The Blair Witch Project


Starring Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, Joshua Leonard.

Burkittsville, Maryland is a little town that used to be named Blair. Back in the early 1940's, seven children went missing. A year later the bodies of these seven kids were found in a local man's basement, who lured them in and killed them so they wouldn't look at him. A local women Mary Brown went fishing with her dad, and felt the cold grip of a hairy, ugly woman on her arm. In the previous century, five hunters' naked bodies were found bound together in a sculpture with their intestines hanging out. Local legend has it the woods are haunted by a witch who does not take kindly to strangers wandering about.

Heather Donahue and her cameraman Joshua Leonard and soundman Michael Williams set out to film a documentary called The Blair Witch Project, to get information about the legend, and to explore the woods for the location of the hunter's demise and the cemetery of the seven children over a 3 day period. Day 1 is spent in lighthearted banter with locals who laugh off the legend, but still won't walk into the woods. On Day 2, the trio set off with their backpacks into the woods. They find the hunter's death place and the cemetery with little difficulty. On Day 3, they begin the trek home, but can't seem to find the car or the road they left it on. That night, they hear sounds in the woods on all sides of the tent. On the morning of Day 4, they are just a bit unnerved and anxious to get home, but they can't seem to find the map. Now they begin to panic, and Day 4 leads into Day 5, and that night they here more sounds, this time baby's cries and some voices. They soon refuse to sleep, and without food for days and totally exhausted, they are beginning to lose it, and fear for their lives. Perhaps the legends are true.

Filmed on a shoestring budget as a pseudo home-movie documentary, the film is without special effects or gore. It is also without cheesy manipulations and implausible plot twists found in virtually all of the horror films over the last 40 years. The latter reasons are predominately why I am not a horror film fan. Other than the first Scream and The Silence of the Lambs, I haven't really liked any horror movies this decade. But The Blair Witch Project succeeds for two main reasons. Firstly, most of the horror is in the mind, and in the anticipation. The worst times of fear for us occur in the dark, when the screen is pitch black with only occasional flashlights on and off, and we hear weird voices in the background, and then the often panicked voices of the three filmakers. Occasionally we see just the frightened running of one or more of them when running in the bush. This works partly since we expect, because of all the horror movies we've seen in the past, something to jump out or a body to be lying there dead, but it never happens. So the tension never dissipates. I had goosebumps for at least the last half hour, and I rarely get them at all from horror movies. Secondly, the documentary gives the movie a sense of realism other horror films do not have, because these people act just like real people, and we don't have the initial feeling they're just actors playing a part. The plot is very thin, although that's not a real detriment, because we continually anticipate events happening, but the fact that they don't just increases the tension.

There are problems in the film. The film quality is very rough even for a documentary. Shots as the filmakers move are often indecipherable. Real documentaries would require and get much better film and sound quality. My old Canon video camera can get better quality than they got. There are a few plot contrivances that are a bit farfetched. For example, the manner in which the map is lost is not believable. They also planned to follow the river to get out, but inexplicably drop the idea without explanation, a tactic which would have eventually led them somewhere and prevented them from walking in circles. Also, these three continue filming at times when all reasonable people would have been more worried about their lives, and where they're running, than on filming for posterity. But as horror movies go, these are minor flaws, and do not seriously detract from the film's overall effect. Although the performances are generally believable, occasionally they seem forced, such as the scene in which one character explains what happened to the map. The performance though of Heather Donahue is outstanding from start to finish. She believably goes from the confident, bossy leader of the expedition to a frightened, self-blaming ball of fear, and her scene with the tight shot on her upper face, with the flitting eyes and occasional tear, brilliantly shows her unravelling. This is possibly the scariest movie I've ever scene, and if you actually like horror films, this is not to be missed.




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