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I love giving a movie that you love to somebody and having them love it too. This weekend I lent my boss The Blair Witch Project. For some reason I have two copies of it so I watched it myself this weekend too (along with the wonderful companion piece that was on the sci-fi channel, Curse of the Blair Witch, not to be confused with the awful sequel). This movie excites me so much. I so can not stand it when people say it's "stupid." I know better than to say that a movie is scary or not scary because that's subjective. What scares me will not scare someone else. But it amazes me when people can't appreciate what this movie is doing, who ask things like "Rocks and sticks? What's scary about that?" If you don't know, you need to go out and buy yourself a better imagination!
I love how this movie cuts together hours and hours of unscripted footage (well-filmed by the improvising cast, btw) and creates a story more coherent on more levels than many big-budget films. First there's the myth itself, begun in BWP and expanded upon in CotBW. The Blair Witch is the perfect legend. It's full of unsettling details: symbols written on walls, feet that don't touch the ground, strange stick totems..." that appear more than once but are never consistent enough to piece together a straight idea. The string of incidents are all wildly different: a woman accused of witchcraft is banished to the winter woods, children in a town disappear; a ghostly hand pulls a little girl into a shallow stream; a party of men goes out to find a lost little girl and winds up tortured, then disappears, a serial killer carves up kids in his basement and finally 3 film students hike into the woods and disappear. None of the stories sound completely true, they have nothing to do with each other, yet each carries the slightest hint of The Blair Witch. It's too coincidental to resist piecing together, yet not never clear enough to understand, just like real legends are. There's a lot of room to move around in the dark.
Legends like these work on an instinctual level, and I feel like a lot of the movie comes from the same place. I remember arguing with my English teacher in 9th grade about how authors used symbolism. I insisted (with the confidence only a 14-year-old can have!) that a good author wouldn't consciously say, "I'm going to use a metaphor for fire here." No, when the work was really cooking the metaphors would bubble up out of his/her brain naturally because they were true. That's what I feel happens a lot in BW. It's a movie about kids who are filming a movie, filming themselves filming. As the tension mounted I remember becoming more aware of those cameras. When Josh disappeared I thought, "Will they get picked off one by one?" then realized no, they/I was "safe" because there had to be two people so they could film each other. (This is set up quite nicely in a shot early on where Heather and Josh literally circle each other with cameras.)
At one point Josh accuses Heather of filming everything because the world through a video camera is "not quite reality." An astute observation, but I would add that in this movie sight=power. If you are the cameraman, then you are the watcher instead of the watched. The three kids use the cameras to assert control over their environment and escape the feeling that they themselves are being watched. Rustin Parr, the serial killer, is said to have kidnapped children 2 at a time. While he killed the first one he made the other stand in the corner facing the wall so that he wasn't watched. (One child, Kyle Brody, turned from the corner to watch. He survived but went insane, of course.) And how did the original people of Blair get rid of Elly Kedwards (the "real" Blair witch)? They blindfolded her and left her lost in the woods. I can't believe this theme was mapped out by the producers in a big meeting--it was just there, inherent in the story.
For a character junkie, this movie's a treasure. My boss and I weresqueeing discussing it this morning and she said, "I loved Mike! He's the one who's story we'd do in the magazine. He changed!" Josh is the most distant character of the three--when he does seem to break down he's only seen in the distance, in fact. This is not to say Josh isn't a compelling character in his own right, just that I'd say he's the secondary one. It's fitting for the last two anxious days it's just Hansel and Gretel Heather and Mike--if one was to leave it would have to be Josh.
