Halloween: Threatened by shadows at night (The Blair Witch Project (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	The Blair Witch Project (DVD)
Date:	10.10.06 (330 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great scary low-budget film

Disadvantages: A lot of people don't like the way its shot

This is a just-the-film review. I was going to review the DVD, but then I realised that my region 1 has completely different extras to the UK version. Bah!

The problem with writing about a horror film for dooyoo's great Halloween competition is... (oh yeah - I don't know how widely known dooyoo's Halloween competition is, but you should enter it. Just write about something frightening - in any category - and stick the word 'halloween' in the title. You could win lots of dooyoo miles. *Scary* miles!)

Um, anyway. Problem is, most horror films aren't really that scary, and I kind of feel I should pick one that does the concept of 'scary' justice for once. Ghostwatch would have been ideal, but I squandered that years ago. So I find myself forced to resort to a film that frightened the monkeys out of me (I even had a nightmare about it), but which polarises responses in those that see it between people who agree with me and people who don't get it.

(And while obviously a part of me regards those of you who don't get it as unimaginative fools, I suppose to be fair I should acknowledge that it isn't like most films that get released at cinemas. There are no special effects, no budget, no actors you'll have heard of, no music, and it’s all shot on two hand-held cameras. I'll also accept that it's far better suited to being seen on a TV than a big screen, as the shaky camera can be physically unpleasant to watch. I saw it (on video) before it was released, and therefore came to it before the hype had built it up into something it never really was.)

Anyway, it takes place in the small town of Burkittesville. There are dark legends about a witch living in the local woods, which tie in with various disturbing deaths over the centuries. Three film students, Heather, Mike and Josh, go camping in the woods to make a documentary about the legend. They get hopelessly lost, and as the days wear on, it becomes obvious that *something* is playing with them, taunting them, hunting them...

The great thing is that the students themselves film everything - we only see what their cameras see. The filmmakers somehow contrived to have some deeply spooky stuff happen to the actors, whose reactions are frequently improvised. It seems that as the film shoot progressed the poor actors were really starting to believe in what they were doing, and so while some of the early acting isn't so great, it gets much better towards the end, when the fear and distress seem completely genuine. (Especially in the famous scene where Heather points a camera at her own face and tearfully apologises for everything - she doesn't seem that she was a good enough actor earlier on for that to be anything other than real. Obviously there’s a certain amount of actorly duplicity going on, but it seems a lot more convincing than most ‘ooh I’m really frightened’ performances you’ll see.)

The near total lack of any kind of physical manifestation for whatever it is that's hunting them makes it all the scarier. When you see something scary in a film, it’s never as bad as it could be. 'Oh no! It's a clown with a chainsaw and bat-like wings! That's terrifying! But... well... it could have been worse, couldn’t it? He could have had a flamethrower too! And bigger teeth! Etc.' By never directly or completely revealing the nasty to us, the film ensures that it lives in our imaginations, and is therefore way scarier than anything that could be shown.

The actors convey fear and shock very well, which obviously helps enormously. And the forest setting is good, too, especially at night when the light from the camera only picks up trees surrounded by darkness. There are some scenes that are unbelievably frightening - the 'attack' on the tent one night, for instance, or the ending which I mustn't spoil. It captures the scariness of a forest at night, when you’re cut off from things like telephones and streetlights, at the mercy of mother nature. Heather certainly seems to panic in a totally genuine way at some point, presumably having run into a stray tree branch or something.

The fact that nothing is ever really explained makes it all the more uncanny – when we don’t understand something it’s a lot more disturbing than when we do (which is why Ring 2 was a bad film – it gave pseudo-scientific explanations to something that had been pretty chilling first time round, thereby rather spoiling it). The final image of Blair Witch is great – the version I originally saw didn’t have any kind of explanation for it at all. The version that got released did make a nod in the direction of explaining it, but probably not enough to spoil things.

So there you have it. Blair Witch Project – really scary and totally bleak. It looks incredibly amateurish, but that just makes it seem all the more real (and allegedly some people in America believed it had really happened, although that sounds like it might just be publicity drummed up for the film). The editing is nice, but otherwise everything has a distinctly home made feel to it. Apart from Heather Donahue, who I’ve seen somewhere else (can’t remember where) the other two cast members haven’t done anything else I’m aware of, but after a slightly ropey start they’re all excellent.

The publicity for the film was amazing, including a great spoof documentary about the ‘real’ legend of the Blair Witch, and a good website about it – neither of which acknowledged that it was fictional. Unfortunately, in a way, the publicity caused such high expectations that I doubt any film could have lived up to them. Hence the fact that roughly half the people who saw it came out slightly disgruntled, unable to see what the fuss was about. I think the film is great – one of the scariest I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen plenty of scary films, most of which signpost the scary bits so clumsily that they make me angry rather than frightened). Blair Witch, by being rather different to the norm, builds up an atmosphere of genuine dread that has rarely been matched in American horror since. (Yes, OK, Cannibal Holocaust did it 20 years earlier, but Blair Witch is actually fun to watch.)

Watch it on Halloween – someone will be showing it, I daresay, and failing that the DVD can be had on amazon for less than a fiver. It’s good for sending the shivers down your spine. It’s rated 15, possibly for the rather adult language as much as the scary bits. There was a sequel, but I hear it’s terrible. There’s also a film called The Erotic Witch Project which sounds kind of tempting. Everyone likes an erotic witch.

Summary: The perfect Halloween scare fest