31 Movies of May, Day 27: The Blair Witch Project
May 27th viewing: The Blair Witch Project, chosen by Chicago Cinema Workers donor and my mother-in-law, Carol Freysinger.
Year of Release: 1999
Directed by: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
Written by: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
Starring: Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, Michael C. Williams (sadly not Micheal K. Williams, that would’ve been more interesting)
Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Fat Pug (Oatmeal Milk Stout, 5.9% ABV), Maplewood Brewing Company, Chicago, Illinois)
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local when getting buzzed during quarantine)
…This is what had people shaking in their boots in 1999?
I suppose that’s not fair. The Sixth Sense also came out in 1999, and in addition to being an otherwise riveting thriller, that scene where Haley Joel Osment meets the poisoned girl is genuinely terrifying. Also, Audition came out in 1999, and, well, *shivers uncontrollably* I guess that movie is pretty scary.
But The Blair Witch Project? I can understand how this might have been scary on an intellectual level, but when watching the film myself I just felt a whole lot of nothing.
I have to assume a lot of the terror generated in theaters was based on novelty. Now found-footage horror is its own full-on genre, including wide-ranging features from REC to Paranormal Activity to Unfriended, but when The Blair Witch Project came out such a trick was easier to sell. Similar to those folks who thought the Lumiere brothers’ train was actually going to come out of the screen and hit them, it’s easier to believe that you’re watching actual footage of supernatural woodland murders when you haven’t had any previous experience with this type of stuff.
But now? None of these feels interesting or intriguing. It all just feels rote. It doesn’t help that much of the movie is highly repetitive, it’s largely just the three characters traipsing through the forest getting annoyed at each other as they get progressively more lost. There’s a reason I chose the header image I did for this post, and it’s because it (along with the man standing petrified against the wall) is one of the few images from this movie that would actually generate recognition. Most other shots from this film have no identity to them at all, - which is of course intentional, but it doesn’t make it any less boring.
Compare this to the aforementioned Sixth Sense. Like Blair Witch Project, I had most of the story beats spoiled for me long before I’d seen The Sixth Sense. But The Sixth Sense works independently of that, it’s stunningly cinematic and makes you deeply invested in its central characters even if you already know the big twist. Blair Witch only has its central premise going for it, and when that central premise is commonplace, the premise really isn’t much to offer.
