BLAIR WITCH

SPOILER WARNING!!!

I was going to wait to post this review until after I finished my long, meandering review of the original, but I just couldn't wait. So here we are. BLAIR WITCH. You've heard of this movie, right? It's the one Brad Miska, ever the upstanding critic, of Bloody Disgusting called “a game-changer” that will break “the mold of traditional horror” films. You know, “the next big thing”? 

Ladies and gentlemen, if this is the next big thing… if this is the bright and bold future of horror films… we are FUCKED. We are well and truly fucked.

This movie is horrible. There's no two ways about it. It is just an abysmal film, a total failure in every conceivable way. And not just as a sequel. As a film. As a separate entity. It is terrible, irredeemably so. When I left the cinema, I only had two thoughts in mind. The first was “god, I hope this movie tanks” and second, “I wonder if Brad still has the taste of Adam Wingard's dick in his mouth?” 

BLAIR WITCH plays the same game as STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS and JURASSIC WORLD. It's both a remake and a sequel, a “re-quel”, if you will. As such it has to indulge in the old before it can indulge in the new. It's a tough balancing act (just ask Rob Zombie) and Wingard (along with his co-conspirator in cinematic atrocities, Simon Barrett) doesn't pull it off at all. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT managed to consolidate all its world-building into about 10 minutes. Here, the entire first half of the film is devoted to retreading old ground (because this films target audience wasn't even sperm when the original came out). We learn about Rustin Parr again. We learn about the history of Blair again. We learn about Coffin Rock again. We learn about the Witch again. By the time the exposition train runs out of steam, we're halfway through the movie and that means the spooky stuff needs to happen fast. In the original, we had some time before sticks and stones showed up. Here, fuck it. Both at once with no build-up. Just BOOM! there ya go. 

And speaking of BOOM!, the film goes full-on PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. This is the kind of film where characters cannot show up in the frame without an explosion of noise on the soundtrack. Every time someone stops talking for 30 seconds BOOM! Every time someone turns around slowly BOOM! Someone says a word that begins with the letter g BOOM! Every single scare is telegraphed through redundant action. By the fifth time a character says “sshhh… quiet” only to have his friend BOOM! show up behind him, you're aware of how this shit will play out. Eventually, someone says “can we stop doing that?” after being jump scared by her friend for the 50 billionth time and we all think “yeah, can we?” But nope, that shit happens right up until the end of the film. Because that's all it has to offer. There's no suspense, no tension, no genuine frights. Just BOOM!

Oh fuck, I should describe the plot, shouldn't I? Fine.

Meet James. He's Heather's little brother. James is browsing YouTube one day when he stumbles across a video purportedly shot in the same house his big sister went missing in all those years ago. For one brief moment, the person filming the action stops by a dirty mirror. It's a woman. James sees this and through a great, huge leap of logic, he concludes that the woman in the video is Heather.

So James decides to head out into the woods to find her (he was four when she went missing, by the way). Along for ride are Peter, James' best friend, Peter's girlfriend, Ashley, and Lisa, James' kinda-sorta girlfriend. Lisa is a film student and this provides her with a great opportunity to make a student film. She wrangles up a couple thousand dollars worth of camera equipment, including GPS-enabled, high definition earbud cameras and a drone (which is used solely for a handful of aerial shots just so the idiot audience won't forget these people are lost in the fucking woods). The group meets up with the uploader of that YouTube video, Lane, and his girlfriend, Talia. They're true believers, kinda ditzy, but as Lane is the only one who knows where they're going, they get to join the group.

But that isn't really why Lane is in this film. See, Lane and Talia are not tour guides or fleshed out characters who serve a real narrative purpose. They're explanation machines. If any character has a question about the Blair Witch or the history of the town, we need someone there to answer that question. We can't actually have a sense of mystery here, people. I mean, what fucking year is it? 1999? Get outta here.

So Lane and Talia provide us with all the answers to all the questions. For example, did you know that the only way the Witch can kill you is if you look at her (unless you're black in which case, you're dead either way apparently)? Did you know that you're OK as long as you don't spend the night in the woods? Do you know why Rustin Parr killed those kids or why people go missing or why you could walk for days but end up in the same place? Lane and Talia know all that and more. The only time the film doesn't go out of its way to explain everything to you, the dumb fucking idiot, is when those characters disappear from the film, only to show up later to die pointless deaths.

