Shaun de Waal
Movie of the week
The Blair Witch Project may have already outdone Star Wars Episode IV: The Phantom Menace and Eyes Wide Shut as the most hyped movie of 1999, except that the hype around it was relatively organic. That is to say, this low-low-budget movie (a mere $30 000 to put together) had no huge publicity budget to kick it off, though it was helped by an ingenious Internet site. It went from festival screenings to the mainstream on the strength of its being innovative and different, with word of mouth building it into something of a cult. It has gone on to be the likeliest contender for most profitable movie of all time in relation to what it cost to make.
In case the hype hasn’t reached you yet, the basic idea is this. Three student film- makers are investigating the legend of a witch in a small town in Maryland, a town that was once called Blair but is now Burkitsville. A series of strange and dreadful events have given rise to this myth; they go out to see if there’s any truth to it. They interview residents of the town, then set off into the woods on their own to find some of the mysterious locations connected to the story.
And they never return.
So what we see in the movie is their own footage, the black-and-white work of cameraman Joshua Logan (the actors use their own names) and the video-diary of director Heather Donahue, who is recording the progress of her project with obsessive dedication. Michael Williams is doing the sound. They are thus documenting their own increasing desperation as they lose their way and bizarre things start happening to them.
This severely restricted point of view forces a strong identification with the characters; there are no special effects to distract from their growing confusion and terror. The improvisatory nature of the film and its vrit look help persuade the viewer that this is more real than a glossy, manipulative big-budget horror movie would be, with all the Hollywood stock-in-trade of slashers and screaming maidens.
How scary you find it will depend, to some degree, on you: I didn’t find it that frightening, and at least one person walked out of the screening, bored, but there are plenty of folks who were scared nearly witless by it. In any case, it is interesting enough as a movie and as a character study to make it supremely watchable. It is, at least, something new.
The way the boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred is done with immense skill – more so than in the famous Italian put-on Cannibal Holocaust (1979), which presents the footage of a group of anthropologists who had supposedly vanished into the jungle and been eaten, after witnessing (or instigating) various horrors.
In The Blair Witch Project, the actors themselves shot the film as they trudged, not quite sure where they were, through the woods. They slept in a small tent and had to deal with invisible crew members, who were shadowing them, making funny noises at night and planting strange objects outside the tent. This makes it all very convincing.
Still, it’s hard, when you’re sitting in a cinema, to forget entirely that this is a fiction. The blurring technique works better, in a way, in The Curse of the Blair Witch, the fake documentary made for TV (and shown here a week or two ago) that gives more about the ostensible history of the witch and the circumstances surrounding the students’ disappearance. Some of this was originally intended to go into the film proper, and maybe it should have, to set the scene a bit more. At any rate, I found The Curse of the Blair Witch more spine- tingling than the minimal movie – perhaps because things are always scarier when watched alone at home.