Call me naive, but unlike many of my colleagues I thought the unexpected runaway success of The Blair Witch Project in the summer of 1999 was encouraging, not depressing. I saw it as an indication that contemporary teenagers are far from the hardened cynics media “experts” make them out to be and that special effects and a handful of stars aren’t their sole reasons for wanting to see a movie. Its appeal offered a clear challenge to the studios and even forced the film industry to let it play in malls—an astonishing accomplishment for an independent pseudodocumentary that cost only $30,000.
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No doubt unconsciously, The Blair Witch Project conveys certain aspects of this country’s current isolationism with a rare emotional and conceptual purity. The filmmakers cleverly make use of the viewer’s imagination and innocence, even as they fiercely concentrate their own focus and energies, so that not even the usual obligatory love interest is imposed on any of the characters. This ultimately gives the story an allegorical impact: on some level it has to be about more than three student filmmakers getting lost in the woods, because of the sheer dread it conveys about that simple experience.
This seemed like an outgrowth of the bad habit of blaming the audience for most of what one doesn’t like about contemporary movies. (I have a book coming out this month, Movie Wars, that places most of the blame on the industry as well as the flacks, hacks, and other industry shills.) But as Philip Weiss argued at the time in the New York Observer, this was “a self-justifying media delusion.” Noting that Time magazine ended its chronological breakdown of the movie’s marketing with its own August 16 cover story—as if that were part of the Master Plan—Weiss rightly observed that a Time cover story when the film was first released “would have killed this picture. Any big hype would have killed it….The media are just playing catch-up to the viewers” and the populist response, which no one could have predicted.
Another example of a minimalist, low-budget horror film that relied on audience imagination and caused a sensation—and was much more brilliant than The Blair Witch Project—is Cat People, a 71-minute B movie that launched the career of producer Val Lewton in 1942, eventually yielding a spin-off, The Curse of the Cat People (and a cruddy Paul Schrader remake 40 years later), and seven other low-budget horror pictures. (The best of the lot is The Seventh Victim, though The Leopard Man is the scariest.) Lewton’s taste and intelligence—as well as that of, among others, director Jacques Tourneur, screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca—provided the main continuity from one picture to the next. By contrast, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 uses none of the same personnel as The Blair Witch Project; the only “creative” continuity it offers is the references to the existence of the previous movie.
Directed and written by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
With Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard.
