# Blair Witch Project, The (1999)

### reviewed by
James Brundage

    The Blair Witch Project

Written, Directed, and Edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez

Starring Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard

As Reviewed by James Brundage (MovieKritic2000)

The Blair Witch Project can be described with many adjectives, one of which is mildly nauseating. Watching the camera shake and shimmy and other adjectives beginning with "s" used by William Shatner during Airplane 2, one cannot help but either get a stomach ache or a headache and wonder why they left the Alks Seltzer at home. Myself, I spent half of the movie thinking of the old jingle: "pop, pop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is."

To describe The Blair Witch Project's plot is simple: three student filmmakers decide to make a documentary and end up disappearing in the woods of Burkitsville, Maryland. They spend time arguing and slowly disintegrating into madness, at the same time being haunted by the Blair witch.

The key word here is slowly. Although this, by technical definitions, is an excellent horror movie, it remains as genre as anything else turned out. The film takes its time getting to the scares, but does not make tension in the meantime.

Before I go on my analytical and essayistic diatribe, you should probably know that The Blair Witch Project is a complete hoax. It is a hoax done so well that one cannot help but be scared by it (I'll give The Blair Witch Project that, it actually scared me at a few moments).

The film, however a well done of a hoax it is, feels boring. It also feels real.

Supernatural elements aside, the dialogue, the camerawork, the emotions, and even the timing: all of these things feel incredibly real to the viewer. People do not suddenly go insane in real life: it is a slow process. Nor does terror become complete immediately. The Blair Witch Project, taking its time, is true to life as it displays the emotions and nature of what people in that situation would be and feel like.

This most likely comes from the way that the movie was filmed, from the complete ad-libbing that makes up the script, and from the fact that the actors and actresses had very little idea what was going on.

However, as the film becomes more "realistic", it also becomes more boring. As much as we would not like to admit it, the thing that attracts us to film is the escapism from it. Even in ultra-realistic films such as Taxi Driver, we still feel that bizarre contrast between being complete in the reality that the movie creates while being separate from it. Our view of realism, of Hollywood realism, is that of a good orchestral score, background music, good cinematography, and all of the other technical aspects of filmmaking that we take for granted. The emotions and reactions of the people may be completely realistic, but, on some level, we want the fake. We want the unreal -- and better -- camera angles, lighting, musical accompaniment and contrived lines that go along with films.

The Blair Witch Project gets my very lukewarm acceptance as a horror film, if only because it hits its teen target head on. The teen crowds can go with their girlfriends or boyfriends and make out (thus saving the need for motion sickness pills), and they can, if they so wish, be cynical and crack on the movie. The Blair Witch Project is open for insult in this fashion.

As far as viewing The Blair Witch Project as a social commentary, I am giving it a resounding recommendation. The Blair Witch Project, in the most backhanded way, teaches us that what we truly are searching for in the movies is not realism, but instead the illusion of it. Much as art is the illusion of sentience, The Blair Witch Project illustrates the need for the illusion of reality created by the movies. It illustrates, in a way very difficult to achieve, the need for the contrived in our lives to make them interesting.

Concluding, The Blair Witch Project is oddly haunting, especially in the aspect that it provides a mirror to our own desires. That it contains, without script, without musical score, without any of the bonuses we take for granted, a blistering satire of our own desires to experience not the real, but the illusion.

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