The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Director: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
Had I seen this before: Yes, somewhat against my will due to peer pressure from my 17-year-old co-worker at the mall coffee shop, what's up Kellan hope you're thriving
Hello and welcome to the time of year when I try to compensate for my utter exhaustion with summer by forcibly instilling my favorite of autumnal feelings: pleasantly creeping dread. I'm almost certain The Blair Witch Project was the first movie I went to see in the theater despite being absolutely terrified to do so--I'm not sure when I crossed the line from saying "I don't like horror movies, too scary" to "oh actually horror is one of those counterintuitive balms for my personal type of anxiety, like giving stimulants to people with ADHD," but 1999 was firmly in the prior segment. (Side note: I realize I have been spending a lot of time in or around 1999 in this space lately and I just want to say no you're having an extremely quiet and unobtrusive midlife crisis.) The thing is, the 1999 of it all is important context for this movie in particular, because the viral marketing strategy combined with the little baby internet really made it seem like this was going to be the scariest film ever presented to audiences. Like, there would definitely be people (maybe you!!) throwing up from fear at your screening. Maybe you would die. Of being scared.
Fortunately (for us all, am I right?) my attendance at that screening of The Blair Witch Project in the summer of 1999 did not prove fatal, nor even especially scarring. I did find it scary, and I before revisiting it I did still remember a couple of especially creepy bits (the teeth!), and I'm pretty sure at the time I played up the fact that afterward I had to drive home in the dark by myself through a few miles of slightly rural area, can you even imagine. Watching it now as a--I don't want to say jaded, but certainly more horror-experienced--adult, I do still think it achieves its goals as a tiny-budgeted little twig-wrapped package of creepiness. But I am also sympathetic to those whose reaction to watching it now is "this movie is not scary, nothing happens, it's just three idiots in the woods yelling at each other." I could counter that what those people fail to understand is that making a mistake and consequently being yelled at is the scariest scenario of all, but I really do see where they're coming from.
I can't say I personally knew anyone who was convinced that the movie and the people in it were all real, but that was certainly the winky winky impression that the marketing was going for at the time. I was about to blame the fact that the internet debunking machine wasn't as lightning-fast as it is today, but then I spent .000001 seconds thinking about the general fate of false information disseminated online today and you know what maybe we were better off when everything was just a matter of checking Snopes, actually. At any rate, the whole point of found footage is to create the sense that everything happening on screen is real, documentary-style--no score, no obviously scripted conversations, no tidy plot mechanics. Just some unknown people stumbling into a bad situation. And having, in the intervening years, seen many low-budget found footage movies, I think Blair Witch does a better job than most of its descendants in terms of following its own rules and creating at least a semi-reasonable excuse for questionable behavior.
The main plausibility hurdles in found footage tend to be: 1) who is filming this and 2) why are they still filming this? The answer to #1 in almost every case is that someone is making a documentary, but lesser films usually fail to answer why anyone would continue bothering to film things once they turn horrific. One of the smartest things this movie does, once things are very tense but not yet completely unbearable, is have Mike accuse Heather of using the camera as a sort of filter so that she can put some distance between herself and the real world and doesn't have to fully experience how bad their situation is. If you, as an audience member, buy that explanation, then the fact that the camera stays on until the bitter end makes internal sense. (They also make a more half-hearted gesture in the beginning of the movie toward how much back-up battery power they have, presumably in order to stave off complaints that the video camera should be long past dead by the end, but frankly I'm usually happy to have technology work or not work depending on what the scariness of the scene calls for.)
Anyway, you know what's scary? The freaking woods. You know who thinks so? Most humans who have lived in the vicinity of densely-wooded areas since the beginning of time. See also: all fairy tales. It's easy to get lost and gets very dark at night and you're far away from help and there's a bunch of stuff out there that probably wants to eat you or poison you or at least poke or scratch or sting you. The idea to just film some random people being scared (and querulous) in the woods turned out to be such a good one that they made $250 million on a $60k budget and the thing is...that's tough to argue with.
Some stray thoughts: Heather's serious documentary voice in the beginning veers slightly into Catherine O'Hara territory and did take me out of the moment a bit; I appreciated the 90s dirtbag vibe wherein characters could all wear flannel and smoke cigarettes without it being any sort of specific character choice; this is the second 90s movie I've rewatched recently (the other being Dazed and Confused) where characters have an extended conversation about Gilligan's Island, a reference which is fully lost on my children; for me the most relatable moment in this movie is when one of the characters, awake in the middle of the night, hopes out loud that it's at least 5:00 or something and then swears in frustration to discover that it's 3:00 am.
Comments from the 13-year-old: First, she said that YouTube apologizers should take notes from Heather's tearful apology to everyone's mother because "she seems really sincere." Second, she noted that the lack of music in the end credits really leaves you with that sinking feeling long after the movie stops, and compared it to the lack of music over the end credits of Cabaret. Was that my proudest moment as a movie-loving parent? Maybe not? But...maybe! And finally, this was, in her opinion, the scariest movie we have watched together so far.
Line I repeated quietly to myself: "What the fuck is that?!?"
Is it under two hours: One of the greatest strengths of this sub-genre is that it tends to keep it tight--this one is a lean and mean 81 minutes, only 55 or so of which is people fighting about a map
Thing that I will now be avoiding, for safety: Spending time outdoors
Homemade Marshmallows from Martha Stewart
One of my hesitations with doing horror for the blog was that I was worried everyone would be too busy running from their certain doom to bother thinking about food, but not only do the characters in this movie make a point of showing off their pre-journey grocery haul (complete with an extended marshmallow close-up), they spend so much of their time growing increasingly hungry while lost in the woods that they do talk about food quite a bit. So I had several options but I thought for this one I'd go with the campfire classic.
Anyway, I hope one or two of you are excited to join me on this Spooky Season journey or at least let out a less audible groan than my mother did!
