(4 of 6)
The original idea was to surround this story of three kids, lost and grumpy in the woods, with other pseudodocumentary filler: archival material on the witch legend, interviews with local police officers and friends of the missing students, all tied together by a suitably questing narrator. The trope is familiar enough, both from that oxymoronic phrase "reality TV" and from fake-umentary murder movies, such as the 1979 Cannibal Holocaust and the current Drop Dead Gorgeous. The Last Broadcast, a slick thriller assembled on a desktop computer in 1997 for--get this--$900, mixes interviews and "found footage" in its story of a cable-TV crew that goes into New Jersey's Pine Barrens in search of a legendary monster; the crew calls this trek "the Jersey Devil project." There is betrayal, death and a twisty climactic frisson in this dark, media-mauling parable. The similarities between it and Blair Witch prove that for film, video or digital artists, self-reflexive stories are in the air.
Blair Witch, like any movie, has many antecedents. It is, by our casual count, the 873rd horror movie about youths who go into the woods on a lark and come out on a slab; the 4,982nd in which people disappear in reverse order of star quality; and the zillionth in which kids are frightened into a state of suicidal stupidity. Horror's evil creatures don't have to be very cunning when the heroes keep wandering in circles or deeper into the old dark house.
Is it good or bad that as viewers come out of a horror movie, they can't decide exactly what happens in the final shot (hint: recall what the witch made the kids do) and who the villain is (one guess: the missing filmmaker)? We'll say good, that ambiguity can coexist with atrocity. The film also plays upon the horror genre's attraction-repulsion for the filmgoer: what-happens-next? vs. why-am-I-watching-this? It makes canny use of dramatic longueurs. It's scary even when nothing happens, because something awful might, and, eek!, right now! Anticipation is all. Anxiety is a more powerful emotion than shock. Knowing we are to die is worse than dying.
In common with earlier indie horror classics like Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Evil Dead, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the new film makes a virtue of its seeming artlessness. A picture's dead air, ragged acting and extreme shifts of emotional tone throw the viewer off balance. This is not your standard Hollywood movie, whose technical finesse reassures even as it excites. The bizarro indie horror films seem unmediated, out of control, a blurred or garish snapshot of lunacy. It's as if the footage had been found, a year later, and all that's left is a grainy record of awful happenings.
But something else attracted critics and the first knowing viewers to Blair Witch, and that is the film's bold sense of withholding. Horror, after all, is a genre that gravitates to the lurid edge. The jaded audience wants more--more teasing sex, more gross-out gore. So directors make their young minor characters play the sin-and-repent game: you have sex, then you die horribly. Makeup maestros like Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead) dream up (or nightmare up) grotesque faces and prostheses. Screeching violins italicize the killer's abrupt entrance as he raises his knife behind the fair maiden.