Stay Out Da Bushes!

Rating: Null/10 (4 October 2000)

Sorry to quote Jesse, but I couldn't resist. This movie has garnered much divided opinion; both camps are right. It sucks AND it's great. First of all, immediately dismiss every opinion that whines 'where's the blood?'. Simpletons who need monsters and gore to officially enjoy a horror movie should park their cars on road shoulders and read back issues of FANGORIA while waiting for the next highway fatality to rubberneck. This is essentially a ghost story, and ghost stories frighten with mood and suggestion, not with slashed carotid arteries. But most of the naysayers have a point: after the overkill of the media hype, you DO walk away deeply disappointed after the first viewing. The narrative structure, such as it is, is clumsy and tedious. But part of that disappointment is due to the fact that horror movies are marketed to yahoos, and otherwise-rational viewers have become all too willing to think and act like yahoos when watching a horror movie in a theater. And who can blame 'em? This is what you get after 20 years of horror 'comedies' that substitute CGI, 'dream' sequences, brand-name psychos, and idiot movie critics who analogize the horror genre down to the level of a 'rollercoaster ride'. To release a serious, straightfaced, artistic horror movie nowadays is to ask audiences to think unsettling thoughts and FEEL something genuine: far easier to let the latex do the talking over a heavy-metal soundtrack and hope you can con enough kids into believing a 'director's cut' DVD of ELM STREET 12 is a statement for the ages worth owning. Now, while BLAIR WITCH is far from perfect, it does have one 'monster' that no fx wizard could ever approach...those damned woods. Anyone who's ever gotten lost on a camping trip, or even driven through the woods at night, knows exactly what I'm saying here. There's something deeply, frighteningly eldritch and pre-human about wooded areas. Early in the movie, the three students drive past a rotted, primitive shack nestled in the woods. The shack plays no part whatsoever in the later scenes, it's just a two-second visual throwaway, but it called up disturbing memories. I've driven past a dozen shacks like that, and I always wonder: who lives there, COULD live there? I never think 'those people must be desperately poor'; instead, I think 'this is what communing with nature really means'. Nature isn't Bambi and Grizzly Adams, it's harsh, unforgiving, cruel, remorseless; the territory of elder Gods who predate our warm and fuzzy civilized notions of deities and divinities. To live out in those woods and survive, you must bring tribute and make offerings to elemental forces so terrible that our ancestors finally fled, formed socities, created cities....ain't NOTHING scarier than the wild. As the three kids in this movie venture deeper into the woods, I felt a deep intuitive foreboding forming in the most primitive jelly of my brain. They're doomed because they've learned to be afraid of people but they've forgotten to be afraid of Nature, and deeper they go into a place where the very terrain- the rocks, the trees, the dirt beneath their feet - is the predator stalking them. All the faux-hostility they've learned from rap music and schoolyard brawls can't help them now. If you saw this flick and left the theater underwhelmed, see it again, alone, late at night. You might think twice about preserving any rainforest anywhere. The 'movie' part of BLAIR WITCH may be weak tea, but those haunted woods are scarier than any weightlifter in a hockey mask.