DIRECTORS/SCREENWRITERS
Daniel Myrick
Eduardo Sanchez
PRODUCERS
Robin Cowie
Gregg Hale
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Neal Fredericks
MUSIC
Tony Cora
EDITORS
Daniel Myrick
Eduardo Sanchez
CAST
Heather Donahue (Heather)
Joshua Leonard (Josh)
Michael Williams (Mike)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 86m
U.S. release: July 16, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
See also:
- Book
of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
|
If
The
Phantom Menace was the geek event of the summer, The
Blair Witch Project is the hipster event -- the movie you
have to see, not necessarily because you want to see it, but
because you want to be able to say you've seen it. As a lifelong
horror fan, and one who so recently suffered through The
Haunting, I was more than eager to subject myself to
what has been described -- okay, hyped -- as the scariest movie
since Halloween
and The
Exorcist. What I got instead was a neat premise (and
not an original one, either), one or two mildly creepy moments,
a final shot designed to send 'em out buzzing, and a whole
lot of bickering in between.
"In October of 1994," reads the ad copy, "three
student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville,
Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage
was found." The movie we are watching purports to be that
footage, though I trust that by now everyone knows that it is
actually a work of fiction -- the work of three improvising actors
entrusted with camera equipment in the woods, under the remote
supervision of two directors who figured out a plausible context
in which to make a feature-length film on video and 16mm.
A great deal of thought went into The Blair Witch Project,
and what's most disappointing is how little of it shows up in
the film itself. As the three-person documentary crew -- director
Heather (Heather Donahue), cameraman Josh (Joshua Leonard), and
sound man Mike (Michael Williams) -- stumble around the bleak
Maryland woods, a sense of strangeness and dread gathers in the
repetitive shots of the ugly leaves and tangled branches, which
look the same from scene to scene, adding to the characters'
disorientation. They are pursuing a supernatural legend in a
dead forest that looks as if it would prefer to stay dead. Blair
Witch has a terrific grainy ambiance, but that's about all
it has -- it's all suggestion and no payoff, like a softcore
porn video -- and when the characters are lost and shrieking
at each other, one's patience begins to wear thin.
An improv movie like this lives or dies on the strength of the
performances, and each of the actors here has some good moments
-- generally when they're quiet. Heather Donahue, for example,
has been encouraged to play Heather as a shrill bitch a lot of
the time, so when she's scared shitless into guilty silence --
she knows she's largely responsible for getting the crew lost
-- she's much more effective than when she's shrieking in terror
or rage. But sometimes you miss the structure that a fully scripted
horror movie can offer, and the actors often aren't up to creating
their own dialogue on the fly. When the map goes missing, Josh
delivers this statement: "Heather, this is so not cool.
Heather, this is so not cool." Her response: "I
know, it's not cool." And the performers really run "fuck"
into the ground; I realize that frightened, exhausted people
may revert to repetitive four-letter vocabulary, but after a
while it seems like a failure of imagination on the actors' part.
Conversely, the most famous scene -- Heather's anguished apology
into her camera -- sounds totally pre-scripted and inauthentic.
(And it's framed a little too artfully, as if Heather knew her
terror-stricken half-visage would become the movie's marketing
icon.)
The filmmakers go for realism whenever possible (the characters,
for instance, are realistically irritating at times), which may
be a mistake. Blair Witch rides bumpily on its premise
that what we're watching is real, yet since we know it's not,
all we can do is judge how well it has been faked. We become
connoisseurs, not emotionally involved in the characters' plight.
The movie feels like an improvisatory exercise, not a pure shot
of ungovernable horror, and its chills amount to the usual spooky
omens (ooh, a bunch of sticks!!) and odd rustlings in the dead
of night. It feels like the work of clever people dabbling in
horror -- a calling card, a riff, a watercooler topic for the
next few weeks.
Horror movies may be so cluttered and ironic now that some people
may take this film's minimalist, back-to-basics method as a form
of integrity, which in a way it is. But the end result isn't
very satisfying. Most of the movie, in fact, deals with mundane
fears like getting lost in the woods; the filmmakers devote more
time to arguments over who lost the map than to supernatural
terror. And much of it is far too high-pitched, as if foulmouthed
hysteria would be enough to frighten us. Some have said that
if we didn't know Blair Witch was fake, it really would
be as terrifying as many critics are claiming. But who ever thought
Halloween or Night of the Living Dead were really
happening? Those movies scared us because, well, they were scary,
not because they were cleverly faked to seem real. Blair Witch
is a labored gimmick with too much "realism" and too
little inventiveness.
In an early scene in 1981's An American Werewolf in London
(now there's a great horror movie), two college students
are lost on the foggy Moors, surrounded by blood-freezing growling
noises; one of them clenches his teeth and says quietly, "Ah,
shit, David, what is that?" That brief, understated
scene does everything that this movie tries, and mostly fails,
to do in 86 minutes. The Blair Witch Project may bother
those who are easily freaked out, and it may dissuade a few campers
this season, but the lofty talk in the press of its being a new
horror masterpiece is nonsense. That's a burden of hype this
scrawny cinema-verité stunt can't carry. |
