By Keri O’Shea
Can it really have been fifteen years since Blair Witch slipped into the modern horror consciousness? Love it or hate it – and people seem to fall into one or other of those categories – it has significantly shaped the horror cinema which followed in its wake. Since Blair Witch, nothing has been the same. It’s easy – all too easy – to scoff at the film now, and people who didn’t care for it in 1999 are often even more vociferous in their criticisms today. But Blair Witch made such a ferocious impact that it became ubiquitous almost immediately. That image of a bleary-eyed Heather, speaking so close to the camera that you could see her nose streaming as much as her eyes – well, it made people laugh or roll their eyes when it was taken out of context and reproduced over and over again, but people soon knew precisely where it was from. Critics frequently bemoaned the lack of craftsmanship in the film because it didn’t look much like anything else they knew, but they paid attention nonetheless. Mainstream TV and radio began wondering aloud what all the fuss was about. Blair Witch did well enough quickly enough that it began to play in bigger cinemas, where it was seen by those crowds of non-horror fans who always rock up to spoil it for the rest of us by being incapable of imagining anything or even sitting quietly. Christ, it even made it into that lazy, barely-written and supremely unfuckingfunny Scary Movie. Not bad going, for a movie with a budget of around $60,000.
From a personal perspective, I absolutely love this film. I’ll be the first to bitch and moan about the ‘found footage’ thing (more on this later) but, like most viewers, I had no idea what Blair Witch would spawn all the way back then. More than that though, and here’s where a lot of people look at me as though they’re a tad disappointed, I’m happy to admit that when I first saw this film, it seriously unnerved me – to the point of having nightmares. Yep. It’s one of those rare beasts for me; a terror film, with no real brevity, no bombast and no gore.
Many fans of the genre spend a hell of a lot of time trying to recapture that feeling, myself included – that terrifying feeling of something bigger than them, or of the dangers of knowledge, of finding out that you are even so much as on the periphery of something powerful, something harmful beyond you. This is why, although I count it amongst my favourite films, I have only seen The Blair Witch Project once. It’s not that I’m anxious that I’ll be afraid all over again, but anxious that I won’t.
Although the film got its release fifteen years ago today, I had to wait until Halloween before I got to see it in the UK. At the time, I certainly classed myself as a horror fan, but I’d only picked up on some of the hype (which I eventually checked out in retrospect). I knew that the film was a documentary and I knew it was a horror; I didn’t know a great deal more. The film itself – consisting of footage ostensibly found buried in the Maryland woods, a year after the disappearance of a group of three student filmmakers – had nothing in common with anything else in my collection. I’d seen fake ‘snuff’ footage in films, but the purpose of that was not, seemingly, to scare, only to shock or sicken. I hadn’t seen a horror film shot in this way before. The plausible idea of making an amateur documentary about a folk legend, as well as the explanation that this footage had been cribbed together by those investigating the subsequent case, worked fine with the rather piecemeal style. In addition, the distinct lack of features I’d associate with most films, such as conventional credits, added nicely to the veracity.
The impact on the audience that day was nothing short of strange, though. We collectively went from chatty at the beginning, as normal, to absolutely silent – but the silence carried on after the end of the film. What had we just seen? Of course not everyone sat there that day loved the film, but you could tell it had done something. People don’t usually file out of a film in absolute silence. If anything, they’ll moan. Nobody did that. Why?
One of the many criticisms now leveled against Blair Witch is with regards to that shooting style which made it stand out then, but makes it the unwitting parent of a whole sub-genre now. It is definitively ‘found footage’; this term now lends itself to an ever-growing number of films which emulate or extend the Blair Witch model. And why do they do it? Well, the filmmakers responsible obviously perceive it as being incredibly easy and want to make a fast buck along the way, which may enable them to move on to bigger and better projects, either within the horror genre or without. Let’s be honest though: if you’re reading this as a fan, a writer or anything in-between, then it’s likely that in the last decade or so you’ll have seen some truly dire found footage films. Here at Brutal as Hell we are frequently exasperated by the calibre of the films sent to us, and it’s meant we often fight over not reviewing them – which is unfair to those few which still put the format to good use.
