Micro-Budget March: The Blair Witch Project (Dir Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1h 21m, 1999)

In October of 1997, three actors, armed with two video cameras, and accompanied by a small crew, hiked into the woods of Maryland, to make a film. Largely improvised and shot over just eight days, and posing as a pseudo-documentary, the film cost, including its laborious eight-month editing process, in which dozens of hours of footage was filleted down into a single eighty-one minute narrative, barely $60,000. Yet, over the next two years, in which an ingenious marketing process melded the film to a masterful early example of viral marketing, the nascent internet blurring the lines between fiction and fact as its narrative melded the events of the film with a reality where the stars of the film were missing, presumed dead, an entire campaign sprang up to find their whereabouts, and its website only added to the mystery, so the film became more than just a run of the mill horror movie using novel new techniques in its production and release. It became a thing of legend

It became, of course, The Blair Witch Project, not just the film that launched a media empire (including two utterly unnecessary and very silly sequels, several novels, video-games and, of course a veritable roaring trade in tourism in the area), but also the film that undeniably launched the concept of "the found footage film", whose legacy stretches from the equally low budget and diminishing returns of Paranormal Activity and its series, to the monstrous Cloverfield. It remains, more than two decades on a cinematic cultural touchstone, homaged, parodied and referenced in everything from the execrable The Bogus Witch Project (released less than a year later by comedy-has-been Pauly Shore) and, inevitably, Scary Movie to the utterly bizarre Scooby Doo Project, a live-action/animation hybrid send up by the Hanna Barbera cartoon series released mere months after the original film.

Certainly it remains, to a degree, a form of touchstone, but this is in the form of its legacy upon cinema rather than its impact upon it. BWP has become a yardstick, a thing to compare things to, rather than a film to consider the merits of; films are regarded as "the scariest movie since Blair Witch Project", films have nimbly borrowed its marketing strategy, its ability to shock and scare audiences in 1999 through its mixture of fiction and fabricated fact, from Paranormal Activity's masterful marketing based around reactions to and demand for their series, to It (2017)'s wonderfully disturbing placement of replicas of its iconic imagery of Georgie holding the balloon across US cities.

No-one, certainly can deny the importance of this marketing campaign, of the realness of the entire film, much of which must be attributed to the late Steven Rothenberg, without which the film's shrewd marketing campaign would have floundered in making BWP an absolutely phenomenal success, making back over four thousand times its budget, (even including its distribution and marketing), even before it became a cult film on home media. Its sequels and expanded universe alone indicate that the film maintains its grip upon an audience, the relative success of 2016's Blair Witch, acting as a direct sequel only further suggests that nearly twenty-two years later, there is something still effective in this film's concept to keep 'em coming back, with a feature length documentary recently released, and a TV series on the way.

Thus, when I came to Blair Witch Project as a film itself, as a piece of cinema rather than merely an element in an artfully crafted Internet 1.0 spider's web of forums and websites and mockumentaries, I'm afraid to say it's something of a disappointment. What posits itself as the ultimate in dark and disturbing cinema, as its trio, filming a documentary on the Blair Witch slowly become lost in the woods and in their own paranoia, and eventually, one-by-one fall victim to the witch is, in blunt and simple terms, a creaky, slow, and surprisingly boring piece of cinema. Around admittedly excellent performances from its main trio of Heather (Donahue), Joshua (Leonard), and Michael (C. Williams), essentially playing fictionalised versions of themselves, our trio are slowly assailed by dated jumps, occasionally creepy imagery, and crew going bump in the night.

Here an aside. Yes, I appreciate that much of the effectiveness of this film is dampened with its age-its central conceit has long been exposed, its formula long since watered down in other films to varying degrees of success. Most of the websites involved in making this film a success are lost to time and expired domains; the very sand upon which BWP built itself carried away by time and diminishing interest. Yes, I know that horror is a very subjective and situational concept, and watching this in the middle of a sunny day on Netflix on my own, is a far different experience than a collective paranoia of a cinema audience. BWP, like perhaps no other film in the horror canon, is a fragile, but effective spell of a film, but it's one that I utterly failed to fall under.

But, credit is due to BWP. It certainly begins strongly; its opening fifteen or so minutes feel suitably verité, introducing us to Heather, Josh and Mike, before intercutting documentary style footage, interviews with local residents, and the trio getting to know each other better. Here, Myrick and Sanchez' extensive backstory for the Blair Witch concept, as well as their smartly done "planting" of actors among the townspeople, pays off, and much like its marketing campaign, the lines between the very real Burkittsville and its fictional history blur wonderfully. Even taking this into account, the film quickly and effectively creates the idea of the Blair Witch, particularly in the appearance of the utterly odd Mary Brown, whose single scene leaves a huge impact upon the trio, but even in the case of the real-life residents-by the time that the film leaves for the woods, we, like Heather, Mike and Josh have already fallen under the spell of the witch.

