A truly scary, watershed moment in filmmaking

Rating: 10/10 (17 July 1999)

There are going to be two kinds of people that walk out of this film. Some will be immediately shaken by it. It will take the rest until they get home, shut off the lights and try to go to sleep until they realize just how much the film messes with you. Most of the latter are going to be of the backlash mentality, as this film's hype was only second to that of the Phantom Menace. Fortunately it lives up to the hype. This film delivers horror on that base, gut level that The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and (to some extent) the Evil Dead gave us. This is not a cut-and-dried post modern horror flick like the sort that typifies the genre of late. The main premise if you haven't heard it: Three student filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams) disappear into the woods while shooting footage for a documentary on a regional legend, The Blair Witch. A year after that, their footage is found, and the conceit is that what we are watching is the actual footage of what happened, edited by Haxan Films. What happens? There are no easy answers, and in all actuality, it will take you a while to form the questions as well. It bears the mark of a well-made horror film (or any film for that matter): it makes you think, and stays with you after leaving the theater. All three of the students give frighteningly real performances that are wrenching at times, especially Heather's confessional towards the end of the film in which her eyes are those of a hunted, frightened animal. The movie succeeds on a technical level as well, being largely an improv piece between the three main actors (who incidentally, also completely shot the film, contrary to recent reports that this was untrue) who were given basic character directions and rations by the directors, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick. The directors also basically told them, `We will mess with you at night. You will never be in danger, but you will get messed with. Film everything.' What resulted was 18 hours of footage culled from an 8 day trek in the woods that eventually go cut down to a highly effective 82 minute film in which the fear and hunger are, to some extent, very real. Take note, this cinema verite approach is not completely new. Benoit Pooelverde used it to great success in Man Bites Dog, (which also features a similar denouement), and the sparsely released The Last Broadcast also features the same plot device (among other interesting similarities: a crew from a faux documentary access show gets slaughtered in the woods, and their footage is all that is left). Even if the Haxan films guys bit a little off of these preceding films, and I'm not saying that they did, they still managed to turn out a hell of a good film that I can easily label (as a horror buff since infancy) as the scariest this decade. It has had some detractors, people complaining about the shaky camera work (part of the idea, when you're being chased by a supernatural force in the woods you don't have time to frame up shots), or about the fact that there's no latex-covered face for the horror in the woods, no boogeyman that gives us a payoff, very little gore...but therein lies the charm and freshness. I challenge any of the naysayers to try to go out and spend a night in the wilderness now. Then would they realize how deep this film cuts. It is an innovative and welcome change from Scream-era mindless horror. The only bad thing is that it will probably spawn a slew of copycats. But hopefully said copycats will realize that you can make a very good film on a very little budget as long as you have a good script or extremely well-fleshed out idea and an excellent cast.