a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Good filmmakers and critics will agree: people will be more scared of what they cannot see than what they can. That’s why Jaws is a masterpiece of suspense and terror… you rarely see the shark. That’s what works in Alien and Silence of the Lambs (and thus, that’s why Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection aren’t very scary at all.)
The greatest strength of the outrageously popular new film The Blair Witch Project is that the filmmakers keep the audience from seeing what is out there in the woods killing people. When things start going wrong for the film’s central characters (I wouldn’t call them “heroes”), the audience has no chance of making sense of what is happening, and thus some severe scariness is afoot.
The difference between Blair Witch and the aforementioned horror films is this: the others are about people who fight to make a wrong situation right. There are heroes. There are lessons learned. There are interesting personalities, and things to think about. The events suggest a parable about political or societal realities.
This film is just about a bunch of annoying, mean-spirited fools who get themselves into trouble and then suffer the consequences.
The movie follows the progress of three hikers, led by an arrogant foul-mouthed young lady named Heather who is making a documentary on a local legend. Supposedly a witch once haunted the woods above the small town, and once upon a time she killed a bunch of children. The legend does its best to warn people not to go into the woods. The first half-hour of the film represents the footage of the hikers as they prepared for their fateful journey. There are some funny and enjoyable stories told by the locals, differing versions peppered with superstitions and various levels of actual belief in the story. During this part of the film, I was charmed by the locals and intrigued by the legend.
Then, the movie begins to dig its own grave. The three venture into the woods with a map and curiosity, and not much else. They go in themselves looking for the landmarks where the legend was said to take place. They become disoriented. They become desperate. They turn against each other. Basically, all manner of unpleasant things start happening. Evidence of satanic rituals appear in the woods, or are those just pranks set up by kids? Strange things go “bump” in the night. The campers’ belongings begin to disappear.
The audience begins to laugh uncomfortably, to cover their eyes, to shriek. Some walk out. Others cry. Others seem to revel in the terror and the misery. Me, I sat there wondering when we were going to see some sign of something good… something honorable in the effort? Were the characters going to become interesting? Was the script going to become tongue-in-cheek and funny? Or was it just going to continue being this drudgery, this non-stop stream of expletives?
It never gets better. It just gets worse.
Do these kids ever have an interesting conversation? No. Is there anything beautiful in the woods? No, not really. Does anybody think to follow the progress of the sun across the sky, or follow the progress of the stream through the woods to keep from becoming disoriented about north, south, east and west? No. Either the script thinks the audience is too stupid to think of these things, or else each audience member just blew seven bucks to watch two hours of the dumbest hikers ever to set foot in the woods. While the improv acting is rather impressive (if indeed they were improvising), the characters these actors play have boring conversations, long annoying arguments, and manage to get laughs only by swearing or finding more creative ways to insult each other, aggravate each other, and scream for help. Sorry. Not impressed.
If you enjoyed this film, I would appreciate hearing what you enjoyed about it. I’ve been alone in a woods in a tent in the middle of the night when something that sounded enormous stalked around the tent growling, something I couldn’t see until morning. (It turned out to be two bickering raccoons.) What was most interesting to me was this: When it’s pitch black in the woods, things sound a lot bigger than they really are. Every little raccoon footstep was loud and menacing. The Blair Witch Project captures that feeling better than anything I’ve ever seen.
But I don’t pay for feelings when I buy a movie ticket.
Especially unpleasant feelings.
If a movie is going to make me feel fear or misery or grief or pain, there had better be a good reason for it. The mind-bending horror stories of Kafka or Edgar Allen Poe are scary, but they also lead us to reflection on human nature, on the evils of this world. Silence of the Lambs terrified me, but it also made me think about how we make ourselves vulnerable to each other, about how we think locking up a dangerous man makes him no longer dangerous, about how refusing to give in to fear can help a person overcome whatever is inspiring the fear. I like scary movies that enrich my experience, that have enough care in their design that I come away a better person for thinking about it. (I even like movies that don’t have happy endings–like Seven–because they often have challenges or intriguing questions of their own.) Even a light frivolous comedy can enrich my life, because laughter helps us not to take things too seriously.
If the filmmakers had wanted us to consider the foolishness of the campers and laugh at our own frailties, I might have found that an interesting subject. But I don’t think that’s what the filmmakers wanted. They just want to scare us by confusing us, disorienting us, and by playing a simple trick on our inner ear.
That’s right. They want to scare us by making us feel dizzy. This film is entirely from the point of view of the hikers who are using–naturally–handheld cameras. Being particularly prone to motion sickness myself, I started feeling it long before anything remotely scary began to happen. If you’ve ever used a handi-cam, you know how dizzy you can get watching video that was filmed while the cameraperson was walking or looking around. Imagine the cameraman running through a crowded forest looking frantically this way and that. Now, blow that footage up onto a big screen. For an hour and a half. It’s enough to make you want to lose your lunch. Who wants to pay seven dollars to be scared and sick to their nauseous?
It doesn’t take a social scientist to tell us that people today will pay money to be made to “feel something” in a world that is increasingly good at desensitizing us. The Blair Witch Project will make you feel something alright. It will make you sick to your stomach, and then it will try to convince you that it was because you were more afraid than you have ever been.
The Blair Witch Project doesn’t give you any hope of discovering how to outwit this frightening enemy. It doesn’t consider the make-up of a monster, or consider what leads a person to terrorize others. It doesn’t let you consider strategies of survival. And it only portrays the dangers of self-centeredness in the most painfully obvious way. If it teaches anything, the message is this: Don’t be like these people. Have a brain. Don’t go into the woods when it has a reputation for terrible carnage and abominable murders. And definitely don’t go there with your friends who have smoked so much grass that they can’t tell left from right.
This film is already a cult classic, and it is breaking box-office records as it lures in moviegoers like the witch luring the dull-witted campers, only to abuse them. That may be the scariest thing of all.