As an aside, I have to wonder if Wingard and Barrett were sitting at home one night and Wingard was like “hey, Simon, did you ever play that game Slender? You know, the one about being lost in the woods while some creature stalks you? What do mean, "what creature?" You know, that creature in the woods, the one that fucks with your electrical equipment when you're near it and will only kill you if you look at it?”

Also, does Wingard think that the human ear is in the middle of the face? Because characters, all of whom have cameras attached to their ears, constantly talk directly to the camera. Like full-on, eye contact style talk to the camera. Are they just staring at each other's ears the entire movie?

Along the way, Ashley cuts her foot on a rock and is infected with some twig parasite thing, someone gets crushed by a tree while out looking for fire wood (in a dry forest, why would you need to go looking for fire wood?), the drone crashes, we learn that the iconic stick figures can double as voodoo dolls and the sun simply stops rising. By the time we reach the house in the woods, we've also learned that the Black Woods exists in some kind of time vacuum, leading to the realization that the woman on the YouTube video is actually Lisa (the time travel aspects of this film make so little sense they'd even cause Doctor Who's fucking head to explode in frustration). Then Lisa and James enter the house and the single stupidest scene in all of horror movie history plays out in front of us. Ever want to watch two people die in 15 seconds because they both make the same stupid mistake one right after the other? Well, here you go. Have fun.  

I sure didn't. 

BLAIR WITCH is the kind of movie in which a woman suffering from a massive life-threatening infection that leaves her all but bedridden stops running from the Witch to climb a tree to recover a lost drone that will do exactly fuck all to improve her chances of survival. 

BLAIR WITCH is the kind of movie where characters obviously under threat from a spectral entity that can snap trees in half still go out to collect firewood in the pitch blackness of night despite the fact that they have a fire already lit and it's doing just fucking fine. 

BLAIR WITCH is the kind of movie where the characters bring thousands and thousands of dollars of camera equipment with them, but clearly went to Dollar General for their flashlights (seriously, count how many times a flashlight conveniently stops working in this movie). 

BLAIR WITCH is the kind of movie where right in the middle of a Witch attack, the writer still has two fully grown characters mutter awkward teenage romantic bullshit that wouldn't feel out of place in some pre-teen anime. 

BLAIR WITCH is the kind of movie where a handful of idiots wander off into the woods to find someone missing for 17 years even though they all know what the fuck happened to her in the first place yet are still surprised when bad shit starts to go down. What exactly did they expect? We have characters here who know full fucking well that some bizarre shit went down in these woods yet still laugh whenever Lane and Talia suggest that bizarre shit sometimes goes down in these woods. There is no tonal consistency here nor is there any consistent form of internal logic.

And let's discuss the mess that is this films visuals. One of the underlying foundational concepts of the found footage movie is that what we are seeing is, surprise surprise, found footage. The original film did have some editing. It was, after all, a condensed version of the footage found at the “crime scene”. All found footage movies feature some sort of editing, but the level of editing going on in this movie is ridiculous. Scenes feature full-on shot reverse shot editing. The fact that there are now six cameras in total (four earbud cameras, one digital camera and one camcorder), plus the addition of the drone and a webcam, means that editing is a necessity. We have to cut constantly so we're not lost amid the chaos of too many characters in such a confined space. That ruins any kind of authenticity.

Worse, we feel the director behind each and every shot. Every single edit is precise. We're always looking in just the right direction. If something happens, we always see it. Everything is in our face, dead center in camera. This is a found footage movie that should not have been a found footage movie. Film it traditionally and the film is exactly the same. The gimmick adds nothing. BLAIR WITCH is perhaps the single greatest failure of a found footage movie. I would have expected Wingard, one of the grand modern purveyors of the format, to actually fucking understand how to make a movie like this. I guess not.

