The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The Blair Witch Project, as I remember when it first came out, all those many, many years ago when I was a Sophomore at BSU, was an endlessly-hyped "event" film allegedly based around the "found footage" of three disappeared college film students, Heather Donohue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams--all of whom are still alive and well, and all of whom essentially play themselves in the picture.

I had a strange dream last night (imagine that), wherein an entire Chinatown was hidden inside a house that someone commented looked as if it was the house at the end of The Blair Witch Project. Seeing how I take such dreams as signs (particularly if they name names or titles) I got up this morning, rewatched it after years and years, and decided it begged for review. So here we are.

The film begins as a "film within a film", the documentary being the "found footage"; a selection of townies from "Burkittsville, Maryland" are interviewed about what they know concerning the legends of the "Blair Witch" (a name obviously derived from the well-known case of the "Bell Witch" of Tennessee), and hearing a variety of conflicting tales, one of which involves a local serial killer who apparently took seven children into an abandoned house in the woods, and made each face in the corner while he killed their companion. Later, Heather, standing in an old cemetery, relates part of another legendary killing, at a place called "Coffin Rock", in which men were tied together and gutted like animals. A crazy woman named Mary Brown (who, stereotypically lives in a trailer and carries a Bible), tells of sighting the Blair Witch, which she describes as being a woman covered in hair or even fur.

Heather, Mike, and Josh, carrying all their film and video equipment, stop and load up on camping and survival supplies and make their way out to the woods of Burkittsville to do their documentary and find the 'witch." They are not disappointed.

They start off cheerfully enough before realizing, with a sort of dawning amusement and disbelief, that they have become hopelessly lost. What's more, as if they are in some bad dream, or an old episode, perhaps, of "The Twilight Zone," they are seemingly going around in circles. They repeatedly cross the same stream over the same log, make camp in spots that are, they are certain, the same spot they camped in the night before, and generally become disoriented to the point of near-hysteria. remaining cool and collected at first, they gradually begin to emotionally disintegrate, as the exhausting "hike" through the woods never seems to end, but goes on repeating the same scenery, the same trees, creeks, and stones, and giving them no clue as to how they are to get out of the woods, back to their car, and back to civilization.

What's worse, at night, they begin to hear weird cries, and they interpret these as human. "We're out in the middle of nowhere[...]if someone came all the way out here to mess with us, they have to have something wrong with them. And I'm not gonna mess with that." says Michael, who adds that, if they AREN'T "people" (i.e. the Witch), he's "not gonna mess with that either.

They wake in the morning to find weird piles of stone around their tent; someone or some THING has obviously left them there on purpose. Later, they find the famous "stickman" stick figures hanging from the trees as their seemingly neverending trek commences. Now they know there is something, some primitive force, way out here, seeking them out. It KNOWS they're alone and afraid.

Michael confesses to kicking the "useless" map into the creek in one strange scene, earning him the ire and hatred of Heather and Josh. Heather is accused by both of them of getting them lost in the first place ("That fucking map was useless!" complains Mike) and in her most famous scene (The close-up with the top half of her face lit by flashlight as her nostrils flare and she weeps uncontrollably), she apologizes to all of their parents as "it was my project...I insisted on everything." She has accepted that they are probably going to die.

There is some confusion as sounds are heard outside the tent at night. Someone bolts from the tent and we only see their back. Josh finds some "slime" on his backpack. he then disappears without a trace, leaving only Mike and Heather, who are by now starved and exhausted almost beyond the point of endurance. Later, they find bloodied bundles of twigs tied together with strips of what they take to be Josh's shirt.

They are virtual zombies now, shuffling hopelessly in one direction and then another. Heather's face is streaked with dirt. But, they are still filming, always filming. Finally, they come upon an abandoned house. Is this the place where Parr, the serial killer, murdered the children? Is it the home of the Blair Witch?

Blair Witch preceded the popularity of "reality programs" that are less than actual reality. Josh even says at one point, "Heather, I know why you like this camera so much. It's not quite reality." The very fact that they kept taping, right up until the very end, should have clued the audience in to the bogus nature of the "found footage" backstory. The film plays on the same fears dredged up by FOAF urban legends and cautionary tales. Heather, Mike, and Josh are overconfident, arrogant, and unqualified documentarians trying to tackle a subject that not only consumes them, but it also destroys them. Heather, at one point, even states, "It's impossible to get lost in America today. We've destroyed all our natural resources." These people entered into the woods with no clue as to how to survive, and they paid the price for it.

Everyone is afraid of the woods, of being lost and alone; of wandering fruitlessly over the same pathway and never finding their way back out of the cold, darkness, and sense of dread and death. Everyone will invent a witch, a clan of demented murderers, or something even more awful in the darkness when they are cold and scared out of their minds. And hype will go a long way to selling even the most primitive of pictures.

However, having said that, there is still something eerily effective about The Blair Witch Project, a kind of "could-be" reality that, as stated before, is the stuff that drives urban legends. Everyone KNOWS those legends to be nothing more than simple cautionary folktales, modern paranoia presented in the form of a fable. Or are they?

Some may wonder. And some will wander far. Even in the dark.