#HALLOWEEN: RECOMMENDED VIEWING: CURSE OF THE BLAIR WITCH

 

As I explain (and later lament) in this semi-editorial from several years ago, The Blair Witch Project was a summer 2001 phenomenon following its release upon the unsuspecting world. With the Internet as we know it still in its infancy, the idea of pulling the wool over the eyes of its users was barely an idea. Fifty years prior, Orson Welles had gotten on the radio and insisted that aliens were landing and it was the end of everything as we knew it. Listeners fell for it. Twenty years ago, the BBC aired a program called Ghostwatch, in which a fiction narrative shot to look like live television convinced people that ghosts were not only real, but were soon coming for them. Viewers fell for it, one of whom would eventually commit suicide once he became convinced the ghost featured in the program was haunting his house.

From radio, to television, and now, to the Internet. 

The Blair Witch Project was the first to seize that opportunity to make a lot of people look like gullible jackasses. (I don’t blame people for falling for it – it was very genuine.)

While far less theatrical and dramatic, and far more subtle, The Blair Witch Project was not bolstered by a marketing campaign that highlighted the newbie filmmakers behind the camera and the casts of unknowns – no, the marketing campaign was in actuality a national search for the truth. The Blair Witch Project website was a genius hodgepodge of missing person fliers, tearful interviews with alleged family and friends, and creepy black and white photographs of the items recovered at a rather strange location in the woods where it was believed this three-person film crew had dispatched to investigate the legends of the so-called Blair Witch of Burkittsville, Maryland.

Then audiences found out they’d been duped. Lied to. Made “the fool.”

And they didn’t like that. Not at all.

While some decried the film’s use of imagination (what a concept!) instead of the kind of stupid CGI that same summer’s redux of The Haunting was shoving into people’s faces, there was a kind of unsettling revelation that a lot of people were slamming the film because they thought they were there to see a genuine snuff film; not, it turns out, a well-executed descent into horror and madness that, except for some cold nights and hunger pangs, did not place its cast into any immediate danger.

Following the strange and disturbing viewpoints of people upset that the footage of kids being systematically stalked, haunted, and killed by a witch wasn’t genuine, soon came the next stage of the hype machine: the backlash — people enthusiastically exclaiming their hate for the film simply because so many others were so into it. Such unrelated mind-boggling campaigns of spite still exist to day, but more vitriol has been hurled at The Blair Witch Project than any other film of which I’m aware. Tell someone a film is scary, and it's a natural reaction for that person to find ways and explain ways in which it is not. Tell someone you think something of questionable legitimacy might be true; that someone will explain why you're a fucking fool for ever falling for it. We're human beings and by our nature we're pompous, arrogant, and we think we know everything. And we like to think we're above and beyond something new that comes down the pike if too many people, news media, or pop-culture bon vivants tell us we should.

I am a massive and devoted fan of The Blair Witch Project, and no amount of spite-hate will ever make me feel differently. And the dozens of proclamations that allegedly bolstered the haters’ arguments for why the film was bad – “You don’t even SEE the witch!” – actually works against those shouting it. Essentially, those people are saying, “I have no imagination! I need to have everything spoon-fed to me!”

What dorks.

Granted, I at no point thought any of it was real, and not because I'm a genius, but because I was an avid reader of Fangoria Magazine. Yet that didn't diminish my enthusiasm for what I had just witnessed on-screen.

People are quick to point out that The Blair Witch Project wasn’t the first found-footage format film, and people threw out titles like Cannibal Holocaust, or Ghostwatch, or Man Bites Dog as examples. Some went back as far as 1922’s Häxan, for which the Blair Witch filmmakers named their production company.

And yeah, these people are right. The format had been around for years, decades, centuries. But The Blair Witch Project was the first cultural phenomenon in many ways. It was made by a bunch of first-timers with no actual script. Its cast and crew suffered the harsh elements of a Maryland winter just to get the thing on film. Famously, the crew was so broke during filming that, once the film was completed, they returned the camera equipment to Radio Shack for a full refund. And yet these broke filmmakers’ film, with its meager little budget, would go on to make back its budget three times. Wait, did I say three times? I meant THREE HUNDRED TIMES. It bested the previous record for most money made by an independent film – Halloween – and that record wasn’t for an independent horror film, but independent film in general. It inspired a wealth of imitators, all of whom would rip-off the infamous tagline. ("In October of 1994, three student filmmakers..."). It was a middle finger to studios making nonsense like The Haunting and The Mummy and other CGI extravaganzas that you didn’t need million-dollar special effects to put asses in seats. You needed ingenuity, passion, and a clever way to sell it all.

Having said all this, and as much as I love The Blair Witch Project, I love “Curse of the Blair Witch” that much more.

