The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Channel 4’s “100 Scariest Moments”
list, #5:
The Blair
Witch Project
(1999)
Once upon a time, before I was born, Horror stories were
common subjects on the live stage, but now they are pretty rare. Director Todd
Browning’s film "Dracula" (1931) was not a direct adaptation of the
novel (1887) but based on a stage version (1924). This was true of many of the
silent Horror films that proceeded it, but very few of the sound films that
followed. Close to 50 years later, when another film-version of another stage-production
of "Dracula" appeared (stage play 1977, film 1979), it proved not to
be terribly effective.
I find this odd, because Horror cinema shares as more
with live theater than many other film genres; both require the audience
experience an intimacy that must be inherent in the mannerisms of the media
before the fiction can start building of an audience’s relationship with this Characters
or the sweep of the narrative – I believe that is less so with other film genres
like War, SF, or Romance movies. Film Director George Romero has long wanted to
make the “‘Gone with the Wind’ of horror movies," but he never did, and
maybe it is not even possible, but his two early greats, “The Night of the Living
Dead” (1968) and "Martin" (1977) could easily have been stage plays,
far more easily than Margaret Mitchell’s grand historical novel (first
published 1936). True, both London’s West End and New York’s Broadway have both
built industries out of trading usual intimacy of the stage in pursuit of epics,
but for generations, there has been growing critical annoyance with “big
theater’s” fetishism for over-blown stage productions that are seen as nothing
but an expression of their obvious jealousy of the larger canvas that cinema
enables. Mitchell’s novel has adapted to the stage at least three times (1974,
2003, and 2008) and all proved embarrassing.
There are still plenty of non-Horror films being made
based on stage-plays, so I don’t know why the relationship between live theater
and Horror cinema (and the Horror genre in general) got so broken; it seems
such a perfect match -- Much of Horror cinema exploits minimalistic conflicts
that require only phrases, not even full sentences, to outline. The settings
are often similarly limited to heighten claustrophobia. The time-frame in which
the events take place limited, and after the exposition is taken care of, that
time-frame is compressed to barely more than the device of
"real-time." The casts are generally small, or, if we’re talking
about a "body-count" movies, the size of the cast deceptively hides
that there is, in fact, very few actual Characters – In other words, why not on
stage?
Part of the answer might be that for the cinema of Horror
to be intimate, the intimacy must purely of the medium (or, "The medium is the message"
as Marshall McLuhan put it) and again, even more so for Horror than most other
cinema. Worth noting, the 1931 "Dracula" film was released the same
year as Director James Whale’s film version of "Frankenstein," which
was also based on a stage-play adaptation of its novel instead of the novel
itself (the novel was 1818, the play 1927); but Whales "Frankenstein"
diverged from both, more fully embraced its new-ish medium of cinema, and came
off the far less "stage-bound" than “Dracula.” As a result,
“Frankenstein” stands up better today, 80-odd years later.
The evolution of "The Blair Witch Project"
strongly supports the thesis of that last paragraph. With only three Characters
trapped in a forest with few landmarks and no reliance on any special effects, so
it could be staged live...but would it work?
Writers/Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo
Sánchez went forward without a conventional script,
just a 35-page outline, planning on all the dialogue to be improvised. This
script was dutifully filed for copyright protection purposes in 1993. This
eventually proved to be a vital move, because separately and wholly
independently, a different project, "The Last Broadcast" was being
developed and shot only a few hundred miles away. "The Last Broadcast"
shared a shocking number of similarities in both plot and conceit of execution
with "The Blair Witch..." and even managed to get released first; but,
though an interesting effort, was financially unsuccessful and remains obscure.
Imagine the law suits if Myrick and Sanchez hadn’t filed all their paperwork
properly and on time?
Myrick and Sanchez then advertised in “Back
Stage”
magazine for Actors with strong improvisational skills and whittled down a pool
of 2,000 Actors to the three leads. They also produced a pseudo-documentary
full of faux-interviews and news clippings detailing the Folklore that was the
background for the film ("The
Blair Witch Project: The Story of Black Hills Disappearances ")
which was used both to pitch to investors and later to market the film.
Filming began in October 1997 and lasted a mere eight
days, but it also forced the small cast through a marathon of uncomfortable
scenes and situations. The movie is about three people lost in the woods
harassed by Supernatural Forces, so the Actors were made to be lost in the
woods and were harassed by the crew, they were denied both food and sleep so
that their actual emotional state was pretty close to what they were pretending
to be. To assure that all the most compelling interactions improvised between
the cast members were usable in the film, the fictional Characters had the same
names as the Actors.
