July 30, 1999 | The power of suggestion and the potency of imagination are exploited with uncommon cunning by the makers of The Blair Witch Project, an ingeniously creepy horror film that reinvents the rules of its genre. Refreshingly free of splatter-movie mayhem and in-jokey ironies, this low-budget, high-concept thriller is deadly serious about encouraging us to share the fear of the folks on screen as unseen things repeatedly – and menacingly – go bump in the night.
Right from the start, we know that those folks have ample reason to be scared witless. Blair Witch Project begins with the terse announcement that, in 1994, three student filmmakers hiked into Maryland’s Black Hills Forest to shoot a documentary about a local legend, the dreaded Blair Witch. The filmmakers disappeared without a trace, and were never heard from again. One year later, however, their footage –- black-and-white 16mm film and full-color Hi8-video – was found.
Of course, none of this really happened, just as there is no factual basis for the frightful specifics – evil doings by an 18th-century conjurer, serial killings by a 1940s psychopath – that are cited as elements of the Blair Witch mythos. These and other expository details are introduced to serve as the persuasive underpinning for a faux documentary supposedly drawn from the “found” footage. The premise is audaciously simple, and the execution is consistently clever. Indeed, Blair Witch Project so convincing in its realism that quite a few moviegoers are bound to accept everything at face value. Don’t be surprised if you can’t convince some people that this is a work a fiction.
After 20 or so minutes of scene-setting and character-establishing, Blair Witch Project gets down to business when the three filmmakers – Heather, Mike and Josh, played by Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard – enter the deep, dark woods. It takes little time for them to get lost, and only a bit longer for them to realize they’re not alone. Mind you, they don’t actually glimpse a witch, or even a serial killer, lurking in the distance. But they do come across telltale signs – purposefully piled rocks, portentously entwined twigs – that indicate something supernatural is going on.
Time passes, evidence accumulates. By day, the increasingly frantic filmmakers – hungry, cold and achingly exhausted — begin to turn on each other. At night, however, they huddle together inside their tent while, not so far off in the distance, persons or things unknown make themselves heard.
Blair Witch Project is the joint effort of five Florida-based filmmakers known collectively as Haxan Films. (For the record, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez are officially billed as writers, editors and directors of the movie, while Gregg Hale, Robin Cowie and Michael Monello are listed as producers.) But the quintet can’t take all the credit. The three lead actors actually shot their own footage, and improvised their own dialogue, while tramping through the woods under conditions similar to those endured by the on-screen filmmakers.
This free-form approach to collaborative storytelling is not without its pitfalls. Left to their own devices while expressing their mortal terror, the actors are tediously repetitive in their foul-mouthed dialogue: “I’m bleeping scared!” “Yeah, well, I’m bleeping scared, too!” “Well, turn off the bleeping camera!” “Bleep you!” And so it goes, on and on, until it gets pretty bleeping unbearable. The actors are never less than believable. (Donahue is especially good as her character evolves from bossy obsessive to guilty prey.) Sometimes, however, believability isn’t enough.
Even so, Blair Witch Project is undeniably impressive as a triumph of pinchpenny resourcefulness. Much to their credit, the filmmakers play fair while working within their self-imposed limitations: We see only what the filmmakers could have seen and recorded, for only as long as they could have seen and recorded anything. As you watch, you know where the movie is going. But you’re not quite sure how it will get there, or how much of the final destination will be revealed. The Haxan team saves its biggest scare for the very end, simply by reminding us of something mentioned in passing early on. This sly visual allusion is the only kind of special effect that The Blair Witch Project ever needs.