In the weeks leading up to The Blair Witch Project’s release, its filmmakers wrote and directed a television special that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it was still called, ya know, the Sci-Fi Channel). A companion piece to the feature film soon to terrify audiences to death, “Curse of the Blair Witch” was an extraordinarily well realized and well-written and even well-acted piece that surely would have been the last piece of convincing anyone skeptical about the coming film’s legitimacy would have needed to full-on believe it was all 100% true. Though peppered with scenes from The Blair Witch Project, “Curse of the Blair Witch” is largely as fake a “documentary” as they come – something that would have aired on The History Channel during the month of October, alongside their investigations into actual vampirism that occurred (and still occurs) in Romania, the Salem witch trials, or the origins of lycanthropy. Actors chosen to play doctors, historians, friends and family of the missing, accused murderers, news reporters, members of law enforcement, eye-witnesses, and the list goes on and on, all come together to paint a very convincing myth about the Blair Witch of Burkittsville. At no point does it feel fake, hammy, or over the top. At no point, since the documentary doesn’t offer up anything in-your-face fantastic or too ridiculous to believe, would you ever doubt its contents, if perhaps you’d stumbled upon it while channel surfing and were totally unaware of what this thing was called The Blair Witch Project. And this is the doc’s greatest strength. There’s no newly-created shaky footage of something creepy occurring before you. There’s nothing contained within purported to be actual anything of the witch. What we have are a collection of talking heads discussing myths and legends, history and hearsay collected from journals, newspaper articles, and everything else entrenched in the town of Burkittsville’s past. We have voice-over actors reading from testimonies and diaries, we have members of Burkittsville with tenuous ties to the conflict that are still made to feel important, and my favorite part, you’ve got one interviewee contradicting another participant’s claims – a typical opposing viewpoint taken out of real life.

 

So what the fuck does this have to do with Halloween? Well, let’s start with the witch aspect, which should be the most obvious. Witch iconography has been synonymous with Halloween for a very long time, and the town of Salem in Massachusetts has since embraced this association, going as far as hosting hordes and hordes of people who descend upon them every October for all kinds of witchy and ghoulish activities. Like a lot of other aspects of Halloween, much of its association was never part of its truest roots, but over time began to adopt certain other portions of history as its own, creating one big orange and black hybrid. (For instance, did you know that the idea of death had nothing to do with Halloween until the Catholic Church butted in and insisted people celebrate All Soul’s Day on November 2 as a way to cancel out the “evil” of the pagans who observed Halloween’s original traditions? Halloween’s sudden proximity to All Soul’s Day for the dead would be just one of many times in which something that had nothing to do with it suddenly became part of its traditions. For serious, yo – Wiki that.)

That the kids in the film go “missing” during the month of October, and that their footage contains them walking across a cemetery or dark foreboding woods where trees stand naked like sentries and the ground is blanketed with browning-over leaves certainly helps to add to the ambiance.

As I’ve explained before, when I think Halloween, I don’t think big cities of suburbia. I think small-town rural America – main streets, farm land, and isolated ramshackle houses in the middle of the woods…much like the one the kids stumble upon in the last ten minutes of the film. Burkittsville embodies much of that, from the beginning of the film in which the kids walk around interviewing townspeople, to the end, where they are stumbling around the woods and discovering a creepy abandoned house covered in children’s hand prints.

Most importantly, something has to feel like Halloween to me. I’ve seen films set on Halloween that don’t feel a goddamn thing like it, but I’ve also seen films, on their surface, not Halloween-related whatsoever, but which still become essential October viewing.

 “Curse of the Blair Witch” is definitely one of them.

IT AIN'T THAT BAD – BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2

In this column, movies with less-than-stellar reputations are fairly and objectively defended. Full disclaimer establishes that said movies aren’t perfect, and aren’t close to being such, but contain an undeniable amount of worth that begs you for a second chance. Films chosen are based on their general reception by both critics and audiences, more often than not falling into the negative. Every film, no matter how dismal, has at least one good quality. As they say, it ain’t that bad. 

Spoilers abound. 

A sequel to The Blair Witch Project was probably doomed from the start, no matter what direction was attempted.

A direct-direct sequel? What, it turns out – oops – Heather, Michael, and Josh survived their encounter and fled that awful Parr house back into the woods for more dark-screaming?

No thanks.

Perhaps a group of investigators set out after having located the recently unearthed footage and try to find traces of the missing kids, this time bringing along their own camera crew?

Perhaps if the first Blair Witch had been released after Paranormal Activity, which had proven you could go back to the same well using the same schtick and find success, then maybe that would’ve happened.

But it didn’t.

Blair Witch’s success at the box office rang the dinner bell for an inevitable sequel, and so franchise owner then-Artisan Entertainment became intrigued by a pitch that would’ve made the first movie just that: a movie.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 takes place in an environment where The Blair Witch Project is recognized as the fictional narrative piece of pop culture phenomenon it legitimately was when it was released back in 1999. It follows a group of people so obsessed with the movie that they set out on some kind of Blair Witch Weekend Extravaganza to immerse themselves in everything that made them total suckers for the movie.

