This is the horror that humans, safe behind their city walls, have carried with them through the millennia: that we may not be alone. People who lived differently, spoke differently, thought differently, who were unknowable and unnerving. In the beginning, we were not the only humans the woods were full of other people, other species of human like the Denisovans or Neanderthals, who made strange decorations of branches and flowers. The strange symbols and unfathomable customs of whatever is tracking them through the woods hint at a far older horror, a horror that goes back to the very beginnings of civilization, before homo sapiens was alone in the world. James sort of horror, of something being disturbed, something that is only ever glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, in the whip pan of a camera, in the pixelated grain of lo-fi video. There is the promise of a Lovecraftian reading, of a backwoods cult worshipping and summoning a nebulous force in the deep forest but there is more of the M. Is some one making strange twig-dollies and practising al fresco dentistry in the woods, or some thing ? We’ll never know. But the film leaves this hanging there is no explanation. The characters reference the film Deliverance Mike, particularly, is convinced early on that rural locals are messing with them. They look for proof of the supernatural, and are sorry when they find it. They fret and kvetch about mod-cons while utterly relying on them: compasses, cars, torches, snack bars. They have come looking for something beyond the city borders, something that happens outside of their urban lives. Heather’s insistence that “it's very hard to get lost in America these days” is a source of disappointment as much as hope. The wild is the source of horror, but the characters are also uneasy with modernity. But it manages to tell this without the snooty superciliousness and conservative repression that dominates the traditional folk horror of the ‘70s. This is the story of a group of metropolitan smart-alecks who underestimate the dark power of the woods and what dwells there. That genre being, effectively, folk horror. One of the other editors is such a scaredy cat that he hadn’t ever dared watch it before, and while he wasn’t quite as scared as he had worried he might be (proving, as claimed above, that imagination is the most horrible experience of all), it is still a terrific example of its genre. One of the Metropolitan editors has strong memories of watching this in the cinema at the time of release and found it nearly as terrifying the second time around. With a plot hinging on consumer electronics that became obsolete almost immediately, it could only work at this particular moment in technological development: a liminal state between online ubiquity and offline confusion, real and ‘fake’, documentary and fiction: lost in the woods, sobbing into a camera. This was ‘multimedia’ in a world that wasn’t yet fully networked and saturated by it, a film centred on surveillance in a world that wasn’t yet wholly, literally recorded. Fantastical as it now seems, there was some genuine confusion about whether Blair Witch was actually found footage, and this uncertainty propelled virality, in the modern sense, at a time when such a thing was new, difficult and almost unheard of. These were the early days of the Internet and the promotion of the film played with it beautifully, creating websites that hinted at the reality of world within the fiction. “It’s totally like filtered reality,” says cameraman Josh of the camcorder, “it's like you can pretend everything is not quite the way it is.” (At this risk of being a bit Media Studies, even ‘like’, that ubiquitous tic of ‘90s vernacular, is an unconscious reference to the distance between appearance and reality.)Īnd then we have the palaver around the movie. Every frame of the movie is ‘filmed’ by the characters themselves - a practice they rationalise as ‘documentary making’ - illustrating the contemporary obsession with recording and the distancing effect of mediation. They refer to other films constantly, at one point deciding which way to go by recalling which witch was evil in The Wizard of Oz. The Blair Witch Project is very much of its time within the world of the film the characters rehearse the ‘90s preoccupation with media saturation. So runs the text on-screen at the beginning of the movie, the rest of the film “being” an assemblage of their film and video recordings as they - Heather, Mike and Josh - stumble around a featureless forest while something hunts them, torments them, pulls them deeper into the shadowy trees. “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary called ‘The Blair Witch Project’.
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