Importantly, the Characters carried cameras and filmed
themselves (some had to be shown how). The film is made up solely of what the
cast captured themselves, so this is a story about film itself, and stories
about film are pointless to stage live.
Myrick and Sanchez got something-like 1,140 minutes of
usable footage film from the two cameras so post-production became the process creating
this pseudo-documentary in a manner more like a real documentary than other
fictions. It took eight months to hone all those 1,140 down to a
tight-and-chilling 105 minutes. The illusion-of-reality could not have been
more flawless, and ultimately, that illusion counted for as much, or more, than
the film’s compelling conceit.
The conceit was neatly summarized perfectly in the film’s
tag line:
"In October of 1994, three student filmmakers
disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville,
Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage
was found."
The film begins mundanely as the group, Heather Donahue,
Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard, get ready for a few days in the woods.
They mug for the camera, crack jokes, and go food shopping. Next comes a scene
in a graveyard where they get busy with the actual job, filming what was
supposed to be the opening scene of the film they are trying to make. Heather
has a monologue outlining some of the Folklore that is the subject of her film.
The cast were all unknowns and all received great praise
for this film, but none have gone on to be big stars. The one who garnered the
most attention was Donahue as the documentary Director trying to keep command of a situation
even after see finds herself hopelessly trapped inside the story she’s trying
to tell. Donahue modeled her Character after a Director
she’d worked with, a self-assured Character when everything went as planned,
but a cripple during crisis.
Suspense builds insidiously: Something happens to the
map. Without apparent cause, a backpack gets covered in slime. Food is running
low and they’ve run out of cigarettes. Then there’s the crazy stick figures
popping up everywhere.
As their desperation grows, Josh and Michael turn on the
unprepared Heather, "We agreed to a scouted-out project!" and
"Heather, this is so not cool!" Heather displays her petite
bourgeoisie pamperedness, insisting that the woods are not large enough to get
lost in because "This is America. We've destroyed most of our national
resources."
Heather’s climatic moment comes before the story’s --
that’s almost always a good touch, that a story has multiple, strong,
resolutions of its various threads, but here it especially is striking because
it was achieved within a story that is so minimalistic. Donahue has a
remarkable scene, in a tent, pointing the camera at herself, recording her
apology to her mother; other critics have compared it to the last entries in
explorer Robert Scott's notebook entries as he froze to death in Antarctica.
The film, perhaps accidentally, follows the rules set
forward in Lars von Trier’s “Dogma 95” manifesto and with stunning effect. It
is a pretty amazing bit of conceptual invention to tell a full fiction in which
every scene is an un-story-boarded done from the Character’s POV. Everything is
exactly as an unprepared cameramen might capture it, and what is missed is as
coherent as what is captured on film. Jarring transitions are potent, confusion
is not distracting but creates greater intimacy with the terrified Character behind
the equipment. A running Cameraman tries, and fails, to keep an obscure subject
in frame. Some of the best scenes occur at night, where darkness and the hand-held
video are in direct conflict. Sometimes the screen is wholly black and all we
have is the panicked voices of the Characters, breathe ragged from running, with
stranger sounds in front, behind, all around them.
It came at a time when the pseudo-documentaries were
already on the up-swing; but these films were generally comedies like the work
of Director Christopher Guest (“Spinal Tap” (1984) & “Waiting for Guffman” (1995))
as well as films like “Dadetown” (1995) “Forgotten Silver” (1995) and “20
Dates” (1998). Other than fore-mentioned “The Last Broadcast,” I can only think
only think of one other Horror genre film that played with the conceit, the
notoriously gory, misogynistic, and racist, late-Grindhouse-entry, “Cannibal
Holocaust” (1980).
The most important antecedents to “The Blair Witch…” seem
not to be pseudo-, but actual, documentaries. There was a time when it was
acceptable to have a film made up entirely staged footage and still rightfully
claim the “documentary” label; examples of this would be Frank Carpra’s series
of WWII Propaganda films, “Why We Fight” (first one released in 1942), Peter
Watkins’ exploration of the consequences of a limited nuclear war, “War Game”
(1965) and Charles B. Piece’s film about an Arkansas Sasquatch, “The Legend of
Boggy Creek” (1975). Myrick and Sanchez cite “The Legend of…” as a direct
inspiration for “The Blair Witch…”
After “The Blair Witch …” it seemed that every other
horror film was using the pseudo-documentary/found-footage device. By 2001 we
have “The River,” an entire TV series based on the conceit, and then in 2012 we
get “V/H/S” an anthology films built around the conceit, and it had two sequels.
