The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Lest we forget, Deliverance was 1972. Six years later The Hills Have Eyes. Two decades later they still do. And James Dickey's backwoods have always been there in the unconscious, waiting. What The Blair Witch Project does is take us back to those woods, and then leave us there with three film students--Josh(ua Leonard), Mic(hael Williams), and Heather (Donahue)--there to document the Blair Witch Legend, get in and get out. But, as the opening title card informs, they never make it out, meaning that during the next 80-odd minutes the issue isn't Will they die, but How will they die? Which is quite a gamble for independents Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, dramatically speaking. But they make it pay. Before the opening sequence is even over, narrative matters have ceased to intrude. This thanks to genre--not horror, but documentary: they idea that anything can happen, and did. But the documentary brings with it its own set of conventions, one of which is that the filmmaker is able to keep and objective distance from the subject. Which is to say the filmmaker doesn't believe. Which, conveniently enough, is the first mistake in any horror film. The second is to get suddenly curious. Here, Myrick and Sanchez provide that tragic curiosity via documentary interest, and then collapse any and all objective distance Josh and Mike and Heather might have had from the Blair Witch Legend by making them subject to it. Which is exactly the kind of sophisticated reversal so often absent from horror. All the same though, this is a horror movie. Josh Mike and Heather do make all the typical mistakes--splitting up, with-holding information, turning on each other, etc--and they do often choose, as Josh says, to stay and record instead of help, but still, it never quite becomes formulaic. And it's not just about cinematography, presentation, improvised lines, so-called method-filmmaking. It's about stumbling deeper and deeper into the darkness. The Blair Witch Project draws upon our most primal fear--the unseen presence. The strongest scenes in it aren't the ones with the leaves rushing by and the noises just beyond the frame, they're the ones where the screen is black, and all we have to gon on is audio whispers. The weakest points perhaps all occur in the first 15 minutes, where Myrick and Sanchez had to edit this raw footage together in a back and forth manner, so as to firmly establish that everything we're seeing is through the camera of a crewmember. A necessary evil, perhaps, in the absence of voice-overs or scores or potential soundtracks we're trained to cue into. Does The Blair Witch Project intend to retrain us, though? Perhaps. If we pay attention. First, however, it just disturbs us at a fundamental level, and then, by foregoing the Hollywood ending, it doesn't take that disturbance away. Suddenly, American cinema isn't so American anymore. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones

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