SteynOnline

Mark’s Movie Vault

HALLOWEEN HORRORS

I was hoping London's film critics would decline to roll over in the face of The Blair Witch Project juggernaut. But, as it turned out, they love it more than the US reviewers, whose enthusiasm derived mainly from America's reflexive respect for financial success and a fear of being wrong-footed by a surprise hit. As everyone knows, the film cost $60,000, or $50,000, or $35,000, according to which paper you read, and made $135 million in its first nine weeks, or $150 million in its first three months, or whatever...

The premise of the movie is explained in the placecard at the beginning: three students making a documentary disappeared in the Black Hills of Maryland; the footage we're about to see was found in the woods. But it's the tale of a website more than anything else: the two guys who directed the film devoted most of their creative energies to a canny web campaign peddling the story as 'real' to the millions of gullible nerds out there on the Internet. Anyone can make an independent film, but The Blair Witch Project is a pioneering example of independent hype.

This may or may not be a harbinger of a decentralised freelance film industry to come in which any old Joe Schmoe can be his own 20th Century Fox. But, even if it is, The Blair Witch Project suggests the pictures themselves aren't likely to get any better. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick were a couple of film students (in their thirties, as students so often are these days) who had no money to make a movie. So they hit upon a gimmick which would obviate the need for any dough — a plot about a trio of student film-makers who head off to make a documentary about a spooky old legend — the Blair Witch — with two cameras (one colour, one black-and-white), and wind up getting lost in the woods while some creepy, unseen force leaves unusual arrangements of twigs outside the tent.

There are three actors — Heather Donahue, who plays 'Heather Donahue'; Joshua Leonard, who plays 'Josh'; and Michael Williams, who plays 'Mike' — and they were told to take the cameras and sound equipment into the woods and improvise dialogue while the directors made spooky noises all around. The result is a horror story with no gore, no monsters, no scary music, just lots of wobbly, shaky hand-held camera shots of trees and ground and sticks and stones and the inside of the tent.

It's a kind of cinematic version of Greek tragedy — terrible bloody things are happening off-stage but all we see onstage are people standing around talking. The big difference, of course, between Sophocles and Blair Witch is the script:

And on, and on, and remorselessly on. It occurred to me about 20 minutes in that, if they were, indeed, being stalked by a Blair Witch, she was most probably an aggrieved 1950s schoolmarm tired of listening to all this swearbox-busting totally fucked up shit. The characters are meant to irritate each other and to some extent us too, but they do so in such a generic, moronic way that you're mainly irritated by the irritatingly lazy way they're trying to be irritating. Nor is the sense of supernatural terror aided by such prosaically earthbound grunting.

At its heart, The Blair Witch Project is about something real: North America is a thin strip of civilisation clinging to a wilderness. You wander off behind the ugly mall, and suddenly you're in mile upon mile of dense forest and your cellphone no longer works. The things 'Heather', 'Josh' and 'Mike' do are no sillier than what thousands of city dwellers hiking in the woods do every day of the year.

But I found the film's supposed 'reality' absolutely impossible to believe in. It's very obvious that the picture's not been filmed deep in the woods, but that they're just tramping about on the edge: there's too much light, too much sky; there's not that sense you have of the branches closing above you and the trees swallowing you up. I'm sure the directors had very good reasons for this: the gloom of dense forest would become oppressive on screen. But they should have at least been able to convey some feeling for the contrasts of the landscape — the thickets and clearings, the dark northern slope of a wooded hill, the sudden shafts of sunlight, the liberating airiness when you stumble across a pond. As it is, the physical landscape of this picture is utterly false and, as the landscape's all you have to look at, that makes the picture false.

To regard the film as a return to the awesome power of a compelling narrative is absurd: the plot is perfunctory, the characters cyphers, and there's no sense of place. The inverted snobbery of film critics is always impressive, but just because something's cheaper than Hollywood doesn't make it better. All The Blair Witch Project proves is that nowadays a couple of guys with $35,000 can be just as hype-wise, gimmicky and crass as the professionals. That's progress?
The Spectator, October 30th 1999