6.5/10
86%
57%
80%
3.2/5
64%
You might think that I am very late to the “Blair Witch” game but this viewing is in fact the 6th time I have tried to watch this film and the first time I have managed to watch it in its entirety.
My previous viewing attempts all left me falling asleep in the exact same spot each time — a witch’s curse perhaps? And this is most unusual for me as I rarely fall asleep during films I am engaged with. And I think that’s the problem with this film but we’ll get to that later. First let’s talk about what the film is about.
The film begins with a title card saying that this documentary was put together from footage found from a project some students were filming. They went missing in 1994 and the footage was discovered (we don’t know how or by whom) in 1995.
Three students head off to the woods of rural Maryland to hunt down facts about the ellusive “Blair Witch”, a person or creature that is responsible for many strange happenings in the region. During a series of vox pops, we hear about a variety of weird events and murders around the town of Burkittsville (formerly the township of Blair).
While none of the stories explicitly reference a witch, there’s a hermit who allegedly kidnapped and murdered 7 children and some other strange goings on that may be the result of some weird and otherworldly influence.
The trio — Heather the director, Josh the cameraman and Mike the sound guy — head off into the woods to record footage of the graveyards full of children attributed to the Blair Witch’s influence.
After the first successful day of filming in the town and graveyard, the young filmmakers camp for the night where they are plagued by strange noises in the background. Later after another nights camping when they leave their tent in the morning it’s surrounded by three strange stone piles.
As the trio finish up and try to find their way back to the car, they’re plagued by odd sounds, a missing map and more strange ritualistic symbols being left outside their campsite.
By the third day they realise that they’re hopelessly lost and are just going around in circles, making no progress back to the car at all. Mike begins to lose the plot, Josh blames Heather for their predicament and Heather is trying to keep it together for the sake of her and the others sanity.
When Josh goes missing, Mike and Heather aren’t sure if he’s gone off to calm down, find his own way home or if some of the sinister noises they’ve been hearing during the night might be responsible.
As they decide to try and make it out of the woods to find help things go from bad to worse. We know that they’re missing, but will the footage show us their fate?
The First Among Many
It’s hard to get over to someone who wasn’t there at the time what a phenomenon The Blair Witch Project was when it was first released.
There was a form of guerrilla marketing around it using this new fangled thing called “the internet” where they were able to create a website collating newspaper articles, missing person reports and more. They filled forums and bulletin boards with posts talking about the discovery of the footage and what it might contain, and leaked snippets online as videos “they” don’t want you to see.
As well as the marketing, there was also the fact that this was “found footage” — a film shot from the viewpoint of a camera, moving the viewer into the perspective of the protagonists and taking them into the action rather than having it statically staged before them like a traditional film or a stage play. You’re viewing the events through the cameraman’s eyes which, if done correctly, can be most effective at directing the viewer’s gaze, mood and empathy towards certain characters.
This isn’t the first found footage film, I think the father of the genre is probably Cannibal Holocaust (1980) which presents the second half of the film as recovered footage from a mission to the Amazon where the documentary crew were killed by… well.. cannibals. The clue is in the title, duh!
The Blair Witch Project opened the wave for a new series of found footage films though, with the ubiquity of camcorders, home security cameras and later mobile phones, we now all have a small movie studio in out pocket.
Where Blair Witch differs though is that it just uses cameras with no gimmicks. They have a standard (for the time) camcorder, and a slightly higher definition 16mm film camera. The latter films in black and white which I think is a directorial choice to differentiate between the two camera/character perspectives.
There are no thermal camera shots, no night vision, no CCTV footage or trail camera shots. What we see is purely through the 2 cameras the crew brought with them.
Contrast that with Paranormal Activity, released a decade later, which is shown through “found footage” but it’s with night vision, fixed security cameras and handheld video which gives them a far wider scope for coverage than the 2 camera set up of Blair Witch did.
So if a modern audience is seeing The Blair Witch Project for the first time they might not see it as the genre defining effort it was at the time — now it’s just run of the mill, and that handily leads me in to my next section…
When Plot Has No Point
As I mentioned in my intro to this review, I have tried to watch The Blair Witch Project multiple times and this is the first time I managed to get all the way through it without falling asleep — thanks to some assistance!
While this film is billed as a horror there’s actually very little, if anything, of a horror nature within it bar the final 5 minutes.
There’s a reason I fell asleep at the exact same point on my previous 5 watches and almost did so this time as well.
While the film is very much a dissection of character when it comes to who is in charge, who can be trusted and how easy it is for people to unravel, there’s nothing really happening in terms of action to keep the viewer’s attention.
The place that I fall asleep takes place at night and as a result there are long periods where there is little or no sound — the characters are trying to be quiet to keep safe which makes sense — but this is also coupled with a black screen because there are no lights in the middle of the woods, our protagonists don’t want to turn torches on and, without night vision, there is no light to enable the cameras to pick up any visuals.
And this black screen goes on for a few minutes.
And this is a perfect storm for me to doze off thanks to a film where my interest was already waning.
Now I’m not saying I wanted them to discover a skinned corpse hanging from a tree à la Predator, and I’m not saying they should be spraying the woods with gun fire (although with this being America, are you seriously trying to tell me no one took a gun?)
But maybe a glimpse of a shadowy outline in the woods here, a looming shadow against the tent there — that would have gone a long way to keeping the mystery intact while providing a much needed jolt of adrenaline for the viewer (or me at least).
A Film Of Its Time
I think the main downfall of The Blair Witch Project is the success it had.
It made over $240 million on around a $60,000 budget (excluding post production and marketing) and as a result was in the popular zeitgeist for several years after the film was released.
There were countless rapid knock-offs and because of this I watched the French and Saunders parody before fully finishing the main film and that will forever be the way I see it — a parody of what a horror film actually is.
There is no action, there is no real fear, there are no jump scares, no gore and no monsters.
Even when the trio turn on themselves it’s easily resolved for a while.
So what is this film?
It’s a clever film of its time which is all style and no substance. A film that spawned a thousand copycats, some better like Cloverfield and some questionable like Paranormal Activity.
Whatever you think of it though, you cannot argue that The Blair Witch Project had a profound impact on modern filmmaking and showed what you could do with a small budget, a novel idea and being ahead of your time — and you didn’t need a predictable jump scare to get there (even if I needed one at the 1 hour 10 minute mark or so.)
Final Thoughts
I can see why The Blair Witch Project became the cultural phenomenon that it is, but I don’t think it deserves the horror praise that it gets.
Overall, not a lot happens. It’s just 3 kids wandering around in the woods, and as a rural kid who used to spend her entire summer holidays wandering around in the woods maybe that’s why I don’t find it as daunting and as scary as a townie would.
And the fact that I almost fell asleep at the exact same point for the 6th time shows that there is an issue with plot, pacing and editing that 27 years hasn’t fixed.
It’s not a bad film, it’s just an uninteresting one. Which is a shame as it really had a good underlying plot with the actual Witch that was ignored in favour of… well, not a lot really.
Watch this film if you need something on in the background while falling asleep, or would like to see what Paranormal Activity would look like if it was made by a competent filmmaker.
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