As Halloween draws closer, it’s time to go back to ’99 again
and talk witches—and I ain’t talking Hermione Granger or Sabrina…
Yes, between the blockbusters of that year that everyone
talked about like the Phantom Menace or the Matrix, there crept up a little
low-budget horror that got the talk of the town for being unbelievably scary,
and in a innovative new format to boot. Oh, it wasn’t the first of its kind
like that—the Last Broadcast and Incident in Lake County preceded its release even
if they were actually produced after—but this is what launched it into the mainstream. It’s
found footage, and over the last twenty years, it gave rise to a glut of cheap
horror films involving schlomos waving camcorders around while getting
remarkably in-focus shots of CGI monsters. But how well does the progenitor do
it?
This was actually shot in the early nineties, when personal video was
getting easier and cheaper than before—a decade before, anyone could still make
something on Super 8, but now, you could carry around much better and greater-capacity
cameras. So, it’s not surprising that a group of film students, essentially
playing fictionalized versions of themselves, decided to take documentary
filmmaking to a new level. Combine a little bit of the urban legend craze that
took hold in the nineties, combine a little bit of slow-burning classic horror
inspiration, and we had the makings of something…interesting.
And that’s what the Blair Witch Project is—interesting. Piss
your pants scary as it was marketed back then? No, not really for the most
part, unless you have a crippling fear of twigs. But, unlike the billion
bilious borefests of cheap crap that would come in the future, the film doesn’t
use the format to just save money on making it look good—no, the focus is on the
gradual psychological descent of the characters. It starts off simple enough,
just interviewing local residents on a local legend (it’s not really explained
in the film itself—we’ll get to that)—but soon maps go missing, directions
start looping, and everyone frays piece by piece. Hell, they even start
wondering why Heather, the main character essentially, is still insisting on
filming all this—and, as it’s implied, it’s all part of her own spiral.
Now, where it does start getting scary is at the very end—where
the classic ploy of leaving all the true horror to the viewer’s imagination
comes into ploy. You’ve been watching the protagonists just barely keep it
together, and now they start hearing strange noises in an abandoned house, with
something lurking nearby…
So, is the film still worth watching? Yes, but go in to view
it more as a psychological thriller than a straight horror. However, there are
some annoying parts where you’re viewing just plain black—sure, that’s
realistic for a camcorder with zero exposure in the woods, but it doesn’t make
for the best experience when the film basically shifts into an audio drama. Supposedly
the leads went through actual stress in an arduous woodland shoot under their director—much
like how Kubrick would push his players to the limit, you’ll have to be the
judge of how it all turns out.
But what’s interesting about it is how the film was one of
the first to exploit viral marketing. The internet was still largely making
funny noises on the phone for most people, and at least 95% of it in 1999 would
be dedicated to bitching about Episode I. But with this release, came fake
missing posters, testimonies, websites, and, most prominently, a SciFi (in the days
when marketing departments weren’t performing their own colonoscopies)
mockumentary that does explain the Blair Witch ‘legend’ in depth. In some ways,
it’s a tad creepier than the actual film itself, and definitely worth a watch.
You couldn’t really do this now, with things being much
easier to look up and social media quick perhaps to go any which way on this.
But, for those that remember the days of Netscape and when you Asked Jeeves
instead of Googling, it does give that extra little bit of dial-up era
uniqueness—sure, you still get elaborate backstory via online marketing now,
but it tends to be much more on the level as it were.
The Blair Witch Project got the ball rolling on found
footage films, though it was 2007’s Paranormal Activity—that classic of
passive-aggressive demons creaking doors and farting on bedsheets in the night—that
really got the modern trend surging. There were some standouts like
Cloverfield, but far, far too many where people apparently superglued their
hands to their camera straps just so they can properly film the teeth of a badly
rendered tamale about to eat them after it goes oogah boogah and dances the
can-can. Subtlety? Who cares! Characters? Pfft—it’s cheap and we can cough it up
onto whatever silly name they have for that nerd channel these days!
But that’s why this film still remains superior, despite
having some flaws, to many of those. In 2016, we got a sequel—one that by modern
found footage standards was decent, but fell into some of the same traps like a
CGI creature showing up at the end to dance the boogie and provide yet more
jump scares. Now, you might be wondering why I didn’t mention another film that
came in 2000 that was also supposedly a followup—and that presumes I want to acknowledge
it, or even suggest it has anything to do with this film really.
And if there’s one more positive aspect to this film, it’s
that it encouraged newer generations of filmmakers—ones with real passion, and
not the ones cashing in to crank out cheapo knockoffs—to use improving
technology to make their own projects. Perhaps that’s what the Blair Witch
Project should really represent. So, hang up your own weird twig figures, and give
it another look…
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