Blair bitch project (The Blair Witch Project (DVD))

Member Name: roger_smith

Product:	The Blair Witch Project (DVD)
Date:	20/10/00 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A good allround film

Disadvantages: Ugly women

We had been hearing about this film last summer for months before hand - we had checked out the web page, bid on the limited edition Sundance Film Festival posters that flooded eBay - even made vague attempts at securing a bootleg. The night of the film, we rented a campsite at Bear Lake in Lakewood - set up our tents amid the little gusts and rainbursts - and took the drive down to the little indie theater that was, for three or four weeks, the only theater in town showing Blair Witch Project. We had to buy our tickets two weeks prior to our show - the movie would remain sold out for the entire run at that little movie-house.

Our plan was simple - get together some friends, watch the film - go camping. As with all simple plans, however, ours went terribly, and ironically, awry.

The Blair Witch Project is a film that may be impossible to adequately defend. As a stand-alone piece, BWP seems to the myriad of back-lashers since its release, to be a wobbly, profanity-filled, bit of over-hyped fluff with minimal (or no) payoff and hardly deserving of its brief status as something extraordinary. Critics as varied as Roger Ebert ("there were moments where I needed to cover my eyes") and Film Comment's Michael Atkinson ("this may be the first true horror film") were in consensus that this film was something special - something so terrifying that the likes of it had not been seen before. Much has been made of the shoestring budget and the guerrilla film-tactics employed in the making of it (the commentary track of the DVD is one of the few that is truly illuminating) - what I intend to accomplish is that impossible defense of what, to me, is one of the most intriguing and valuable bits of film-making in history.

It is that rarest of beasts - a work of art that announces a new genre, and defines at last a new movement of art and literature. It could be not only "the first true horror film" but the first truly post-m
odern work. It combines methods of gathering knowledge from the Internet to cable television (the Sci-Fi Channel broadcast a mockumentary entitled The Curse of the Blair Witch comprised of one hour of the 20-some-plus hours of footage excised from the film), to printed media (MISSING flyers posted at Cannes and Sundance), to a comic book adaptation and an enhanced CD/soundtrack. It taps into a new generation of viewership, it is the quintessential gen-X experience. Strip away our computer terminals and 120 channels and get us lost in the woods? No cell phone? No economical SUV with room to grow a family? As one of the actors in the film says at a couple of points in the film "It's almost impossible to get lost in America today, we've destroyed most of our natural resources." The Blair Witch Project taps into the bogeymen of a generation coming to maturity between the ages of 19-35, the key demographic for marketing and waste spending, and instructive as to the huge financial success of the film.

What is often lost is that The Blair Witch Project is extremely age and affluence specific. It preys on middle and upper-middle-class fears of disconnection and loss of material identity. In its way, it is as much a meditation on the soul-crushing and ultimately profitless accumulation of material possession as American Beauty and Fight Club - where's your Pottery Barn alchemist's chest when you're lost in the woods being chased by a witch? The film forces us to address very specific issues of reconnection with human-beings rather than the pale substitute of tele/fax/internet. The film strips away the technologies and homes-in-nice-neighborhoods that shield most of us from the great monkey-humping mass of humanity and sticks us in the woods for a few days, lost and hunted, with strangers.

The Blair Witch Project occurs almost completely in the space between the actions on the screen and the audience. It will not bear up under t
raditional film critique techniques - it does not boast a cinematographer, a director, nor script - in fact - it's intrigue relies almost entirely on the multi-media mystique that was built around it and, of course, on the collection of childhood (and adulthood) fears my generation brought with them into the theater.

As a horror film, there are no visible ghouls or goblins and absolutely no gore (except for a brief shot of what appears to be a tongue and teeth in a bandanna) - it does not provide, in other words, what a mainstream audience expected, and wished, to see. What it does provide is a trio of naturalistic performances that elicit hatred and irritation in some, recognition and sympathy in others. Consider that you will read few reviews, pro or con, that suggest that the performances are entirely ineffective.

What Blair Witchmost effectively provides is a catalyst for our deepest fears (that footstep on the basement stair when you're home alone, the witch's hut in the middle of the forest) - a literal translation of our greatest anxieties.

The Blair Witch Project is a remarkable and unbearably tense film - the characters are recognizable, the fear is visceral - if it can no longer be appreciated in the wake of grossly misplaced expectation, more's the pity. After our showing, we were all visibly shaken. The final scene, often misunderstood, of Mike standing in the corner, waiting for his turn under the knife, left us frightened and jittery. We had second thoughts about going to the campground. But we went. Like many of the film's viewers, our expectations for the source of terror was misplaced.

The campground was full of redneck teenagers drinking and singing along to Barenaked Ladies until four in the morning. Frat hopefuls for the next five years were assembled there, excitedly exchanging date-rape, gay, and AIDS jokes while sketching, in that illiterate shorthand that passes for language, strategi
es for Jethro to get into Tanka Ray's Daisy Dukes. It put it all in perspective - huddled sleepless in that tent that night after Blair Witch - the age of the elegant fright is gone, replaced by night terrors of being run over by a drunken teenager in his pappy's Dodge Ram after a long evening of cursin' and bon-fire'n.

Ultimately, though, that night was the finest distinction that I can draw between the subtlety and brilliance of The Blair Witch Project, and the crudeness and gratuity of the majority of today's mainstream films. Demand better. Look closer.

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