of a sort-of documentary. It asks for a different kind of attention to be paid; it asks for the viewer to imagine the people behind the cameras. It doesn't ask for us to marvel at its low-budget inventiveness or its "big studios would never have the guts to do this" taboo-smashing. Just that we accept the notion of three young people and two cameras between them, venturing into the Maryland woods in search of some information on some malevolent entity called the Blair Witch, and of course finding out more than they wanted to.
A grain of salt must be taken with such a premise - the woods are not a good place to be walking around with a camera held up to your eye (one stub of the toe, and you're Camera-Face from Hellraiser III). And I'd certainly not be hauling around a 25-pound camera during the film's more intense moments. But it is, after all, a movie. The alternative is narrative gaps the size of elephants, at best filled in by narration. Thank you, I'll take the footage.
(Some have accused this movie of ripping off Cannibal Holocaust, which reportedly uses a similar setup of being in the form of some guy's home movie, or something. I haven't seen this film - finding it around here seems like such an unlikely prospect as to be not worth pursuing at all - but I'd hardly call this a ripoff. Every other Victorian novel took the form of journal entries and/or letters to loved ones - hell, even my own takes the form of very lengthy e-mails - and this is just a cinematic riff on that. I'm surprised we don't see it more often.)
The characters are reasonably drawn (with largely improvised dialogue) by the three lead actors, who share their characters' names (this is usually a sure-fire sign that a movie sucks, but not here). They marvellously come across as regular folks put into a scary situation (being lost in the woods) and succumbing to hunger, exhaustion, and imaginations inflamed by the stories they'd heard. Panic and blame sets into all three of them, more unsettling in some than others. These are three people that, for the first half of the film, come across as alternately irresponsible, trivial, and pigheaded, but they're all fairly likeable. One wouldn't want to see them come to a bad end, but the setup of the film demands that they do; this produces a sense of dread in even the most innocuous scenes, and the two cameras capturing their interactions do so like doomsday clocks. Their inane banter (like the look at one guy's chest hair) would be insufferable in people we didn't like. And it had me smiling.
This movie is almost as good an example of creating its own inescapable reality as, my favorite example of the notion, Alien. Writers/directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick do much less with imagery than they do with sound, and they exploit the sounds in the night wonderfully; never piling it on, but never making them easy to ignore. (irrelevant grumble - there was some sound-leakage from The General's Daughter in the theater next to us, grumble grumble) What we hear early on might be rocks clacking together, might be trees falling or branches snapping - it's that we don't know but can imagine that makes it all scary. Fancier movies with bigger foley FX budgets often make the mistake of giving us sounds that we can't even really attach to anything, and just assume that they're scary for it (take this year's The Haunting). This is a movie that, well, throws us a frickin' bone.
Sure, there are things we see that are scary - somebody falling on the tent, strange stick figures hung from trees, and of course the ol' shaky-camera-with-one-light-in-the-woods-in-the-night, which is hard to screw up. But it's the things we hear that really make this baby memorable - even just the things we hear ABOUT (like the old guy in town's description of the Blair Witch legend, and one of the young 'un's looking off into the woods and screaming out "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?", about what, we're stubbornly denied a view)
By the end of the movie, we're left wondering, for the film refuses to answer all our questions - it only shows us what it sees. It leaves itself open to a number of possible interpretations and possibilities about the events of the film, any of which are as frightening as any other.
There were a few aspects of the pre-release hype which I think led to some false expectations on my behalf, so by the time the film was done, I was wondering where certain things were. Where's the dad being asked if he thinks his son's disappearance involved the occult? Where's this "demon wearing a little girl"? I'd have done better going in knowing that ALL that comprises the movie is the two-camera footage.
There are a few technical problems - note that early "graveyard" montage, which certainly must have been edited and voiced-over in a film lab. (There was at least one other example of this goof, but I forget what it was. Any others, I didn't notice.)
Still, bottom line, this is the scariest time I've ever had in a movie theater in my life. Ever. No shit, no exaggeration - but keep in mind that I never got to see many horror movies in the theater prior to 1995. It's a different kind of scary than the movie it had to live up to, In The Mouth Of Madness; I don't know yet if this is going to keep me awake at nights, let alone for a year. But it had my heart pounding and my stomach sunk while I was in the theater, and sure enough, had me looking over my shoulder a lot on the walk home. (later - after I came home from watching this movie, I wrote this review and tried to go to bed. This attempt did not last long, and I got up and watched Evil Dead 2 to calm my nerves. Total time elapsed in bed? 20 seconds.)
I am kind of worried about this movie's eventual release on home video - videotape is just an ugly, ugly format, distractingly so. The problems are reduced by its transfer to film, but every ad and TV spot involving this movie I've seen shows the SOV shots as if they were fresh off the tape. Every transition from film to video and back would be so jarring, I suspect it might pull most viewers at home right out of the film. The lesson here is, see it in the theaters, kids.
Y'know how some people want to see a scary movie, but they don't want to see a REALLY scary movie? Don't take them to see this movie, unless you want to be kicked.