The Blair Witch Project (1999)

REVIEW: The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Reviewed by Matt Pusateri

When I was eight, my brother, a friend and I decided to camp out in our backyard on a summer night. We pitched a tent and rolled out sleeping bags. For us, this was almost "roughing it." We ate junk food, watched the skies for UFO's, and told ghost stories until the middle of the night. Sometime around 3 a.m., just as we were drifting off to sleep, we heard someone scream in the distance, about a block away. It was a loud, shrill scream. I've almost never been so frightened in my life. In a blind panic, we all rushed to the front of the tent, fumbled with the zipper, and trampled over each other get out of the tent and rushed inside the house, where lights, carpeting, and TV would seemingly protect us from whatever was lurking outside. Looking back, our terror seems silly and absurd, since we were in a fenced backyard of a suburban Los Angeles home, yards away from my parents' bedroom window. I'm not even sure today that what we heard was a woman screaming, not a cat. But on that night, it was what we couldn't see and didn't know that was so terrifying.

What triggered my memory of that incident was The Blair Witch Project. This $35,000 independent film has stunned the entertainment industry by out-grossing many major studio releases this summer. The film deserves both the hype and ticket sales it has generated. It is a fresh, engaging, and flat-out scary film. Unlike the countless Scream clones and sci-fi monster movies, Blair is scary without relying on special effects, haunting soundtracks, or a teams of high-paid make-up artists. It draws on the primal fears all of us share, and have experienced at one time -- the fear of the unknown and the fear of being vulnerable and exposed.

Presented as the recovered footage of three documentary filmmakers who vanished in the woods of Maryland while making a film about a legendary local witch, the movie depicts three college students as they go into the woods to explore the spooky local legend. You know it's not going to have a happy ending, but don't know what the characters are going to face. You're along for the ride, trying to figure out what's going on and what's out there, in the dark, just out of sight, before it reaches out and gets them.

The film starts with the project's leader, Heather (Heather Donahue), who compulsively (and conveniently) tapes everything the group does, as she prepares for the trip. The documentary is supposed to examine the local legend of the "Blair Witch," who has supposedly been responsible for several unsettling and mysterious deaths in Burkittsville, Maryland, since she was banished from the town in 1786. Heather is joined by fellow students Mike (Michael Williams) and Josh (Joshua Leonard), and the trio head to Burkittsville, where they interview people on the street about the legend. Some townspeople have never heard of the Blair Witch legend, while others seemingly know a lot about it. A few suggest to the filmmakers that they think she's still out there somewhere. In an eerie scene, a local woman explains on camera what she knows about the story of the witch, while the baby girl she is carrying keeps putting her hand over her mother's mouth, as if to keep the words from coming out.

The next day, the three students strap on backpacks and head into the woods in search of some famous landmarks related to the history of the Blair Witch. They find a spot known as "coffin rock," where five men's bodies were found ritualistically dismembered and inscribed with strange symbols in 1886. After that, the students set off to find an infamous graveyard deep in the woods. When they camp at night, odd things start happening, and they begin to hear noises nearby and sometimes right outside their tent. As they plod on, tensions rise along with fatigue and fear. Soon, they are lost and struggle to find their way out of the woods. Disturbing late-night visitations continue to plague them, and they begin to fear that their harassers may be worse than curious wildlife or mischievous rednecks. Heather, from the outset, is the in-control type -- always in charge of the map, always making decisions -- but as they become increasingly lost and fearful, you can see her sense the control over the situation slipping away, which perhaps scares her the most. Their cycle of hope, fatigue, and fear continue for days, leading up to some creepy developments, surprising final twists, and an absolutely chilling finale.

The film's creators, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, didn't so much direct the film as manipulate it. They gave the three actors the basic backstory of the film, then sent them off on their own to film the scenes in the woods without any script. They would get daily messages to the actors about general plot developments and things to do, but otherwise, the actors improvised scenes and filmed them. In turn, the Myrick and Sanchez would review the tapes after each day and make suggestions for the next day. To keep the developments spontaneous, they kept the actors in the dark about what else would happen (except that they would not be hurt), so the late night disturbances faced by the actors were genuinely surprising, and no doubt, frightening to them. When the characters look tired, it's because the actors were tired. If they sound testy, they probably were. Reportedly, the directors warned the actors before taking the job that "your safety is our concern, your conform it not." (In fact, the actors, while alone in the woods, unlike the characters in the film, did have a GPS locator device in their gear to prevent them from genuinely becoming "missing," like their fictional counterparts.)

Part of what makes Blair effective is that it looks and feels genuine. The shaky camcorder effect isn't contrived as in some ads or in NYPD Blue, it's a camcorder being held by someone on the move or whose arm is actually shaking. The early part of the film looks like anyone's goofy camcorder tape -- people clowning off in front of the camera, playing with the zoom control, and hamming it up. By the time things start getting strange, the viewer has been sucked into the illusion that he or she is watching a real videotape of real people making a documentary. The film wouldn't work if you were constantly aware that these were three actors in the woods, dirty and tired, but perfectly safe. The improvisational acting in the film, mixed with genuine reactions of surprise, frustration, and fear, make the performances by the three actors convincing and compelling. Two of the actors have noted that people have recognized them since the film's release on the street and stopped them to express how relieved they are to see that they are safe after all. In the course of the 90-minute film, you see and feel the toll the experience takes on the characters, as they descend from frivolity, to frustration, to anger, to desperation, and finally, to sheer terror.

The Blair Witch Project is one of the scariest movies in recent years: a film that follows you around for a while after you leave the theater. Some friends who have seen the movie have told me that it disturbed them more a week after they saw the film than right after seeing it. It does a much better job at getting at the things that truly scare all of us than most contemporary horror films. The smartest move by its creators was to let the audience imagine the scariest parts of the film themselves. Many of the scariest elements of the film are just out of camera range, hard to hear clearly, too blurry to see, or just far enough away in the darkness that you can't see. That's what scares us in real life, what scared me years ago in my backyard, and what continues to frighten millions of audience members. When you leave the theater, you're not exactly sure what you saw, what you heard, or even what ultimately happened to the characters. And that, quite possibly, is the scariest part of the experience.

GRADE: A

Copyright 1999 Matt Pusateri Check out other film reviews, game reviews, features, and columns at The Separate Radio Volume Knob (http://www.pusateri.org/knob.htm)