I give Artisan and director Joe Berlinger heaps of credit for trying it this way. You have to admit, it’s a pretty ballsy move by putting all your eggs in the basket of “you know that movie you love and which made the world come out in droves to see it? Turns out we’re retconning it all and having it be just a movie.” And it was even ballsier in picking documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger (the Paradise Lost trilogy; Brother's Keeper) to take the helm of his first (and so far, only) feature film.

The screenplay by Berlinger and co-writer Dick Beebee (the House on Haunted Hill remake, “Tales from the Crypt”) is actually not just some kind of exploitative rehash of familiar horror tropes (or at least wasn’t meant to be), but was actually about our dependence on pop culture and the power of mass hysteria. All of the characters come from completely different walks of life – a former patient of a mental institution, an unstable weirdo (and hot) Goth, a married team of writers researching for a book, and a new age Wiccan out to dispel the notion that all witches are evil bitches – and yet they have all ended up in the same place, and it was their obsession and/or infatuation with The Blair Witch Project that led them there.

The best part of the film belongs to the opening five minutes (not including the terrible credit sequence), which is a compilation of news reports and entertainment talk shows discussing the explosive reaction to The Blair Witch Project – from MTV's Kurt Loder (remember him?) to Jay Leno – which is intermingled with interviews of “real” Burkittsville residents who discuss their love/hate relationship with the film. It’s an incredibly clever and intelligent opening to a film that is trying to tell its audience right off the bat, “We’re trying something different.”

Obviously, though it's shot traditionally, there still needed to be that amateur video aesthetic that made Blair Witch so successful and effective. And so elements of video captured by our cast becomes the catalyst for the film's conclusion. Because what the video shows them doing does not at all match up with what they're absolutely sure happened, according to their own memories. The things they experienced – and believed to be the real truth – are easily shattered when played on a computer screen in front of them. And what the video shows is them committing murder, participating in orgies, and offering sacrifices to the "real" Elly Kedward. But we, the audience, never saw these things. We saw a bunch of white kids drinking copious amounts of alcohol and each discussing his/her own ties to The Blair Witch Project. They were obnoxious and antagonistic and sometimes irritating, but never murderous. So how was it this footage was captured? Are we, the audience, being lied to? And if so, who are the perpetrators? The kids? The witch? Our own eyes? The true mystery lies in a statement made by Jeff, the leader of the Blair Witch Hunt, when he says "Video never lies. Film does, but video never lies." Work that around your noggin any way you see fit.

Unfortunately what was to be a more highbrow and classy affair was corrupted by Artisan Entertainment, who demanded that corny gore and Marilyn Manson complement the opening credits. Blair Witch 2 became a real Frankenstein affair, and Berlinger’s commentary on the DVD is quick to point out which scenes he was forced to include in order to appeal to a more broad (read: stupid) base.

In some regards, I am the lone cheerleader, and unendingly optimistic. But in others, don’t worry – I’m not delusional. For instance, I recognize that the acting is pretty atrocious. Though some members of the cast went on to other notable things (Erica Leehrsen did 2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wrong Turn 2; Jeffrey Donovan ended up with "Burn Notice"; Kim Diamond became Spike Lee’s muse), there is no short supply of horrendous acting and/or dialogue.

For instance:

“Witch bitch!”

“The witch…kills…children!”

"Fucking witch!"

Etc.

(But let it not be said bad acting has killed a horror movie. Mia Farrow’s flat and corny performance in Rosemary’s Baby didn’t deter its then-and-now legendary reputation, and Heather Langenkamp didn’t exactly graduate from the actor’s studio before taking on A Nightmare on Elm Street.)

BUT!

Lanny Flaherty as Sheriff Cravens gives the best performance…ever.

In the movie’s final act, in which reality (or is it?) is slowly meshing with fiction, there are some nice nods to the first film, such as the very greasy Rustin Parr-looking repairman saying, “I’m finished now,” after fixing a soda machine (although they did blow the line they were trying to homage, which was actually “I’m finally finished”). Additionally, his assortment of tools, when piled together, depict the infamous stick figure that became synonymous with the first film.

The resurrection (forgive the pun) of the Burkittsville Seven children murdered by Parr make several appearances as ghosts, and while the idea of including them is nice, and even appropriate, their make-up is beyond pitiful, and comes off like an elementary school Halloween parade. There are also nods to Kyle Brody (the 8th and only surviving victim of Rustin Parr) and Eileen Treacle, who was allegedly drowned by the witch in a very shallow creek. While these inclusions are clever, it also adds an additional layer in that, yes, the first Blair Witch was just a movie, but all of the events discussed in the film – Rustin Parr, the seven murdered kids, etc. – all allegedly happened. So what we're dealing with is a sequel to a movie that calls it just a movie, but which is based on a "real" history that was completely fabricated for said first movie. Still with me?

