As I style myself from time to time as a former “war correspondent”, the horror film hit, the Blair Witch Project, was a bit of an embarrassment to me. To be frank, I’ve never been so terrified in my life.
This was not the case with the winsome film producer who volunteered to accompany me out of interest in the style of the film. She yawned a bit. I developed a virulent case of conjunctivitis which necessitated my covering both eyes with my handkerchief, behind which I emitted occasional yelps and moans at the glimpses I had of the nightmare unfolding on the big screen.
“Which theatres of war did you cover?” my companion inquired sweetly as I staggered out of the cinema scornfully denouncing the film for “lack of content” while battling to control my shaking knees.
So it was with a degree of satisfaction that I read that those responsible for the production had been run out of town. Out of Burkittsville, Maryland, that is – the town in the United States where the film was set.
It seems the local townsfolk have had such an infestation of nutters since the film hit the big time – including weird folk dancing on the local tombstones and daubing satanic signs on church doors – that when the producers returned to suggest a Blair Witch 2 they ran into a collective raspberry.
A local artist, Andrea Cox, was quoted as explaining: “When you have a bunch of drunken teenagers, tripped out in their best Blair outfits, leaping around at 3am, screaming ‘whoooooh’ and stomping on grandma, it doesn’t go down too well.”
But along with my sense of satisfaction at this development comes renewed puzzlement at why I had been so terrified by the film. The story, for those who did not see it, was so thin that it can be summarised in a couple of sentences. Three young film-makers investigating legends of witchcraft go into a local wood where – failing to remember the lesson set by Hansel and Gretel with bread crumbs – they get lost. Tormented by mysterious sounds in the night they blunder around in increasingly frantic circles, eventually disappearing, leaving their two cameras as the only evidence as to what happened. That’s it: no character development, no special effects, no real story line – nothing except sheer terror.
There was one clever touch which rang a bell for me, in the obsessive use of a small video camera carried by the actress playing the woman director. As one of her companions observes angrily, it is her way of trying to contain, to distance herself from the mystery of the frightening events, or non-events, happening around them.
That psychological mechanism is familiar, of course, to professional news photographers who seem to exploit it to capture extraordinary shots in circumstances where normal reactions – fear, sympathy, nausea – might otherwise be expected to paralyse the finger on the camera’s shutter button, if not persuade the owner to throw the damned thing away. The distancing effect of the camera’s viewfinder, which makes of it something of a psychological shield, seems to have much to do with the courage in the face of violence shown by that breed of professionals.
One among their number who comes unexpectedly to mind was Kevin Carter, who covered the township rebellion for a variety of publications, including this one. Kevin used to go out touring the townships early in the morning, looking for a good picture to start the day in the style of a hardy angler trawling for a fish for breakfast. One morning he arrived at the office looking battered, with a black eye and bruises.
“What happened!” I exclaimed.
“Aagh, some PAC kids started chanting ‘one-settler-one-bullet’,” he shrugged, “and I got a bit pissed off …”
I was uncertain at the time whether he was winding me up. It was not the way photographers usually behaved.
On another occasion I bumped into Kevin looking pleased with himself in the newsroom and he showed me some pictures he had taken in the Sudan. It did not require much of an eye to spot the big one. It showed up again over the Christmas period, in a couple of those compilations of “photographs of the century” offered by newspapers and magazines – the picture showing a vulture stalking an abandoned black baby crawling hopelessly through the sand.
When the back-slapping was over I asked in all innocence: “What happened to the baby?”
Kevin looked bewildered. “There were hundreds of abandoned babies,” he protested.
“It’s a great picture. But people are going to want to know what happened to the baby,” I warned.
The picture was later published by The New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize. Kevin committed suicide before I could ask him whether anyone in the Big Apple had inquired as to what had happened to the baby.
I don’t know why Kevin killed himself. But if there is a paradox in a “hardened” war correspondent being terrified by a silly film, the explanation for it is to be found, I suspect, in the story of Kevin.
The effectiveness of the Blair Witch Project did not lie with its content – or lack of it – but with the successful way in which it combined cinma-vrit (the use of the small video camera, which gave the film a “home movie” credibility) with an unanswered question which sounds like an unspoken mantra throughout the film: “What’s happening … what’s happening … what’s …”
The effect is to unleash the imagination, sending a lifetime’s accumulation of bits and pieces of terror surging through the mind.
Wars are not so bad, particularly for correspondents. They can be fun, in the way of a fairground ride, if you have a modicum of luck and as long as you keep control of your imagination. Monsters – their presence signalled in childhood by the squeak of floor-boards and the creak of doors, in adulthood by the images of the tragedies attendant on life – populate all our minds.
We are able to contain them only through self-discipline, by limiting our field of vision.
My guess is that Kevin just lost his viewfinder in the end.