Aging Disgracefully

1. At the time of release it was backed by an innovative web campaign that established the backdrop for the movie. The Blair Witch is, after all, an invented legend. Unless you have some way to implant it in the popular consciousness (in much the same fashion as an urban legend), the film will seem merely confusing. Alternatively, the web campaign helped to maintain the tempo for suspense in the film: it allowed the film makers to avoid having it bogged down by the need to convey many details in order to establish the legend. The web campaign had already more or less done that.

2. Although this web-based marketing of the film was novel (relying as it did on a comparatively new popular medium for the time), it cleverly tapped into very well-worn grooves of the American and, more broadly, Western European collective memory: dark and creepy woods (think of the setting of many of the tales of the Brothers Grimm for example); the old witch legends (a very rich local tradition in North Eastern and Mid-Atlantic areas that were settled at the time of the 17th century witch hysterias); etc. It carefully and convincingly crafted in its full richness the sort of historical tapestry that undergirds many of the haunting traditions of the East coast: the filmmakers seemed to understand that it is not enough just to say that such and such happened in 1689. One must also create the feel of the time being recalled, as in through old photos that seem as if they were drawn from the Ken Burns Collection at PBS, colonial period woodblock prints, a suitably old and mysterious early account of the witch (the sole remaining copy of which is in the hands of an obscure "private collector"), etc. On a more subtle psychological level, it tapped into old and largely subconcious cultural associations, for instance by the witch's Irish ancestry (which, in the context, implicitly and ominously hints at the ancient Celtic/Druidic tradition of dark and mysterious natural magic). As the events surrounding the witch tradition move closer to the modern era, they take on a better documented feel (in the manner that modern recordkeeping demands) but still leave an uneasy sense of an unseen hand guiding events.

3. The film was shot in the dead of winter, but before snow had fallen. This gave the woods a vaguely lifeless and menacing feel. A sense of death pervades the place. Use of amateur camcorders adds to this: the natural lighting is too strong and thus creates that slight overexposure to which camcorders are prone, in some sense robbing the sun of its emotional warming quality and instead rendering it a vehicle for highlighting the lifeless harshness of the woods.

4. The filmmakers understood well that we have two types of fears: those that are taught to us (uhh, cyanide is bad, mmmmmmkay?) and those that are more deeply bred into our bones: strange sounds in the woods at night (the creepy sounds of cracking stones are a master stroke); strange, elemental and unnerving stick figures that the three find hanging from trees in a clearing; etc. Those stick figures are particularly terrifying for their simplicity and the fact that they are left dangling from the trees. They would have been far less scary if they were on the ground or more elaborately crafted. For instance, if they were more elaborate they might evoke a more sarcastic approach ("well, someone has too much time on their hands"). In some sense, this highlights the knife-edge that often separates terror from comedy. As I write this, I am also reminded of my two bull dogs, who are each willing to take on another dog three to four times their weight in close combat but lose all of their courage and strength in the face of a garden hose, most likely because its shape triggers an ancient and deep instinctive fear of snakes (they possess little meat and lots of potential risk, and so are better left alone). But we humans are also ultimately children of nature, and on some level, no matter how deeply buried, these sort of primeval instincts operate just as strongly within us.

5. The viewer never actually sees the witch. If we did see it we would be able to intellectualize it, no matter how hideous it looked. Fox News would begin trying to figure out its party affiliation (how long could the Republicans pass up the chance to tap into such a powerful and malevolent force, leading of course to Witchgate?). The US government would scramble either Delta Force, the Ghostbusters or both (well, why not? What's worth doing is worth doing right) to deal with it. Of course, in the aftermath of the disastrous Delta campaign (they eventually got the Witch but not before, in an initial raid, accidentally burning down Baltimore, which various intelligence assets, fresh from their brilliant work in Iraq, had mistakenly identified as the great forest in which the Witch dwelled), Ridley Scott would inevitably take on the film adaptation of Mark Bowden's best selling novel Broomstick Down...OK, I'll stop now.

You can trust me. I'm your friend.

No, wait: far more terrifying than Delta Force, first they would send the IRS to figure out whether the Witch owed back taxes and if it qualified for the alternative minimum tax. We would begin to suspect the Witch, and not Dow Chemical Corporation, in the gradual disappearance of the northern reticulated spotted chipmunk from those woods-Sorry, as usual I just couldn't help myself.

The point is that by keeping the witch off camera, we are never really given a chance to find traction for the most rational synapses of our brain: we are left with no material to work with, and that amplifies the terror tremendously. The key here is that nature (or rather the dark elements of nature, as embodied in the Witch) remains mysterious: it is a strange, unknown (as well as un-knowable) and possibly malevolent force. In this, "The Blair Witch Project" reminds me of the early films of Peter Weir, such as "Picnic at Hanging Rock".

The Blair Witch Project is, for any reasonable viewer (ie any viewer who does not want to use their reflections on the viewing experience as a platform for hollow declarations of machismo), a convincing experience: we would be terrified were we in the shoes of those three young people.