939. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Running Time: 86 minutes
Directed By: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez
Written By: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez
Main Cast: Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, Michael C. Williams

FRIGHTFEST 2011: 2 of 5

"Frightfest" rages on with the second installment of my tribute to horror, in preparation for Halloween. This time around we jump from 1982 to 1999 and take a look at an innovator in the world of cinema and the first ever (i think) "found footage film" - "The Blair Witch Project".

In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary...A year later their footage was found...

As the film opens, we're presented with the above statement and the film begins. Heather, a college film student, prepared to make a documentary about the Blair witch, assembles a three man crew, consisting of herself, Josh and Mike and heads into the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland. Prior to actually getting into the woods themselves, Heather and the crew interview some locals about the myth of the Blair witch and we're given a few details about what supposedly happened. Some believe the myth, some don't. The myth involves the murder of seven children in the 1940s and also involves a witch who was hung to death in the 18th century. After the interviews, the crew does indeed make their way to the woods, where they hike to a cemetery of sorts, where seven piles of rocks are laid out in memorial of the seven slain children. Once they have the footage they need, the trio head back to the car, but seeing as how they're not experienced woodsmen and have hiked very deep into the woods, they soon find themselves lost. Soon, the food diminishes, tempers rise and things start to go bump in the night.

In my opinion, there are several key factors that make "The Blair Witch Project" a huge success, not just in profits at the box office, but also success in pure genius movie making. The first key element is the marketing. I remember when this film was released and I remember that ominous voice over, reading the line from above: "In October of 1994 three student filmmakers....". I remember reading things like "scarier than The Exorcist" and "the scariest movie of all-time is a true story" and I can even remember me and my brother turning to each other, when they'd play the tv spot and asking, "Is this movie really real?" In 1999 we'd pretty much seen it all as far as horror films go. Corn syrup had been spilled on movie sets for decades in an attempt to scare us and make us want to sleep with the lights on. Here you have a couple of amateur filmmaker's seemingly saying to themselves, "What can we do to really give people a fright?" And the answer was simple - provide us with a smidgen of doubt. Let us think for a second that maybe....just MAYBE this is really found footage. "A Nightmare on Elm Street" was OBVIOUSLY a movie, because "By God, there's that boy from 21 Jump Street". Any horror movie always ended and audiences could go home, calming themselves down by telling themselves that, "It's only a movie". However, when it came to "The Blair Witch Project", there was that smidgen of doubt - "It was PROBABLY a movie, but I've heard rumors that they really found that footage and that those three poor students were heinously murdered." "The Blair Witch Project" gave us a horror film that MIGHT, just MIGHT be real. Of course, the cat was later let out of the bag and it was a movie, but during marketing time, they had a stroke of brilliance and it worked.

The second key factor to success when it comes to "The Blair Witch Project" is that these same amateur filmmaker's didn't underestimate their audience. They realized that people DID have a brain and if you gave them a black screen, with people screaming that they could use their imaginations and conjure up things much more frightening than anything they could commit to celluloid. I commend them for sticking with that attitude and never giving us too much. There's never anything on the screen that is physically (to the eye) scary. All of the fright and scare that comes out of "The Blair Witch Project" came from your own mind. When you went to bed that night, after watching the movie, YOU were the one to blame for sleeping with the television on, because these filmmaker's technically didn't SHOW you anything worth being afraid of. It was all on you! Take for instance "Paranormal Activity", which gets a little silly at the end with the main character (the female) being dragged across the room by an imaginary ghost and then coming back to life, with evil in her eyes and attacking the camera. I mean, that's just going too far - that's underestimating your audience, in my opinion.

There are even other factors, in my opinion, that make "The Blair Witch Project" a phenomenal film. You have, with this movie, not only a horror movie, but also an experiment in human interaction. The recipe is simple - take three people, throw them into an unknown place, scare them, raise their tempers and sit back & enjoy. You also have the three actors ad-libbing their lines and basically saying what they'd say if put into that situation. As far as I'm concerned, these three were all amazing actors, putting on a hell of a show and selling a movie. Say what you will about "The Blair Witch Project", but as far as I'm concerned, it's brilliant. Maybe I'd classify it as a guilty pleasure, but I'm not ashamed to admit it. I think it gets a bad wrap for a couple or reasons - one being that it's a horror movie and two being that it had, what I hear is, a really shitty sequel. Luckily, I haven't seen the sequel and based on the horror stories I've heard about it ("horror stories" in a bad way, not a scary way), I'll steer clear of it.

RATING: 10/10 As it stands right now, this is a TOP 5 caliber choice for my next TOP 20 and I'm not ashamed to admit that. I might get flack for that, but I say what I mean when it comes to my opinions on film. Great movie!

MOVIES WATCHED: 336
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 665

October 21, 2011 12:14am