Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com
To begin, the disclaimer: I only saw 60% of this movie. I would like to be able to say that I was overcome by the suspense and fled lest I be reduced to a quivering bundle of raw nerve endings. In fact, the explanation is simpler, and far more embarrassing. As you may know the conceit organizing The Blair Witch Project is that three student filmmakers went out to make a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch, and disappeared; the film is supposed to be reconstructed from footage that was discovered a year after their supposed deaths. Well, to really get that accidental-movie feel, they shot the whole thing with hand-held cameras; and I thought I was over that motion-sickness thing that plagued my childhood, but I thought wrong. About an hour into the film, something interesting happened, and I leaned forward to look at the screen. My increasingly outraged stomach rebelled, and half of that night's macaroni and cheese ended up on the theater floor. Attended by a mixture of laughter and groans from the other patrons, I made my sheepish way out of the movie theater, where I puked again in a garbage can in the aisle. So, I can truthfully say that this movie made me hurl.
So, I missed all the scare. Which is all right, really, because that wasn't what I was there for. What interested me about the film was the way it was made. I had heard actors discussing this on the late-night talk show circuit. It sounded to me as if this was essentially experimental theatre, akin to some of the projects of the 60s and 70s in which directors tried to break down the accepted conventions of drama by blurring the lines between drama and real life, between stage space and audience space, and between actor and character. The directors, from what I can tell, plunked these three actors out in the woods with some broad guidelines involving motivation and emotional state, and let them improvise from there. So the end result is a kind of quasi-reality effect--you are watching an artistic construct, but at the same time you are also really watching three tired and pissed off humans trying to get out of a gruelling and apparently interminable predicament with their lives and sanity and some semblance of civility intact. It is, like all those experimental theater projects, also a sociological experiment in that I'm sure this all had a real impact at least during the filming on the actors' identities, emotions and behavior. This is something you don't see a hell of a lot of in mainstream cinema, and I wanted to see what it looked like.
Cinematographically speaking, the film is pretty much a washout. Some of this was unavoidable given the overriding convention and the methodology used. During most of the first hour, it doesn't really matter whether you're looking at the screen or not, because it's not visually interesting (it's ordinary videotape, shot without any real attention paid to positioning, angle, lighting, or anything else) and in any case Heather does so much voiceover narration that you don't need to watch to know what's happening. In my case, I was glad, because I could close my eyes and try to settle my stomach, and so this allowed me to tolerate the barfcam for longer. But it contributes to one of the film's main problems, which is that the first 40 minutes or so are pretty damn slow. Things start to rachet up a little once they get lost; but the opening exposition drags, and that home-movie effect is a little more realistic than I think is optimal. It is true that the stuff shot with the mysterious DAT (the monochromatic sepia-tone shots) looks a little more interesting, and the film of the strange artifacts that appear mysteriously around the campsite is appropriately spooky. But given that visual pleasure is part of what we look for in a film, the interest in having that realism effect has to some extent worked against this movie.
The same could be said for the dialogue--there's a lot of repetition and aimlessness, and that makes sense because that's how people talk, but it doesn't necessarily make for compelling cinema. I liked the strain of humor that ran through it ("What killed this mouse? Could it be...witchcraft?") and in general the performances were the strongest part. All three of the actors were naturalistic and convincing, and I believed in the group dynamics (especially Heather's tenuous position as leader and the way the two men are always implicitly questioning it while she rather defensively reasserts it). What sells a horror movie is victim reaction--if the people in the film are convincingly scared, then you'll get scared too. The actors did a good job of showing the progression from "crap, we're lost" to "cool, that's weird" to "shit, this isn't funny any more" to serious freaking out. This, I would imagine, is what makes the suspense work (for those who are barfcam-tolerant and can make it that far). It's a realistic depiction of how three people raised in America at the end of the second milennium would respond if they were caught in the toils of evil magic--starting out sure that it would all be all right and there would have to be a rational explanation, and gradually realizing that in fact this is not the case. Because really, isn't that where the suspense would have to come from--wondering when/if it will ever become unambiguously clear that there is something supernatural at work in this landscape, and waiting for the moment when that will be possible to confirm. If you're interested, like I am, in the relationship or lack thereof between magic and the twentieth-century sciento-rationalist mindset, then this is interesting. If you're just there to be scared, I could see how it might pall rather quickly.
In general, I think the film was really succesful in handling that aspect of it--showing you enough to make you nervous, but not so much that the ambiguity is resolved. The piles of stone that mysteriously appear could be accidental or meaningless. The noises at night could be made by something other than the Blair Witch. The dangling stick figures could be there to serve some obscure purpose completely unrelated to these people. At the same time, the piles of stone echo the "cemetery" they filmed earlier, the dangling stick figures allude to the five dead men at Coffin Rock, and from what I hear tell the last half-hour of the film reenacts one of the incidents told by one of the townsfolk that gets interviewed in the first half-hour. Of course, this can all still be explained by human agency. Mostly. And to me, that's what's interesting--the suggestion that the supernatural and the material coexist in our world, but that we can look right at magic and not see it because our minds convert everything into materialism and rationality.
So while I would have a hard time saying unhesitatingly that this is a good film, it is at least an interesting one. And given the dreck that's out there, I have to respect both the people who made this movie and the people whose fan support has enabled it to become a mainstream phenomenon. We need more experiments. But please, for my sake and the sake of all my delicate-stomached sistren and brethren, put the camera on a dolly next time.
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