Review: The Blair Witch Project (1999)

On the day that The Blair Witch Project first opened--which was also, by chance, luck or careful planning, the day I first saw it--I was reading a collection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft wrote mostly for pulp magazines in the '20s and '30s and has, since his death in 1937, has become quite a literary cult figure and is now generally considered to be one of the finest writers of horror fiction in this century (if not of all time). Lovecraft began one of his stories by saying that "Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places." On another occasion, he wrote that "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is of the unknown."

I wonder if Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, the creative forces behind The Blair Witch Project, are familiar with the works of Lovecraft. If not, they've still managed to craft a horror film in which they follow the concepts that Lovecraft laid out decades ago: That we are drawn unwisely but inevitably to that which frightens us, and that most frightening thing the characters in this film can face is that which they neither see nor explain away.

Sanchez and Myrick have a simple story to tell. Three film students, played by Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, set off into the woods surrounding Burkittsville, Maryland, in 1994 with a video camera, a 16mm camera and audio equipment to film footage for a documentary about a local legend, the Blair Witch. (The legend itself isn't explained very clearly, but we gather that she's appeared a number of times over a great span of time and that her appearances were usually accompanied by violent deaths.) The three students never return, but the film footage turns up a year later. What the audience sees is the purported footage, which shows the three filmmakers getting lost in the forest and becoming increasingly agitated in daylight while being terrorized and scared nearly out of their wits in darkness.

What the audience doesn't see is anything particularly explicit. There is one scene with some mild gore, but even it is vague and yields little useful, lucid information. (This scene prompted a discussion after the film amongst our stalwart little band as to exactly which body parts we were looking at--"Was that an eyeball? Did I see an ear?"--but no firm consensus could be reached.)

In an odd way, The Blair Witch Project is a throwback to the earliest sound horror films, in which there was little or no music, and sound and shadow were left to fill the gaps. It would be much more comforting, in fact, if, when the terrified film students come tearing out their tents in the middle of the night, they were to encounter an actor buried under latex appliances or some computer-generated, wart-encrusted hag that they could fight or run away from rather than what they actually encounter: The trees and leaves that their camera lights can pick up and damn little else.

Sanchez and Myrick offer no such common comforts. There is, to be sure, humor in the film. The early scenes show the three cracking wise about their upcoming trip as they gather supplies, interview locals about the legend of the Blair Witch, and, finally, drive off into the woods. As it becomes increasingly obvious that Heather, the director of the proposed documentary, has no idea where they are and that none of them has any clue as to what forces they've managed to rouse--Animals? Ghosts? Locals intent on fucking with their heads?--a gallows humor takes over, intertwined with much bickering and bitching amongst the three. (This is probably the only point at which the fictional reality breaks down; the constant arguing during the day scenes gets more than a little tiresome, and the actual physical confrontations among the students show signs of restraint on the parts of the combatants--they don't, after all, really want to hurt their fellow improvising actors, now do they?) Nor do Sanchez, Myrick and the three actors playing the students offer us the dubious comfort of the fake scare, where a series of footsteps snapping twigs in the distance is revealed to be a deer trundling through the forest.

What the makers of The Blair Witch Project do instead is remind us that any horror they can possibly put on screen will be watery stuff compared to the steady, thickening drip of the average filmgoer's imagination--the most potent horror engine of all.