Part of “The Blair Witch…” triumph was its capture a
visceral experience that “The Last Broadcast” failed to exploit and the earlier
pseudo-documentaries listed films didn’t require. Though devoid of gore, “The Blair
Witch…” still was reported to have induced dizzy spells, queasiness,
cold sweats and occasional vomiting, and the audience loved it. In olden days
(the 1970s) the jokey marketing for Grindhouse movies had often offered free barf-bags
to audience; here, for the first time, they were actually needed -- not because
of the buckets of blood, but the camera work. According to John Risey, Clinical
Audiologist at Tulane University Hospital and Clinic in New Orleans, "What
happens is the camera and the brain mismatch messages, because you are seated
and you are still, your brain gets wrong information that you are in
motion." The fact that the film could physically affect you alone explains
why “The Blair Witch …” imitators are now their own cottage-industry.
Horror film’s all-important minimalism often paints the
feature film maker into a narrative corner, he/she captivates with the audience
with, "Don’t open that door," but to satisfy the running-time,
several somethings have to happen in sequence, and often too many several
somethings and this strains the credibility. That stain is usually caused by a
SPT (Stupid People Trick), like when the dumbass, well, goes and opens the
door. This happens even in very good films, like how "Wolf Creek’s"
(2005) extended its running time by almost 30 minutes by having a very smart
girl do something unthinkably stupid -- I guess the film maker thought he
needed to present more than 70 mins total running-time to get a wide-release.
"The Blair Witch …" ran for 105-minutes, same
as "Wolf Creek,” with no SPTs. That alone is triumphant.
And its year, 1999, was special for Horror cinema, seeing
also “The Sixth Sense” and “Stir of Echoes,” films that rediscovered the value
of Characterization and the old ways of earning suspense while toning down FX
and violence. Also, that year provided the embarrassing counter-example of “The Haunting,” one of the worst remakes in history, destroying
everything good in the legendary original (1963) by overburdening it with
CGI-effects and dumbing down every single idea. One critic wanted to condemn
“The Haunting’s” Producers (which included the legendary Steven Spielberg) to
an eternity in hell, watching “The Blair Witch …” over and over and over.
Much has been made of the miniscule budget of the
enormously profitable film, with published figures as low as $20,000, but more
realistic are estimates of $500,000 to $750,000, which is still peanuts.
Notably, even the highest figure is half of what was spent on the film’s
marketing. It then grossed $248.6 million.
The marketing is as fascinating as the film itself. The
first pseudo-documentary and other material was released on the internet long
in advance of the movie, creating the impression that Myrick and Sanchez were
not telling a fiction, but presenting a Real History. Many were fooled, and
strangely, many remained fooled even when the Writer/Directors let the
cat-out-of-the-bag at the movie’s release. In fact, not only was the film a
fiction, it wasn’t even based on an actual Folklore, the 19th c. Witch
and the 20th c. Child Murderer who are the background for the tale
were both inventions for this film, there’s no such town as Burkittisville,
Maryland, and the actual filming was done in New York State. The stick-totems
prominent throughout the film were likely inspired by the work of illustrator Lee Brown Coye published
in the classic “Weird Tales” magazine (first
published in 1923).
The phenomenon the film created was the subject of its
sequel, “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” (2000), wherein
groupies who refuse to accept the film was a fiction get sucked into the Curse
-- though a great conceit, the film was terrible. That same year Myrick and
Sanchez launched a TV series, “Freaky
Links” that played with not-unrelated ideas of Pseudo-History and Occult Folklore,
but it was far too similar to “The X-Files” (first aired 1993) and also failed.
After that, both men would produce a number of Genre films but no longer as
partners, several of which were pretty good, but none make a fraction of the
impact of this one.
Finally, in 2016, a third “The
Blair Witch …” film was released. It was a second sequel that was weirdly
marketed as a remake was. The original Writer/Directors were not involved and no
one I’ve spoken has said anything good about it.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D51QgOHrCj0
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