THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT: Good, But Unable to Equal the Hype

By Steve Biodrowski     December 13, 1999

To no one's surprise, the sleeper success horror hit of the summer, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (Artisan, 7/99, 1:27, R), has gone on to great success on home video: people not only want to rent the film for an evening's fright fest around Halloween; they want to buy the DVD to watch over and over. The film certainly deserves much of its success, but the absolute deluge of hype that surrounded its release prompts one to ask a few pertinent questions, based on the superlatives supplied by quote-happy critics. For example, is the film the 'new face of movie horror'? No. Is it the 'best horror film of the 1990s'? No. Is it the 'year's scariest movie'? No. Is it 'breathtakingly original and relentlessly frightening'? Well, no to the first and yes (at least sometimes) to the second.

Actually, BLAIR WITCH is a very good, sometimes even excellent horror film that has been over-hyped by well meaning critics who have set the film up to be a tremendous disappointment to the million of people who saw it after reading the reviews. The problem is that most critics, for all their pseudo-intellectual snobbery, have the same lowest common denominator tastes as the rest of us, so they really do enjoy a good scare; however, they can't admit that--unless the film also provides some kind of artsy hook on which to hang praise. The faux-documentary format of BLAIR WITCH provided just such a hook, and critics raced to heap a heavy burden that the film could not possibly support: that the film proved the superiority of suggested over explicit horror; that the film proved the major studios had forgotten how to make good horror films; that the film is the 'most original horror film since...HALLOWEEN.'
That comparison is a little more apt, although not in the way intended by Jonathan Foreman in the New York Post. HALLOWEEN was hardly original (being an amalgam of PSYCHO and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE), but it was effective. Likewise, the basic plot of BLAIR WITCH (three documentarians disappear into the wilds, and a year later their footage is found, revealing their fate) is derivative of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.
How, then, to explain the hype? Well, the film succeeds at using a few simple virtues often absent from recent genre work. A sense of reality is maintained throughout, in terms of characterization and fine performances from Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard; there is no nudge-nudge, wink-wink to the audience that this is 'only a movie.' The threat from without (the unseen Blair Witch) is used at strategic intervals (mostly at night) to evoke terror, but writer-directors Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez are wise enough to know that's not enough to sustain an entire movie (even one that clocks in at under an hour-and-a-half). Instead, they carefully dramatize the disintegration of the group during the daylight hours, undermining the sense of comfort that comes from solidarity in the face of adversity. And they use a carefully orchestrated series of suggestions to convey the menace haunting (or hunting) the characters, without every really showing anything. (These latter two elements are very similar to the approach used by Robert Wise in THE HAUNTING, more on which later). And finally, the mock-documentary style absolves them from having to maintain the kind of top-notch production values that could not possibly be achieved on their low budget: the sloppy camera work, grainy images, and absence of dramatic music all end up working for, rather than against, the film.
Having said all that, the film is never relentless. The night scenes of the frightened trio are effectively suspenseful, but the only truly overwhelming sense of dread does not emerge until the final minutes, when the surviving characters bring their cameras within the horror house whose atrocities are responsible for the Blair Witch legend. Even these scenes, when considered in retrospect, stretch credibility somewhat, using the cinematic equivalent of that hoary literary device: just as those Lovecraftian narrators kept pen to paper until the monster literally had its fangs in their flesh, these filmmakers keep their fingers on the camera button right up until their last breaths. The film also sorely lacks some kind of framing device to explain how the film was found and what the finders make of it. (I know this was in the pseudo-behind-the-scenes story The Making of the Blair Witch Project, broadcast on Sci-Fi Channel the week before the film opened, but I think works of art should stand on their own, without support from material in a different medium.) When all is said and done, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT remains a remarkable and entertaining film, well-deserving of success, but some of the critics who fell over themselves while piling on the praise, should get a better sense of what else the horror genre has to offer-like THE SIXTH SENSE, maybe?