When you toss in actors that cannot adequately express fear, a Witch that looks like the bastard offspring of the Cloverfield monster and Tristana from [REC], a climax that goes on for far too long and a patronizing level of spoon-feeding from a writer that couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag, you have a movie that insults your intelligence, your love for the original and your standards. Make no mistake, this movie is a colossal waste of time. Because no matter what Mr. Miska wants to tell you, this isn't a step forward. It's a step back. It's a safe, easy, bullshit alternative to trying something new. BLAIR WITCH is an old hat worn poorly, a mixed bag of everything wrong with the horror genre these days. It confuses loud for scary, confusing for interesting and shoddy for brilliant.

It's a clusterfuck, garbage through and through, and does not deserve your time to watch it, your money to purchase it or your bandwidth to pirate it. It is yet another example of idiots thinking that by reaching back, we're really reaching forward. This is not the bold new future of horror. This is just another “me too” film, the kind we've had for years and years. This isn't an evolutionary leap forward, it's wallowing in the past. It's been 17 years since THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. We've had 17 years to study the film, learn what it did well and improve on it. And instead, here we are with a shoddy knock-off from people that clearly haven't learned a single fucking thing.

Bold new future, my ass.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT - PART 1

This is Part 1 of a two part review of The Blair Witch Project.  

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT IS BORING!!! 

Or so say an army of teens and early 20-somethings online these days. I don't blame them for thinking that. Hell, I can imagine for folks like them, yes, it is quite boring.

The style of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT has become the style of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. Both films feature characters trapped in some sort of haunted house story they cannot escape, spending their days dreading the nighttime assaults from forces beyond their comprehension. But PARANORMAL ACTIVITY only borrows from the artistic and stylistic platform devised by Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick. It doesn't seek to emulate it perfectly. So instead of quiet, you get jump scares. Instead of characters actively trying to escape from their hell, you have characters all but wallowing in it. And instead of the beating heart of spontaneous film making, you have the cold and predictable hand of structure-minded screenwriters guiding the whole thing along.

Much like the films that came after HALLOWEEN, the films inspired by THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT seem to misunderstand just what it was that made the film so powerful. They get caught up in the apparent ease of replicating the films success. All you need is a man in a mask stalking teenagers, right? All you need are a bunch of fresh-faced actors with a camcorder, right? Well, no. You need more than that. Because the man in the mask or the kid with the camcorder… that's just a single element, not the whole. And truth be told, while the majesty of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT is still largely intact, much of what made the film so powerful back in 1999 wasn't just the images on the celluloid.  

IT WAS THE “EXPERIENCE”. 

The internet was only four years into its commercialization. It was, by then, mainstream enough, but viral marketing was still a new and exciting way to promote all kinds of products. Sanchez and Myrick took full advantage of this new marketing scheme, creating a whole mythos behind their little low budget horror film. When I first heard of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, it was in a blurb in Premiere Magazine. The film had just played Sundance and was picked up for distribution by Artisan. Though there were no details given as to what the film was about, there was a website listed. Curious, I decided to check it out and man, oh man, did I love what I found.

Here was an entire back story, complete with snippets of urban legends, police reports, “crime scene” photos… You felt like you were stumbling upon some great mystery. I remember waiting 15 minutes (I do not miss dial-up internet) just to watch some embedded QuickTime video about the unsolved disappearance of three documentary filmmakers in the Maryland woods. It was a fresh and fascinating way to market a movie. Seeing the film on its opening night was like finally finding that missing piece of a puzzle, even if the finale brought with it suggestions of an even deeper mystery, one that would never be solved. I was terrified by the film. I was convinced by the film. But more than that, I was impressed with the film.

I have to wonder if anyone else in the theater had the same experience I did. Truth be told, seeing THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT without any knowledge of the fictional back story is to only see half the film. Artisan clearly knew this as a SciFi Channel special, The Curse of the Blair Witch, a more traditional re-telling of the information contained on the website, was aired shortly before release. All of this appealed to me greatly. Here it was, the first true combination of visual media, the traditional cinema presentation of a guerrilla-style film complimented by the new media of the internet.

Around the same time, another film was released called THE LAST BROADCAST. Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler's faux documentary about the deaths of a handful of amateur documentarians bears a striking surface resemblance to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Both are about college-age filmmakers exploring urban legends (in the case of THE LAST BROADCAST, the Jersey Devil), both were low budget efforts, both took advantage of new media. These days, the two films are linked together because of these coincidences, but they're completely different experiences in both construction and execution. THE LAST BROADCAST is every inch the mockumentary and is saddled with a fourth wall breaking ending that saps most of the strength out of the film.