Heather and Mike, meanwhile, do this marvelous flip-flop. Early on Heather is annoyingly confident, getting offended when anyone questions her judgment and stupidly wanting to chase after eerie sounds in the woods. She's casually condescending to Mike, considering him the baby of the group. She accuses him of being chickenshit, calls him "our little Mikey." Nobody would want to follow Heather anywhere, but she stays stubbornly in denial about their predicament for a long time. It's not until they literally walk in a circle while following a compass south and Josh turns the camera around on her that she seems to wake up to real fear. Then she seems to shrink shrinks, becomes meeker, seems younger, is lost. Mike, meanwhile, starts out as the fraidy-cat, aka the voice of reason. While Heather scoffs at the idea of being afraid of the dark Mike knows that's when the monsters get you. Whatever is following them, Mike is afraid of it and he just wants to get home. Maybe because Mike is more used to fear, as things get worse he develops into a surprisingly good guy. He becomes this calming presence. He can't get them out of the woods, but he seems to accept their fate with strength. His jokes get darker, his laugh gets crazier, but still Mike is the guy you would want to be with. Heather seems to think so too. In the last few days of their journey she starts using him as a touchstone, filming him sleeping to assure herself that he's there, huddling beside him, letting him draw her out. In her famous confession where she blames their predicament on herself she says, "Despite what Mike says now it is my fault," which would indicate Mike was reassuring her and had forgiven her. Interestingly, Mike was the first one to accuse Heather of leading them into trouble early on. The final scenes have Mike in the lead, charging into that horrible house after Josh--little fraidy Mike! Heather, meanwhile, spends her last moments either screaming Mike's name or calling, "Mike, where are you?!" As chilling as it is, it fits that the last shot we see of Mike is so...peaceful. (And it drives me crazy when people don't understand what they're seeing there--he's standing in the corner, people, with his face turned toward the wall!).
The most powerful thing about this movie for me, though, is that it literally dipped into my own personal nightmare fodder for story and imagery! I remember telling a friend how I felt a shock from my toes to the top of my head when that house loomed into view and she said, "Oh yeah, of course--because you've got that Hansel and Gretel Fixation." She was amazed I had never realized I had this obvious H&G fixation. I loved the story when I was little, yes, but also the "things" in the story were always really resonant for me: trails for pebbles that glowed in the moon, trails of bread crumbs, getting lost in the woods, gingerbread houses, chicken bone fingers and especially brothers and sisters as heroes. (I loved all those kinds of stories--The Snow Queen, where a girl goes looking for her best friend who's a boy was another huge favorite of mine.) We won't go into all the possible issues I have behind this fixation just now.
The most important thing, though, was that house, which is why seeing that thing in BW so freaked me out. All my nightmares take place in some variation of that house! In my one recurring nightmare when I was little my friends and I snuck into a witch's house via one of those cellar doors that are on the ground outside. We were always hiding in the basement and she knew we were in the house but was kind of taking her time to come and get us to scare us. (I had another more bizarre and detailed dream that maybe I'll describe sometime about another witch in another house...) I still basically have variations of that where I'm in the house, below, and something scary is in the floors above. Something female and monstrous (here I slip into The Exorcist obviously). Something I have to now go and...look at. Well, there was that one time when I was actually in bed beside her and was trying very very hard not to look to the side because I knew once I saw it the imagine would never leave me.
Ahem. Um. So I think that's why I love this movie so much. Lots of stuff to freak me out here. But also, it's a great great film in itself, as is the sci-fi channel faux documentary piece.
I love how this movie cuts together hours and hours of unscripted footage (well-filmed by the improvising cast, btw) and creates a story more coherent on more levels than many big-budget films. First there's the myth itself, begun in BWP and expanded upon in CotBW. The Blair Witch is the perfect legend. It's full of unsettling details: symbols written on walls, feet that don't touch the ground, strange stick totems..." that appear more than once but are never consistent enough to piece together a straight idea. The string of incidents are all wildly different: a woman accused of witchcraft is banished to the winter woods, children in a town disappear; a ghostly hand pulls a little girl into a shallow stream; a party of men goes out to find a lost little girl and winds up tortured, then disappears, a serial killer carves up kids in his basement and finally 3 film students hike into the woods and disappear. None of the stories sound completely true, they have nothing to do with each other, yet each carries the slightest hint of The Blair Witch. It's too coincidental to resist piecing together, yet not never clear enough to understand, just like real legends are. There's a lot of room to move around in the dark.
Legends like these work on an instinctual level, and I feel like a lot of the movie comes from the same place. I remember arguing with my English teacher in 9th grade about how authors used symbolism. I insisted (with the confidence only a 14-year-old can have!) that a good author wouldn't consciously say, "I'm going to use a metaphor for fire here." No, when the work was really cooking the metaphors would bubble up out of his/her brain naturally because they were true. That's what I feel happens a lot in BW. It's a movie about kids who are filming a movie, filming themselves filming. As the tension mounted I remember becoming more aware of those cameras. When Josh disappeared I thought, "Will they get picked off one by one?" then realized no, they/I was "safe" because there had to be two people so they could film each other. (This is set up quite nicely in a shot early on where Heather and Josh literally circle each other with cameras.)
