Fear itself

Rating: 9/10 (24 July 2002)

"The Blair Witch Project" is a horror movie about fear itself. Since fear is subjective, the movie is like a Rorschach ink-blot test: you'll either see something there or you won't. My brother and I disagreed as to whether it was boring or terrifying. We were both right: it bored him, and it terrified me.
In the late '50's, Robert Bloch, in an essay titled "The Clown at Midnite" [sic], generally lamenting the state of horror movies at the time, posed the rhetorical question, "What is a horror movie?" It is, he said, a movie whose content horrifies. Obvious, perhaps; but nonetheless, he said, studios had forgotten how to make them, opting instead for monster movies, sci-fi movies, big-bug movies, and mad-doctor movies, full of shock and "gore" moments (moments only, in those days), freighted with "comic relief," saddled with the obligatory romantic subplot, and replete with "latex false faces that wouldn't frighten a two-year-old." He concluded that there simply was no such thing any more as a movie made just to scare the hell out of you.
Since then, there have been a few. "The Haunting" (the 1963 original, not the execrable 1999 remake) was one; so was the (original) "Night of the Living Dead" and the (original) "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Three very different flicks, but all very frightening, and -- considering the red-meat subject matter of the last two -- quite restrained. NOTLD and TCM were also low-budget indies, which added to their gritty credibility.
Into the pantheon of low-budget/no-budget horror now goes "The Blair Witch Project," a product of the thriving film industry of Maryland (which gave us the oeuvre of John Waters). Minimalism at its minimal-est, BWP (these low-budget creepers always have "mouthful" titles best reduced to initials) is presented as a pseudo-documentary. The premise is that, in October 1994, three student filmmakers set out into the Maryland woods to shoot a documentary about a local legend, the malefic Blair Witch, a Colonial-era miscreant said to haunt the woods still. (One is reminded of the Jersey Devil, the subject of a similar, slightly earlier, and even LOWER-budgeted movie, "The Last Broadcast.") The three kids were never seen again, but a year later, their footage was found. And that is what we watch.
Heather, Josh and Mike (the names of the actors as well as the characters) set out on this weekend camping trip as a lark. But the fun dries up when they promptly get lost, and as the days drag on, are cold, hungry, tired, panic-stricken, getting on each other's nerves -- and stalked by an unseen presence. As in, say, "Rear Window," we the viewers are trapped along with the protagonists; as in, say, NOTLD, they start turning on each other. And they learn too late that you can be young, hip, smart, and middle-class, living in a world of computers and fast food, and still -- when you're lost in a patch of woods you wouldn't have thought big enough to get lost in, in a part of the country long settled and urbanized, and just a few miles from DC -- find yourself prey to primal fears, mostly of the dark. This is, as I said, an essay about fear itself. No masked madman with a chainsaw is after these kids, no plague of flesh-eating zombies, no ghost -- maybe not even a witch. But SOMETHING is out there; the kids aren't just scaring themselves, as it becomes agonizingly clear.
Shot in color video and B&W 16mm film (the two cameras the kids lug with them), BWP is a technical oxymoron: credibly spontaneous (much of it was, in fact, ad-libbed), yet beautifully and effectively edited. The one false note comes early on: one of the locals, an eccentric woman whom claims to have seen the witch, totes a huge Bible and wears a rosary (incorrectly) as a necklace. She might as well wear a sign that says "Religious Nutcase." Pity she was rendered so stereotypically: in movies of this sort, with ill-advised questers heading into dangerous ground, there's usually a disreputable-looking eccentric warning them not to go. So while this character belonged here and her eccentricity is a given, it's too bad that, in a flick of otherwise great verisimilitude, her phony props distract from her acceptable performance.
The image that will long linger in mind comes near the film's end: Heather, taping herself in such closeup that we see her only from the nose up, whispers a panicky, tearful farewell and apology to her parents and those of her crewmates. "I'm scared to close my eyes... I'm scared to open them... We're gonna die out here..." Brrr! Fear itself.