It's a film about a mystery, rather than part of a mystery. It offers a concrete solution, rather than merely ending without comforting closure. It's a good film, but not nearly as great as its counterpart and I think the main reason for that comes down to that one crucial element that really made THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT so damn brilliant. 

THE FOUND FOOTAGE ANGLE. 

Believe it or not, this was considered fresh and new back in 1999. Far from the first movie to utilize it (CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and MAN BITES DOG both spring to mind), the presentation of the material struck a cord with moviegoers. Today, it seems so cheap and gimmicky, but when used correctly, the found footage format can add two incredibly important elements to a film: authenticity and immediacy. 

CLOVERFIELD is many things. Authentic is not one of them. Found footage was used solely to provide a sense of immediacy. I don't care how preoccupied you are, you WILL notice a couple tanks and four dozen soldiers coming up the street behind you. The characters in CLOVERFIELD do not, only reacting when a monster's foot plops down in front of them and the battalion behind them opens fire. Matt Reeves didn't care about authenticity (if he did, we wouldn't have a great film marred by a scene like Hud not noticing the gigantic monster standing behind him after the helicopter crash). He cared about immediacy.

Sanchez and Myrick cared very much about authenticity in their film. The entire production was built around aiding the creation of that authentic atmosphere. Actors were not given a script, only confidential notes dictating speaking points, a general attitude and one or two hidden motivations. The actors were guided from point A to point B via GPS instructions, were not allowed to break character if a camera was on and were required to improvise all dialogue. They really were toyed around with at night and to accentuate their performances, as the grueling eight day shoot went on, their provisions were reduced to little more than an apple, some water and a protein bar.

This is that beating heart of spontaneous film making I spoke about earlier. The characters here don't have arcs, they have breakdowns. As the film progresses, they switch from being antagonistic to pragmatic and then back again. They bicker and argue. For some people, the characters are the big turn-off here, largely because they're not really “movie characters”. Heather, Josh and Mike are not traditional audience surrogates. We too are annoyed by Mike's rashness, Josh's constant badgering and Heather's foolishness. If you find yourself getting annoyed by their endless bitching and walking in circles, congratulations. The film is working as intended.

The found footage angle works so well in THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT precisely because it creates both a genuine sense of immediacy AND a genuine sense of authenticity. We're trapped with these people and their attitudes grate on us the same way they grate on one another. We want out of these woods. We share the frustration and the exhaustion. We fear the oncoming night as much as they do. We're not apart from the group. Rather, we're a part of the group. In a sense, the camera isn't just some object filming all this stuff. It's us. 

WE ARE THE CAMERA. 

Overcoming the underlying gimmick of the found footage movie is a tricky feat. “Why don't they just stop filming?" is a question that comes up time and time again with these movies, even though the internet shows us that people will NEVER stop filming, no matter how grim the circumstances. People walked through the streets on Bastille Day with their cell phones, stopping to document the wreckage of each human body they came across. People stood still and filmed as terrified victims jumped from the Twin Towers. We don't turn the cameras off when shit hits the fan. We turn them on.

  

Stan Brakhage once remarked that if it were not for his camera, he would have not been able to continue filming the autopsy footage that comprises the entirety of his documentary, THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES. The camera as an abstraction device is given weight throughout THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Josh refers to it as a “filtered reality” and concludes that by using the camera so heavily throughout their experience, Heather is seeking to somehow escape the hell of their circumstances. This is somewhat analogous to how war photographers often describe their experiences. They're not photographing dead bodies torn apart by shrapnel or bullets. They're just photographing collateral damage.

But we are not capable of abstraction. As viewers, the “filtered reality” of the characters is our actual reality. The central concept of the film, that what we are watching is the found footage of people who are missing, presumed dead, re-frames the experience from a simple horror film to something worse. We're standing in that morgue alongside Brakhage. What we're watching is an autopsy. 

Coming up soon: a complete (or close enough) deconstruction of the film.