The
tagline of The Blair Witch Project is "In October
of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods
near Burkittesville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary.
One year later, their footage was found." Titles at the beginning
of the film tell us about the three who set forth into the
woods to do a documentary about a legendary witch but never
returned. Filmviewers must surmise that the video film is
recovered. The story begins as Joshua Leonard and Michael
Williams and Heather Donohue (playing themselves), generation
Xers about eighteen years of age, pack up for the expedition
into the Black Hills Forest. Montgomery College film student
Heather leads the trio. When they reach Burkittesville (formerly
the town of Blair), they interview townspeople about the two-hundred-year-old
legend. Some interviewees are skeptical, but others allege
that in 1940 a hirsute witch was responsible for disemboweling
seven children aged six in a now-abandoned house in the woods.
Using a map of the area, the trio sets forth on foot to locate
the house, the gravesites, and perhaps the witch herself.
After a relatively inconsequential first day, they camp out,
but during the night they hear strange sounds. When they wake
up, there three gravesites, marked in stone, outside their
tents; they infer that the witch was responsible and gave
them a warning. On the second day, despite a dispute over
the map between Heather and Mike, they locate the seven gravesites,
also marked in stone. The same sounds bother them during the
second night. On the third day, they decide to return to civilization,
but Mike has secretly destroyed the map, which he believed
to be worthless; after Heather vents anger over the loss of
the map, she decides that the group should go south, using
her compass. In the afternoon they locate a place where sticks
have been tied together onto tree branches in the form of
skeletons. At the end of the day, they have returned to where
they started. Panic sets in, but they have to bed down for
the night. After dark, they are attacked. When the attack
ends, Mike and Heather that realize that Josh is missing.
They hear his screams but cannot find him. When they awake
the next morning, they find a bunch of sticks tied together
with strips of Josh’s flannel shirt; inside the sticks is
a fresh human heart. More panic. They decide to go east instead
of south and soon discover the abandoned house; inside the
house are screams. They try to locate the source of the screams,
but the film ends before they can do so. Many filmviewers
leave promptly when a film ends and do not stop to look at
the credits; for those who stay, titles reveal that the film
was fictional and followed a script, cowritten by directors
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. However, the filming and
the dialog are so amateurish that audiences will find the
plot to be entirely credible. As a horror film, The
Blair Witch Project is a nailbiter for all except
that who realize that videocam batteries would not have lasted
more than a few hours on the first day. But of course the
film only lasts eight-seven minutes, so batteries would have
been adequate. One could stretch the story to serve as a paradigm
for what happens when the naïve venture into the unknown,
such as the decision to launch a nuclear bomb attack, but
the film is really a character study of generation Xers who
are terrified about their futures in a fast-paced world with
neither the expectation that giant corporations will offer
steady employment nor the security that government bureaucrats
will care about them. MH
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