The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Wicked Witch of the Web…

Can it really be already ten years since writer-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s horror revolution, The Blair Witch Project (1999), took the world and Web by storm?

In a promotional gimmick worthy of the late, great William Castle, young cineastes Myrick and Sánchez, who could see exactly how big the internet was going to get, decided to sell their grim ‘tale-to- be-told-round-the-camp-fire’ for real – the pitch, which was among the very first examples of ‘viral marketing’, and which was communicated via ‘for real’ news stories etc on the fledgling internet, was that a film made by three young student filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Joshua ‘Josh’ Leonard and Michael Williams, who all ‘play’ themselves) had been found a year after they had disappeared in the woods near the town of Burkittesville (formerly Blair), Maryland.

The teenagers had been filming, for a school project, an account of the true story behind a legend – the locals (including a marvellously off-kilter Patricia DeCou as ‘Mary Brown’) tell them about the witch myths, including the story of a hermit named Rustin Parr who kidnapped seven children and took them to his house in the woods from 1940 to 1941. Parr brought the children into his basement in pairs, killing one while the other stood in the corner (‘I couldn’t stand their eyes on me’) before turning on the kid in the corner. Par eventually handed himself into the police, (‘I’m finally finished’) saying that the spirit of a woman killed as a witch in the 18th century, Elly Kedward (the one still believed to haunt the forests), had forced him to murder the seven children. Ill-advisedley, the school chums, a la Scooby Doo, decide to investigate the woods – and it is their resulting ‘discovered’ film that we watch…

Rarely, if ever, have I seen a film for the first time in a cinema in which the atmosphere before, during and after was so electric – of course, no other medium but fear better suits how Blair Witch was marketed, but it’s still a rare treat to see a full-house audience, to a man, discussing a movie so animatedly afterwards.

In addition, it’s one of those fright films that actually supports the (irritatingly oft-cited) notion that ‘the unseen is always more scary’ – there is absolutely nothing that is overtly horrific from a visual perspective, but what there is in spades (and check out the image used to illustrate this review by way of example, which was the last ‘scene’ in the film) is superb, nerve-jangling suggestion of something far, far worse than you could possibly imagine.

Led by Heather Donahue (whose excellent, terrified, tearful (and much-parodied) ‘I was so naive’ soliloqy is perhaps the movie’s high point), the young cast do very good job of being themselves on purpose, and the film as a whole emerges as a consumately constructed journey into darkness.

And, yes, I know, I know, why didn’t anyone take a mobile phone? Grrrr. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to watch films…

Whatever – check out the still-excellent Blair Witch website for further updates…but don’t bother with Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows (2000), Joe Berlinger’s ambitious but ultimately pointless effort to get all ‘meta’ with the concept.

86 mins.

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