I am not a big fan of the horror genre but I have seen and enjoyed well known movies like The Exorcist and The Conjuring. One movie that I had not seen was The Blair Witch Project, now streaming on Amazon Prime. This movie completely blew my mind.
The movie starts with a production logo followed by this announcement.
In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.Heather (Heather Donahue) and Josh (Joshua Leonard) are getting ready to pickup Mike (Michael C. Williams) to start their journey to Burkittsville. You may notice that the names of the actors have not been changed. This is just the tip of the iceberg in how unusual and path breaking this movie is.
Nearly all of the movie is shot by the actors themselves -mostly Heather and Josh and sometimes Mike, using two hand held cameras. So there’s the footage that they are shooting for the documentary like interviews with people and Heather is also recording their journey. Their goal is to spend a couple of nights investigating the legend of The Blair Witch.
Things start fine but when they camp on their first night, they hear some strange voices. Things begin to go wrong at a rapid pace, they get lost multiple times in the woods, they lose the map and come across some strange voodoo stuff. I will not spoil the movie for those who have not seen it but really the journey is as interesting as the end itself.
The actors were given a 35 page outline. All dialogues were improvised on set. The shooting took 8 days and the actors tried to remain in character for the whole duration. When they went on their journey, they were not told what mysteries they would encounter so all the surprise reactions are spontaneous. There is a scene in a tent at night where the actors hear sounds. That was the director and the crew shaking the tent from outside.
One of the remarkable things about this movie is you never actually see the Blair Witch. This was accidental. In one of the shots, the director planned to show a white woman while Heather is running, but the cameraman who was running after her forgot to pan to the Witch and they did not reshoot the scene. As a result, all the horror that is generated in the movie is due to the imagination of the viewer. In 1975, Steven Spielberg broke new ground when he refused to show the shark on screen for the first hour in the movie Jaws. All you see are the effects and reactions. The Blair Witch Project carried this baton to the end and never showed the paranormal entity on screen.
The movie has zero special effects, almost no background music. It defies all the cinematic conventions in general and those of the horror genre in particular, about camera movement, placement of the shot and so on.
Bruce Willis brilliantly anticipated The Blair Witch Project on the set of Pulp Fiction in 1994.
Some day in the next five years someone’s gonna take one of these and make a feature film with it. They almost did it with, uh, Bob Roberts (1992). Some kid, some 17-year-old kid, is gonna make this killer, drop-dead, poorly lit video movie that is gonna be the hippest f***ing thing. And then there’s gonna be hundreds of them everywhere. And they are gonna cost about..$60,000.
Amazon Prime trivia
The movie made $248.6 million on a budget of $60,000, just as Bruce had predicted. It spawned a sequence of horror movies that used the “found footage” formula. The movie may not seem as path breaking today, when everyone is making movies with their smartphones and every facet of life is being turned into a reality show.
The critics are always more sympathetic towards experimental movies. There is a general notion that if the subject and/or the treatment is unconventional, that itself makes the movie remarkable regardless of its quality.
I think the criterion should be a simple one. Conventional or experimental, the movie has to engage the viewers in some way. And I don’t mean the movie has to entertain every time. It may provoke you to think or reflect, anything really as long as it keeps you from checking your smartphone. I refuse to look at a barely lit screen with no movement for five minutes because the director wants to show the futility of our existence or some such codswallop. Just keep me engaged, that’s all I ask.
The Blair Witch Project keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time.
