Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
We have nothing to fear but fear itself -- and fear, it turns out, is scarier than hell.
Jul 13, 1999 | A shadow creeping ominously into view through a motel room shower curtain. A swimmer's legs dangling tantalizingly under the water as something big and hungry glides purposefully toward them. A terrorized baby sitter learning that the calls are coming from inside the house. And a close-up of a single frightened, crying eye of a lost camper in her tent at night, her sobs interrupted as she breathlessly whispers to the camera, "What was that?"
These are landmark moments in cinematic horror, the ones that stick in your memory and haunt you long after the house lights go up, and they only come along once in a generation. If you don't recognize the last one, it's because it's from "The Blair Witch Project," the darling of Sundance and Cannes that's already being buzzed as the scariest movie ever made. That, of course, is debatable -- but the fact that a shoestring-budget mockumentary with no name stars, no special effects, no rivers of bloody gore and not even a musical score can be this spooky is a testament to the storytelling ability of the filmmakers, and to their trust in the audience's imagination. It's been a long time since a movie did so much by showing so little.
The back story, outlined in the film's opening, is that three student filmmakers went into the Maryland woods to make a documentary about the mysterious, gruesome legacy of a legendary local witch and never returned. A year later, their footage was found. What we see next is a chronicle of the group's harrowing last days as they themselves filmed them, a kind of "Real World" meets "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," with a splash of "Deliverance." It's an ingenious device, one that efficiently and economically exploits our cultural immersion in reality TV and recalls our own amateurish and shaky home videos. It's at once familiar and disquietingly surprising. In the 20 years since Michael Myers first donned a mask and heavily breathed his way through "Halloween," the standard has been for horror movies to unfold from the killers' perspective. But "The Blair Witch Project" finally turns the camera around and forces us to see through the eyes of the victims. It's a far scarier place to be.
Heather, Josh and Mike (in yet another authenticity twist, all three actors perform under their real names here) rapidly devolve from a cocky trio of would-be auteurs into three frayed, fearful individuals when they realize they are lost -- but not alone -- in the woods. Mysterious piles of rocks appear in their paths. Strange voices seem to be calling from points unknown. And signs of other unfriendly life become more obvious with the passing of each desperate day. The prologue of the film makes the characters' doom a fait accompli, and this information gives "Blair Witch" a new kind of suspense. In conventional horror, we know how things are going to happen (watch out for the guy with the burned face and the razors for nails, dude); we just don't know to whom they're going to happen. Here, we are fully aware that nobody -- not even the plucky girl -- is coming back from that camping trip. The suffocating terror, and the gloomy poignancy, is in waiting to see what's going to keep them there forever.
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