The Blair Witch Project (1999) - film review

In 1994, three young film students - Heather, Mike and Josh - head off for the small American town of Burkittsville, Maryland, formerly known as Blair, to make a documentary about the much talked about Blair Witch.  The locals offer chilling accounts of hauntings, abductions and murders that have blighted the area for the past few hundred years, all of which are attributed to a notorious witch who lived there in the 1700s.   The next day, the students decide to explore the woods around Burkittsville, an area which, according to a fisherman they meet, is haunted by the spirits of the dead.  Not long after they find an old cemetery, the three friends become aware of a ghostly presence around them.  That night, they hear strange and sinister noises in the forest and resolve to head back home as soon as they can.  The following morning, the students fail to find their way back to their car and again have to set up camp in the woods.  Once again, their night is disturbed by haunting sounds.  The next day marks the end of their adventure and the beginning of their nightmare.  Their map has gone missing and now they are hopelessly lost.  Having agreed to head south, they soon have their next shock.  Suspended from the trees are dozens of humanoid shapes woven from twigs - a practical joke or an omen of doom?  Still recording everything with their handheld cameras, the three students continue their increasingly desperate hike through the woods.  None of them will make it back to civilisation.  Their last terrifying few days will be preserved on film, providing a warning to others not to disturb the peace of the Blair Witch...

It is a curious thing that the most unsettling independently produced horror film of the last two decades cost next to nothing to make and initially appears so amateurish that you can easily imagine it being rejected by YouTube.  Yet, despite looking like a home video from Hell, The Blair With Project is a film that took the world by storm in 1999 (grossing 250 million dollars on the way, thanks to a massive marketing campaign) and has acquired a reputation as one of the scariest horror films of all time.  It is not a comfortable film to watch (particularly if you suffer from motion sickness) but it is one which leaves a lasting impression and practically redefines what a horror movie should be.   

The film was the brainchild of novice filmmakers Daniel Myrick  and Eduardo Sánchez, whose innovative concept was to construct a film narrative from amateur footage in the manner of a faux documentary.  With a budget that is thought to be in the region of twenty-five thousand dollars and the support of three enthusiastic young actors (who ended up being put through Hell, deprived of sleep and food in an attempt to portray genuine fatigue and stress), Myrick and Sánchez constructed one of the most startlingly original and realistic horror films you are ever likely to see, and also one of the most chilling.  In contrast to most contemporary horror films, which have become mindless spectacles of gore and sadistic violence, this one shows us virtually nothing that could scare us.  Instead, it allows our imagination to do all the work, and there is no better engine of terror than the imagination.

What is perhaps most strange about The Blair Witch Project is that the full horror of what it conveys does not register whilst you are watching it.  There is a delayed reaction, as if something in your mind is actively shielding you from the trauma of what it has just taken in.  But when, some time later, you consciously cast your mind back over what you have seen and replay the scenario of three well-adjusted youngsters slowly falling apart in an atmosphere of mounting terror you begin to sense that there is something genuinely eerie about this film.  The fact that every shot is taken from the perspective of one of the characters means that the film has its own reality, unlike that of any other piece of cinema.  You actually feel you were there, in those cursed woods with the ill-fated students.  What ends up in our head is not the imprint of a piece of fiction but something that feels like a real lived experience. 

The Blair Witch Project is a film that disturbs our notion of reality in a subtle and profound way.  It makes us aware of the nameless unseen terrors that lurk in the shadows around us, those horrors of the night that may elude our five physical senses but which cannot defy our intuition.  True horror is not some knife-wielding psychopath in a mask, but a barely glimpsed spectre that dwells in the shadow-world of our mind, fear that has neither face nor name.  This is in essence what makes The Blair Witch Project so effective - it dispenses with the cheap horror thrills and shows us the real thing, horror at its most primal and most terrifying - fear of the unknown, fear of the world we cannot see and can barely imagine.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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