Fear of twigs and string

Rating: 1/10 (3 March 2013)

1 THE SCAM Apparently there is a very scary film called "The Blair Witch Project". It is famous for the fact that, although it was made very cheaply using hand held video cameras and the like, it is really, really scary. In fact so scary that it is best to make sure you are wearing your brown trousers before entering the cinema. I thought I was going to see this film but my local cinema tricked me by showing a crap film of the same name which was so badly made that no one else would have been fooled by it. Also it was clearly a fake version as it had zero scares in it. In fact it wasn't a horror film at all but a very bad film made by art students mistaking noise for art who couldn't scare my cat, Xena, who is frightened of anything containing atoms.
2 MY THEORY Urban youth in western countries no longer have any initiation rites or rites of passage. Very few of them even go camping anymore and most of them have little experience with things found in the natural world e.g. trees, leaves. Therefore the very idea of spending a night out in the woods fills them with existential dread and they find it easy to identify with the very unpleasant and very whiney stars of this film. Like the characters in the film they are terrified by the sight of a few twigs held together with bits of string or small mounds of rocks. It's sad I know but what other explanation could there be for fear engendered in some viewers of this film? For anyone who has ever spent a night out in the woods it will forever be a mystery why anyone should be prone to fear of twigs and rocks. All we can hope to do is reach out our hearts to those poor young folk living in daily dread of post traumatic twig disorder after seeing this film.
3 THE ART OF THE UNSEEN I've always thought that The Haunting (original B&W Robert Wise version) to be the scariest film of all time and will brook no argument. In the proper version of The Haunting the viewer never sees what the horrible thing(s) are that hang out in Hill House but nevertheless the lack of gore and the feverish workings of the viewer's imagination supplied all that was necessary to scare the s**t out of said viewer. Presumably the makers of Blair Witch had the same idea. They failed. Miserably.
4 THE ART OF NOISE Another superb feature of The Haunting was the dramatic use of sound to create a feeling of overwhelming terror. Had the Blair Witch makers attempted to engineer the soundtrack and sound effects more professionally I believe they could have turned a deeply s**t movie into one that was at least acceptably a bit prone to cause viewers to worry, a little. They didn't. Instead they opted for making the potentially scary noises inaudible and cranked up the sound of twigs rubbing together until they overpowered everything else on the soundtrack.
5 HOW TO COPE WITH SEEING THIS FILM You may or may not be familiar with my dictum that all modern films would benefit from having half an hour cut from their running length. In the case of Blair Witch the film would benefit from having about 75 minutes cut out of its approximately 90 minute running time. In fact, if you are unwise enough to see the entire film you will come out of the cinema convinced that the film ran for at least 17 or 18 hours. In the interests of sanity I advise you to watch until you get to the end of the vox pop scenes and then head smartly for the nearest bar. Have a few good stiff drinks and return to the auditorium to see the last five minutes of the film. This features scenes inside an old house which are accidentally quite good. Then go home and hug a twig.