At one point Josh accuses Heather of filming everything because the world through a video camera is "not quite reality." An astute observation, but I would add that in this movie sight=power. If you are the cameraman, then you are the watcher instead of the watched. The three kids use the cameras to assert control over their environment and escape the feeling that they themselves are being watched. Rustin Parr, the serial killer, is said to have kidnapped children 2 at a time. While he killed the first one he made the other stand in the corner facing the wall so that he wasn't watched. (One child, Kyle Brody, turned from the corner to watch. He survived but went insane, of course.) And how did the original people of Blair get rid of Elly Kedwards (the "real" Blair witch)? They blindfolded her and left her lost in the woods. I can't believe this theme was mapped out by the producers in a big meeting--it was just there, inherent in the story.
For a character junkie, this movie's a treasure. My boss and I were
Heather and Mike, meanwhile, do this marvelous flip-flop. Early on Heather is annoyingly confident, getting offended when anyone questions her judgment and stupidly wanting to chase after eerie sounds in the woods. She's casually condescending to Mike, considering him the baby of the group. She accuses him of being chickenshit, calls him "our little Mikey." Nobody would want to follow Heather anywhere, but she stays stubbornly in denial about their predicament for a long time. It's not until they literally walk in a circle while following a compass south and Josh turns the camera around on her that she seems to wake up to real fear. Then she seems to shrink shrinks, becomes meeker, seems younger, is lost. Mike, meanwhile, starts out as the fraidy-cat, aka the voice of reason. While Heather scoffs at the idea of being afraid of the dark Mike knows that's when the monsters get you. Whatever is following them, Mike is afraid of it and he just wants to get home. Maybe because Mike is more used to fear, as things get worse he develops into a surprisingly good guy. He becomes this calming presence. He can't get them out of the woods, but he seems to accept their fate with strength. His jokes get darker, his laugh gets crazier, but still Mike is the guy you would want to be with. Heather seems to think so too. In the last few days of their journey she starts using him as a touchstone, filming him sleeping to assure herself that he's there, huddling beside him, letting him draw her out. In her famous confession where she blames their predicament on herself she says, "Despite what Mike says now it is my fault," which would indicate Mike was reassuring her and had forgiven her. Interestingly, Mike was the first one to accuse Heather of leading them into trouble early on. The final scenes have Mike in the lead, charging into that horrible house after Josh--little fraidy Mike! Heather, meanwhile, spends her last moments either screaming Mike's name or calling, "Mike, where are you?!" As chilling as it is, it fits that the last shot we see of Mike is so...peaceful. (And it drives me crazy when people don't understand what they're seeing there--he's standing in the corner, people, with his face turned toward the wall!).
The most powerful thing about this movie for me, though, is that it literally dipped into my own personal nightmare fodder for story and imagery! I remember telling a friend how I felt a shock from my toes to the top of my head when that house loomed into view and she said, "Oh yeah, of course--because you've got that Hansel and Gretel Fixation." She was amazed I had never realized I had this obvious H&G fixation. I loved the story when I was little, yes, but also the "things" in the story were always really resonant for me: trails for pebbles that glowed in the moon, trails of bread crumbs, getting lost in the woods, gingerbread houses, chicken bone fingers and especially brothers and sisters as heroes. (I loved all those kinds of stories--The Snow Queen, where a girl goes looking for her best friend who's a boy was another huge favorite of mine.) We won't go into all the possible issues I have behind this fixation just now.
The most important thing, though, was that house, which is why seeing that thing in BW so freaked me out. All my nightmares take place in some variation of that house! In my one recurring nightmare when I was little my friends and I snuck into a witch's house via one of those cellar doors that are on the ground outside. We were always hiding in the basement and she knew we were in the house but was kind of taking her time to come and get us to scare us. (I had another more bizarre and detailed dream that maybe I'll describe sometime about another witch in another house...) I still basically have variations of that where I'm in the house, below, and something scary is in the floors above. Something female and monstrous (here I slip into The Exorcist obviously). Something I have to now go and...look at. Well, there was that one time when I was actually in bed beside her and was trying very very hard not to look to the side because I knew once I saw it the imagine would never leave me.
Ahem. Um. So I think that's why I love this movie so much. Lots of stuff to freak me out here. But also, it's a great great film in itself, as is the sci-fi channel faux documentary piece.
