A modern masterpiece: Blair's brilliance as much about filmmaking as terror. (possible spoilers)

Rating: 9/10 (27 October 1999)

True story 1: When I was ten, I had a huge row with my mother, and hid out by dark in the local ramparts for six hours. I was so traumatised, I didn't go out again for nearly a year. True story 2: a couple of years later, out in the woods with some friends, we were shot at by the farmer on whose land we were trespassing. They may have been fake bullets, but we didn't know that then. True story 3: last June I was diagnosed for a cancerous tumour. It was treated successfully, but I was convinced I was going to die, and I'm only in my early twenties. True story 4: Two days before I saw THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, I took my dogs out for a walk at midnight. I normally go with my wife, but she was tired. I don't know the area at all, and after a few minutes I was lost. It was foggy, with unlocatable voices everywhere, and I kept returning, with increasing panic, to the same place. This lasted about an hour, the longest of my life. No wonder BLAIR scared the living bejasus out of me.
Why, you may ask, is a total stranger telling me all this? Well, I've been trying to work out why a film everybody else considered boring or disappointing, truly, deeply terrified me into a dripping cold sweat, gauntly pale face, shaking, wrenching my fingernails. A film about uncovering the past has made me reappraise my own. Every day when I was in college, today in the streets, posters for Missing Persons, some missing for over six years. A young neighbour of mine a couple of years ago went on holiday with some friends and mysteriously drowned. I remember as a baby my dad would pretend to throw me off the ferry. Richie Edwards. I had never really given any of these events much thought. I can't stop now.
I wrote the above last night about 20 minutes after seeing the film. I'm a lot less hysterical now. Like Heather, I will take relative comfort in hiding behind the camera. Because the film is as much an investigation into filmmaking as it is an exercise in terror. It reveals the terrible fears behind the 'home' in home movie. It uses modern critical theorisation undermining the 'objectivity' and 'realism' of documentaries, by showing subjectivity pouring into its form with a vengeance.
BLAIR is obsessed with the nature of filmmaking. Barely a scene goes by without some reference to the camera. Some of this is rather obvious - e.g. the shots of the cameraperson in the mirror, or other camerapersons - but much of it is brilliant. In films, even in fiction, we are used to the camera being our detached guide to everything we see - watching it fail so badly, so rigorously, helplessly under attack is terrifying, which is why I think the film affects film buffs more than others - BLAIR is nothing less than an attack on the presumptions of the medium. The camera is as much a source of the fear as the unknown, as light reflected off the lens creates eerie, ghostly images.
Even what seemed to be flaws add to the terror. The continued attention drawn to the camera seemed contrived, but we needed it on for the film to continue. Through the camera we become sadistically party to the threesome's pains - we dread them turning it off. We are the watchers as much as whatever's out there. The perfect editing beggared belief, until you begin to ask who actually edited this? When Mike falls near the end, and Heather can be heard screaming in the distance, the camera moves again, and it's not Heather. Who is it? Mike said the witch models were too creative for rednecks. Isn't the implication horrifying? The well-documented manner of the film's creation actually increases the terror - the confusion over fixed authoriality mirrors the characters' bewilderment at who is the author in the film of the horrors.
As in most horror films, there seems to be a fundamental misogyny at play. As Heather herself notes, the Blair Witch project was her project. She is the Blair Witch. She takes two ordinary middle class guys out of their American homes, and subjects them to the most ghastly horrors. She controls every aspect of what they do>. Another reason for the panic, though, is the complete absence of sex. Only Josh refers to a partner, and he's the first to disappear. These are characters lost in the woods - that ancient metaphor for sexuality, especially female - and the subject never comes up. Yeah right. The camera never lies.
But, most importantly, this is a basically terrifying film. Three people, around my, and most of the audience's age, lost, without bearings, the reassuring signifiers of modern life, in a wilderness with threats both supernatural and primitive. It's not quite as mysterious as PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK - we do know there's something out there - but for a $150m+ film to deny explanations or closure is remarkable. The scene where Josh and Heather are suddenly awake, running after something in the distance, is probably the scariest thing I've ever seen in a movie, although the ending comes close. The film begins with the characters leaving home and ends with them finding one. Having been reduced to the most basic drives of humanity, parentless, lost, the pair rediscover childhood, in the form of bloody handprints. I don't even want to think about that one right now. Grrrgh. You probably won't want to see this movie - it's a different kind of scary.