If Blair Witch has one redeeming quality, one strength above all, it is, without a doubt in its central trio, and these opening twenty minutes before they head into the woods flesh their characters out nicely, from Heather's driven sensibilities to make the documentary to Mike's standoffishness, to Josh's laidback personality. Here, once again, Myrick and Sanchez's control of the film returns-the brief sequence of the trio drinking and smoking after the first day's shooting having been cut down from two hours to its perfect centre. Here, the film once again blurs reality-the scene in the car complaining about camera lenses is not just a verité ad-lib but a genuine problem with the lens on the black and white camera that Mike had difficulty operating.

This verité sensibility continues into the sequences shot in the woods-for great chunks of Blair Witch, despite the ad-libbed dialogue, our protagonists are, in essence, playing fictionalised versions of themselves, and if the film's best asset is in their ability to act on the fly, then Myrick and Sanchez's master-stroke is to, in essence, shoot the film for real. Curiously, this guerilla style cannot help but remind one of Herzog's utterly visionary jungle duology (Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre The Wrath of God), in which, for all the minimal scripting, for all the mad genius of Klaus Kinski, a real boat is going over a real mountain and down a real river, and a party of conquistadors are hiking through a real jungle and attempting to raft down a very real Amazon. This same (slightly mad) visionary sense permeates the sequences of Blair Witch; for all intents and purposes, despite direction left with daily food-drops, our trio are trekking, for real, through a real forest, and slowly going mad.

These sequences at day are what I very much like about Blair Witch. There's more than a little sense, deliberate or otherwise, of Beckett or Conrad, as the madness of our trio grows, Josh eventually going through a complete breakdown where he slowly drifts away, largely in the background of shots, from Mike and Heather. There is a sense of paranoia shot through the day sequences, only growing with the sudden, and utterly disturbing disappearance of Josh, and through the slow breakdown, delivered as practical confession to camera of Heather. But more than this, there is an uncanniness to these day-lit sequences, shot either through the muted colour camera or in grainy black and white, a degree of unreality, of abstraction between our characters and the actors that play them and film-as-them.

Some have even favourably compared it to No Exit, a landmark play by Satre, where a damned trio of sinners suffer through an afterlife locked together in a never-ending room. Hell, as Satre simply states, is other people, and Blair Witch becomes more hellish, more uncomfortable, more unsettling as their entrapment grows, their circling around, as map and Josh go missing, their discovery of the iconic hung sculptures that have become a shorthand for this entire series, and increasingly disturbing and grisly remnants only adding to this. Were Blair Witch simply this, simply the idea of three people caught up in the tale, and eventually turning on each other as their madness and the very concept of the witch takes its toll, it may not have been the colossal hit it turned out to be, but its legacy may have been more than simply a shaky camera and screaming.

For the film's downfall are its night scenes. Yes, in places, the terror is real; one wonders how exactly one would make something as dependent as scaring the absolute shit out of its cast for real on camera today, but aside from the lingering first night-time sequence where the film lets the uncanny disturbing sense of the days bleed into the night, the rest of the night sequences, are frankly laughable. The film devolves to base, boring, overplayed bump in the night tactics, the running and screaming at things that our panicked camera crew-cum-cast didn't even film becomes quickly tiresome, and frankly border on risible. You could argue that, much like the best of horror, the film thrives on what you don't see, but Blair Witch never reaches a point where it reveals anything, or indeed, does anything during the night.

What is more frustrating is that all of the build, all of the tension built as our trio slowly turn on each other, and lose hope during the day is loosed and lost in frankly silly moments of barely seen rustling or muted off-camera yelling or messy, shaky camera. For all the work of our actors during the day, for all the growing paranoia, for all the masterful ad-libbed acting, Blair Witch merrily chips away at all the work it's done in boring staid moments of nothingness disguised as clever preying upon the human mind. It can be effective, but unlike the undeniable power of the daylight scenes, it is far more subjective, and I come away from it bored, rather than scared.

Yet, Blair Witch's power is undeniable more than two decades on. It itself may be a frustratingly average film, only further muddied by its successors and imitators, and the increasing diversification of horror, from run-of-the-mill jump-scare fare to intelligent and dark and message-laden masterpieces, but it is nevertheless an important milestone in its genre, from its ingenious usage of the nascent internet as a cornerstone of its landmark marketing campaign that laid the groundwork for countless other films' marketing, to its stark reminder to its cumbersome, big-budget brethren that a horror movie does not need to be gory, effects laden nor filled with stars to be effective.

And, whilst Blair Witch Project's spell has weakened in years, and perhaps was never as strong as contemporary audiences believed, there are moments where everything clicks, where the film's low budget ethos and its masterful use of handheld camera and ad-libbed dialogue comes together perfectly, and its masterful impact floods back to the surface, and you are reminded just how innovative, and intelligent, and scary it could have been.

Rating: Recommended 

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