War of the Woods

Rating: Null/10 (3 February 2003)

CONTAINS SPOILERS In Berkeley, The Blair Witch Project generated a lot of a certain type of buzz that will often make me wary and I avoided seeing it during its first run, suspecting that I'd feel the rip of an eight-dollar ticket. After having screened a VHS copy acquired at Yard Sale Videos, I still feel that way a little but not because I didn't like it. Seeing it in a theater would have precluded being able to really watch a film like this the way I prefer to do.
I had to stretch a bit to get past some aspects of the film's setup. The self-filmed documentary approach can't quite carry the movie's weight through its entire length. Some sequences could not have been filmed by any of the protagonists, as was the implication, yet there they were. No one among the three `film makers' could have managed the presence of mind, in the midst deep panic, to have filmed Heather running screaming through the dark woods. It was all too far out of pre-established character, although the image is certainly indelible. But even a Dodge Dart with a brown door will get you there if it keeps running and once past my initial hesitations, I was forced to admit that The Blair Witch Project is.very effective.
There are moments when Blair Witch has the dankness of Silence of The Lambs and the raw, twilit scariness of the opening few minutes of Night of the Living Dead, in my opinion one of the great horror sequences. I became a true believer at the point where Josh and Mike began to realize that something was very wrong in the crackling Burkittsville woods, that they really had to get out, and were ramping up to full freak while Heather simply refused to stop filming although there was really nothing to film. This sequence nailed perfectly the deep frustration one can feel under the sway of a relentless know-it-all, especially when said person is female and, thereby, largely immune to the more primordial forms of conversation reserved for males. Josh and Mike, aggravated and frightened as they were, still could not abandon Heather, who had become more of a liability at that point than an asset. Both had begun to succumb to the stress of walking the razor edge between being scared squat-less and being unable to admit it.
The Blair Witch Project has an unassuming, almost sneaky way of getting to you. First off, the main characters are not at all likeable, which in itself is fatiguing. Josh and Mike are types that might be found at loose ends on any Saturday night, marooned in a mall or mini-mart parking lot. Heather is an almost-cute, soon-to-be-overweight, classic candidate for domestic violence at the hands of a future husband or boyfriend equipped with no sense of humor, or of the ironic. A few minutes with them and you are more than ready to burn out from slogging the monotonous autumn woods where night, freed from the shackles of Daylight Savings Time, comes too soon and remains too long. When the exhausted trio takes to its sleeping bags, you're right with them. Then, you're suddenly wide awake for all the wrong reasons. The sound of fracturing wood, out past a wall of darkness on which strong flashlight beams pile up like pizza dough, are not just twigs being snapped. They're branches, big ones. But this conclusion is never verbalized by any of the trio. One of the three refers to the sound as `footsteps' but only if the feet are size-72 American. It's left up to us to fully grasp the implications.
The three principal actors are, essentially, playing themselves and all perfectly manifest the giddy hubris reserved for those who may be able to come fifteen times a day but possess just enough knowledge and experience to be dangerous. But playing one's self may be harder than it looks and they do so with conviction, most notably the tough-minded, endlessly irritating Heather. Her character may be packing the only real cojones in the bunch and when she finally begins to unglue near the end, you know the doo-doo has gotten very deep. It's not mere post-adolescent, cheeseburger-craving discomfort any longer. That trifle has been left far behind; somewhere back under the decaying leaves. Heather's runny-nosed, video self-portrait, made upon realizing that she and her companions are in far, far over their heads, is truly poignant. We may enjoy seeing vain, clueless teens get theirs in slasher movies but the Blair Witch trio; three somewhat loosely-wrapped goofballs trying to pull off a film-making project, are really not clueless in the classic sense nor are they stupid. They've just intrepidly placed themselves in a very wrong place for which there may be no possible right time.
And finally the ending, which is really what this film is all about. Almost everything you ever feared in your youth, both in the light of day and dark of night, is compressed perfectly into the film's last few seconds. When the evil suggested throughout finally thunders down like stagnant water through a breached dam, the result is possibly the most viscerally disturbing horror sequence ever produced. All exploding skulls, bursting rib cages, and dangling intestines ever filmed are mere confetti alongside its simple, implicit power. Only the discovery of the maternal corpse in the basement, in Psycho, even comes close. Keep the little ones away from this one, Mom and Dad. A child's mind will have no defense, nowhere to run, and most disturbing, nothing tangible to run from; only an invisible, meticulously goal-oriented malevolence that comes from nowhere, and everywhere, at once.