For an entire generation, though, Blair Witch was the first found footage movie. There was no sense of apathy. We hadn’t seen enough of them to spot the flaws really, or we were just more forgiving; maybe we wanted to be catered for, not talked down to, as we were being by even the better-known horror directors. Horror in the late 90s had started to become awfully slick. The likes of Scream (1996) came across as smug, treating the genre as if it was worthy only of knowing laughter, and this even at the hands of the man who made The Last House on the Left, once upon a time. Say what you like about The Blair Witch Project, but at least it wasn’t fucking postmodern. In hindsight, sure, you could say that Cannibal Holocaust really set the bar on the whole found footage phenomenon, but most of us hadn’t seen it back then. The mode is the same, but the outcome is drastically different anyway.
So, we had a reasonably believable framework which felt new and raw to many, and a film which surpassed its budget by being creative in a series of interesting ways. One of the key ways Blair Witch got itself known was through its use of the internet. It was perhaps the first film to really utilise the internet’s potential – not through Facebook or Twitter, which had yet to grace us with their presence, but through official and, soon, unofficial sites, which built up a solid fan base for months before the film’s release. The internet back then was new enough to feel fresh, had rather less static to sift through, and was also rather lower on cynicism; rumours that the Blair Witch footage was actually real did no harm to the film whatsoever, and even went some way towards sustaining a new mythology, one which began to take on a life beyond the film itself which survives to this day. And, despite publicity conveniently beginning to grow itself in this fashion, it was also much easier at the time for the film to maintain mystery. Officially, little was said about the film’s plot: the illusion of realness was easy to maintain with a team of non-professional actors playing under their real names; the filmmakers gave away little of what to expect, and any blurb was minimal. This was bold.
So much for how it was done; how about what it does – which is to draw the audience into a gradually-building, unconventional and tense tale? By using the documentary model, it effectively creates plausible parity between audience and documentary crew. We are never permitted a sense of omniscience, of feeling able to detach ourselves from what is happening. There are no wide-ranging shots, no flashbacks, no back story. Anything we may try to understand about the ever-worsening situation comes directly from Heather, Mike and Josh themselves – and via them it’s still incomprehensible, so that our guess is as good as theirs. We are characters too, not bystanders. Choosing the woods as a setting further contributes to the success of the film. There’s something eternal and primal about the woods (which makes people keep on shooting horror films there, for good or ill) – they boast an odd blend of claustrophobia and scale, as well as showing the ease of disorientation plus all of that potential for watchers in the dark who know this environment better than the outsider. Add to that the way the team’s continual filming causes genuine nausea as they spins wildly lost through the forest, and the sense of unease is very real.
Finally, I think it’s important to remember that The Blair Witch Project is, after all, an occult horror. And in occult horror, however ground-breaking you choose your medium to be, you need to remember that ‘less is more’. Blair Witch shows us real fear – the cast here were truly scared and it shows – but it is wise enough to only allude to whatever is out there in the woods that is so scary. Even the best occult horrors through history have been weakened significantly by showing us their monsters – they never live up to the sense of awe which has been built around them. Blair Witch gives us some unsettling examples of occult symbols, and the tiniest fragments of gore – but everything else is, appropriately, hidden, refracted through the very real terror of the cast and through Myrick and Sanchez’s genius appreciation of the terrors of well-selected audio effects.
In many ways, The Blair Witch Project is a film where old, evil magic collides with the modern world; perhaps Heather really does keep on filming throughout because, as is suggested to her, nothing has to feel ‘real’ through that viewfinder. But in the film it is, and it’s made to feel real, right up to that terrifying scream cut short as she finally drops with her camera to the ground. I’ve chosen not to break that spell by revisiting the film, purely because I found it so successful and so frightening. Whatever has come since, and however jaded or cynical we have become about the sub-genre, the genre, the internet, or anything which worked in The Blair Witch Project’s favour, to me it will always be a groundbreaking film.