The Blair Bitch Project

by Dmetri Kakmi

Believe the hype. There is a bitch in the woods. But it's not the malevolent witchypoo you gotta be scared of. It's the hysterical film student, with a video camera constantly glued to her eyeball, that's the real worry.

Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, and made on a minuscule budget, "The Blair Witch Project" is basically the story of three filmmakers who blithely stomp off into the woods to make a doco about the legendary Blair witch.

They just think it's like so kewl, you know? And everything's gonna work out cause they're just gonna show how stupid these country hicks and redneck dudes are to believe in horseshit about witches and ghoulies. And in the process they're like gonna become famous cause they're like on film, okay?

So these smug shits drive to Burkittsville that's like been haunted by this big hairy witch who, judging from descriptions, sounds like maybe her mother was human and her father a horse. I mean, I know people get desperate out in the sticks, and sometimes they do it with farm animals so there's nothing wrong with mama doing it with Mr Ed, but you gotta think of consequences, right? I mean, this is how killer freaks are born. Just ask any horror movie buff. So, anyway, legend has it that this witch has been hanging around since the 1800s eating babies and disembowelling men in the woods. So we know these three innocent babes are going to cross paths with her sooner or later.

But I reckon these kids are so thick they didn't find a witch at all. What they stumbled across was some rural, back-to-nature artists' colony. I'm serious. See, the woods near Burkittsville are festooned with these fantastic, pagan-looking stone biers, artistically tied bundles of sticks and, best of all, these amazing wood sculptures hanging from trees. It's an open-air conceptual art, right? And because these argumentative, irritating morons permanently have cameras glued to their heads they keep tripping over these precious little mounts of rocks and stepping on these artistic original sticks.

Wouldn't you pick up an axe and go after these plebs if you'd spent all night expressing yourself in nature's own medium only to have them stepped on and crushed by wanna-be indie filmmakers? Man, I'd be so pissed off I'd wanna sacrifice them to Pan.

A prerequisite of any good horror film is strong characterisation. If you haven't got that, you ain't got nothing. And this is where "The Blair Witch Project" fails. Our three intrepid filmmakers are of a type. They're twenty-something grungy, inner-city types. They're whinny, slouching, irritating, unresourceful and can barely string two words together. Like all grungies, they're stamped out of a mold. The two men are interchangeable. When one of them becomes witch fodder half way through the film, you're not sure which one he was. And worse, you don't care that he's gone. Heather Donahue stands out cause she squats to pee and has a shrill screech that will shatter eardrums from Montreal to Melbourne. Because they are not strongly delineated characters, lacking all personality and motivation, they merge into one big writhing, screaming blancmange ready for the witchy cauldron.

And because their dialogue consists of little more than monosyllabic 'fuck you' 'no fuck you' exchanges, things become repetitive very quickly. Look, the actors try hard but they haven't got the improvisatory abilities of a John Cassavetes ensemble cast. They really start to grate, and when that happens they lose audience sympathy. It's not that characters have to be sympathetic to be engaging, but they do need to intrigue and hold our attention throughout.

What really got me was all the opportunities Myrick and Sanchez let pass. While watching this film, I kept thinking of a chilling ghost story written by Algernon Blackwood. It's called "The Willows" and it describes the story of two men who go canoeing through marshes and get stranded on a muddy, unstable island for several days. Slowly, they have to admit to themselves, and each other, that something may be stalking them. You never see anything, but you hear plenty, and you see the aftermath of some kind of turbulence around the men's tents during the night. But it's the way Blackwood uses his watery, shrinking location and what he does with his props that make this one of the great suggestive ghost stories. It helps, too, that his characters are eloquent, intelligent men who can reason and take an active part in their destinies, instead of running into the woods screaming blue murder.

To give "The Blair Witch Project" its due, unlike most horror extravaganzas of the last two decades, it does rely on suggesting a sense of menace rather than showing it. When the screen goes completely black for several minutes at a time, and we have nothing but sounds and voices to tell us what's going on, the film gives you some genuinely caca-in-the-pants moments. Crouching inside their frail little tent with only the thin beam of a torch shining on their faces while the pissed off arty witch prowls around outside, the three city-slickers are frail and vulnerable fish out of water, storm-tossed on Mother Nature's heart of darkness. Had Heather Williams been a less irritating, more rounded character, her final, tearful monologue, shot in intense close-up, could have been a true classic horror movie moment. As it is you can't wait for the axe to descend and split her skull open.

The film also makes good use of sound. While hiding any menace in impenetrable blackness, the directors fill the soundtrack with cries, whispers, thuds, screams, creaking, crunching and breaking. It's a rich and unsettling earscape, reminiscent of David Lynch's use of sound in Eraserhead. The only sound withheld from us is the sound of farting, which would've added that special touch of realism to round off this mockumentary.

The film asks, is their ordeal real or imagined? The answer: no, they're just stupid lunk-heads who get what they deserve. Who, after all, would run into the basement of a dilapidated old house, which looks to be the witch's art gallery, with a camera still held to their eye? Serves them right for becoming part of witchy's installation art.

Currently on re-release to celebrate its 25th anniversary is Peter Weir's classic Australian film, "Picnic At Hanging Rock". Like "The Blair Witch Project", it's about a group of people who venture into a vast, unknowable landscape and are never seen or heard of again. The difference is that Weir's film is a haunting visual poem and character study, which still resonates from across the channels of time. As a testament to the self-indulgent void that exists at the heart of grunge culture, "The Blair Witch Project" shows three people trying to run away from the emptiness inside their own heads and going back to nothing.