Copyright © 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
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In every place where there are woods, there is a witch’s house. I know. I’ve been there. When we walk out of our ordinary lives, we walk into something else, we walk into the out-there. I’m calling it the witch’s house, but for the ancient Greeks, it was the home of the great, fearful god Pan, to meet whom induced a state of panic, a religious ecstasy, not a condition that needs a tranquilizer. Go out into the woods, get yourself lost, and something will happen. I know. I’ve been there. The Blair Witch Project, proposes to show what happens when three people get lost in the woods, out of their ordinary lives. Like Hansal and Gretel, they find the witch’s house.
So far, there have been claims that the film is what it puts itself before us as—bits and pieces of film from cameras held by three young people whose project, to make a documentary about a legendary witch, goes horribly wrong. Supposedly, the film was recovered a year after the trio disappeared, and we are seeing a record of their last few days. That is just a fiction. As for the tale, which was told to me by someone standing in line, that a critic committed suicide after seeing it—well, let’s just see if this critic can complete his piece. (I’m starting to wonder.)
The truth about the film is almost as bizarre. Five friends, about a decade after studying filmmaking together, pooled resources and made cash advances on their credit cards to finance a very low-budget film. So far, the story is not all that unusual. What is very strange is that the film turned out to be a hit at the Cannes and Sundance festivals and got picked up for national theatrical distribution. Now, it is the movie to beat this summer, and some major distributors shifted their openings away from the weekend when The Blair Witch Project opened.
This summer we are having a revival of a genre of film that I have a fondness for, the horror film. The Haunting and Blair Witch Project are at megaplexes everywhere, and The Sixth Sense opens next week. It’s instructive to compare The Haunting and The Blair Witch Project, perhaps two of the most different horror films ever made.
Each begins with a leisurely, even slow presentation of the situation and the characters. Project introduces us to the three young people who—to enhance the sense of reality—appear under their own names, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams. Heather, the director of the proposed documentary, insists on videotaping a diary of the experience. There are funny, casual moments with the trio, as well as some very amusing interviews with local people about the Blair Witch, a name linked to several disturbing tales circulating around a small Maryland town, tales which all end in death and mayhem.
In its opening it is not too far in spirit from The Haunting, which begins with a similar exposition of isolated setting, poorly matched characters, and weird old story. But, in roughly the second half of The Haunting, the logic of the story falls apart. Entirely too many rules are broken, entirely too much is shown, as everything from hair to statues comes to life. The film ends more like a fancy theme park ride than a movie.
I doubt if the entire budget of Project was equal to the catering bills for the previous film. (As for the catering of Project, these people look as if they eat a lot of Big Macs.) It is in its second half that Project comes to life, surprisingly, without anything else coming to computer-generated life. In fact, the most terrifying objects in The Blair Witch Project are three little piles of little white stones and a bundle of twigs. What is so terrible about them is precisely that we do not know what is terrible about them.
While The Haunting (unlike the original film of that title) leaves nothing to the imagination, The Blair Witch Project leaves everything to the imagination—not only the answers to the questions but also the questions themselves. The characters go deep into witch territory as they strike out into the woods in search of sites associated with various tales. They leave the last signs of civilization behind, and soon, layers of their personalities start to peel away. To rewrite Sartre’s great line, that "Hell is other people," this film suggests that "The Witch is other people," that the exhaustion, anger, and frustration within the group generate the evil energy which they encounter.
I remarked last week, in discussing The Haunting, that effective horror films have to deprive us of any logical resistance to what is happening. We must have no reason not to believe. While The Haunting and what I call big-beast films—from King Kong to this summer’s Deep Blue Sea—give us many reasons not to believe, the project of Project is to take away any excuse we have not to believe, not to be scared. We and our intrepid trio start out on a lark and end in catastrophe.
What is so catastrophic is that we don’t know what happened. One young man makes a nervous reference to Deliverance, and there is a possibility locals are trying to run the city kids away. The final thirty seconds of this film are among the most disturbing I’ve ever seen, although I don’t have a clue as to what is happening. I heard an audience member ahead of me in the line that filed slowly out of the theater say, "I can’t believe it would end like that." There is no other way it could end—a mystery with no resolution, because any resolution would have destroyed the aching, purposeful inconclusiveness of this extremely imaginative film.
Yet, I imagine that most people who have seen both The Haunting and The Blair Witch Project will prefer the former. We have come to expect our films to be thrill-a-minute theme park rides. Within the past week, I saw last year’s Psycho, unique among movie rehashes in that it is literally a frame-by-frame remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece. I was struck by how tame, even innocent it is. In 1960, it pushed through all kinds of envelopes. Now, it is positively quaint.
The Blair Witch Project is more like Psycho than The Haunting. In its deliberate crudeness, there is a certain elegance. But, be warned: it is certainly crude. The violence takes place only within our heads. But that notorious obscenity which gains more and more film time is heard in this film even more often than in Summer of Sam. In their shrill self-absorption, the three young filmmakers in the film, and by extension, the filmmakers out here who really created this film, seem to have no model for documentary film beyond MTV’s Real World. They seem to have no other model for language, either, with one character saying of another’s behavior, "That is so not cool."
Don’t go expecting to see "the scariest movie ever made." You have to make the movie scary for yourself. Perhaps too much has been left out. Perhaps we need a little more appearance of artistic control of material. I’m not wholly satisfied with this film, but perhaps my dissatisfaction is an indication that I feel so thoroughly the frustration and uncertainty of the characters themselves. The rollicking humor of the beginning, the sheer weirdness of so much of the second half, Heather Donahue’s out-of-focus (like too much of this film) apology near the end, and those final, shrill, unforgettable moments make this a film that I want to see again, soon.
Until then, I can divert myself with the film’s official web site, the most creative official web site I’ve seen for any film:
Keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts… and your video camera running, just in case there really is something under the bed or outside the tent. Pardon me. I must go make sure that the door is locked.
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