Carter Burwell turns in a clever and nature-driven score, using a combination of water and stones to create a patchwork of very woodsy-sounding themes.

Humor is a welcome presence from time to time, normally courtesy of Jeffrey Donovan, and I do also love that “Heather Donohue/light bulb” joke, where the punch line is screaming. (I have an affinity for very stupid jokes.)

As far as horror sequels go, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 gets a bad rap. It’s not as abhorrent as, say, The Exorcist 2, but it’s also not held up to legendary status (and fairly so). It’s big on ideas and nearly-but-not-quite ruined by a meddlesome studio throwing shit at the horror wall to see what sticks. Berlinger has a keen eye, and portions of the screenplay are clever and intelligent. I'd love to somehow see the original director's cut of this – I have a feeling it didn't include owl eating.

Because we'll never really know what Book of Shadows was originally meant to look like before all the studio tampering, it's hard to assign the appropriate level of blame to director Joe Berlinger. The end result is a somewhat irritating hodgepodge of ideas that, while based on an interesting concept, is ultimately dampened by lowest common denominator-type shock value, awful teen rock'n'roll (Nickelback yay!) and the typical amount of violence usually reserved for Friday the 13th. A shame, since the first Blair Witch's level of violence amounted to a couple of red squishy things wrapped in a shirt – and yet it still managed to be a box office and critical juggernaut – so why Artisan felt the need to cram in generic horror blood-n-guts is something we'll never really know.

A really great idea exists at the core of Book of Shadows, and if you can let the film be and examine it with a less discerning eye, sometimes you can catch glimpses of the director's original vision.

I urge you to revisit this particular fright flick. You might just be surprised.

FILTERED REALITY

Found footage movies, especially in the horror genre, are very polarizing to both general movie audiences and the hardcore genre niche as well. Some people love the format (I’m one of them), and others hate it—and for a variety of reasons. Some cite the shaky nature of the camera as too nauseating to endure; others find the (sometimes) lack of a tangible and visible antagonist boring and anticlimactic (though these are actually the people who long ago abandoned the concept of using their own imagination).

My favorite argument: the filmmakers go through the trouble of making it look real, but we all know it’s not real, because it’s a movie.

Seriously?

I recall going to see The Blair Witch Project in theaters, and the crowd was quiet the entire running time, which in this day and age is almost unheard of. No one at my screening, at the film's conclusion, walked out complaining—in fact, everyone walked out quietly, as if in a daze. It was a movie I would end up loving and revisiting several times at home, along with the equally creepy and interesting Curse of the Blair Witch, a fake television special/documentary created to enhance the myth which established the foundation of the The Blair Witch Project.

And then it happened.

The inevitable.

The backlash.

The first people out of the theater doors (and probably well aware of the marketing approach) proclaimed The Blair Witch Project to be terrifying and utterly realistic. "The scariest movie since The Exorcist!" the TV spots would boast.

People, being people, reacted in the way that people do: if someone tells you something is scary, you must not only see it, but prove them wrong. "That wasn't scary! It was stupid! You don't know me! You don't know what scares me! Because NOTHING can!"

The last thing we as people like to be is predictable. This extends to every facet of our life—up to and including film as a medium.

And so we return to that one generic complaint people have about found footage movies in general: the common knowledge that what they are seeing isn't real, despite the filmmakers breaking their backs for their films to appear as such.

When The Blair Witch Project first came out, the Internet was booming—and not just for nerds in garages, but for regular, blue-collar folks like you and me. The Internet hoax was yet to be realized...until a brilliant marketing strategy from now-defunct Artisan Entertainment, the mini-studio that would go on to release the film.

Their marketing? 

Everything in The Blair Witch Project was 100% real. And those kids in the film? They weren't actors, but real students. And up to that time, they were still missing. At that point, everyone had visited the Blair Witch website, which unbeknownst to them, was secretly promoting the film, all the while seeming to instead serve as a sounding board for the missing students' heartsick parents. We all remember the photos of Heather's mom hanging up "missing" photos. We all saw the testimonies from the students' friends and families begging anyone with information to come forward.

And most people bought it like the suckers they are.

I didn't, however; and not because of my supreme intelligence or superiority over the hoi polloi, but because of my basic concept of common sense and my love for Fangoria Magazine. Yes, I knew walking into that theater that the movie was fake—yet I still managed to adore the film.

So why didn't people feel the same way?  Why—once the cast started making the rounds, and they each appeared on the covers for both Time and Newsweek, and Heather suddenly showed up on Jay Leno—did audiences suddenly feel cheated?

"We thought it was real!" they cried. "If it never happened, it's stupid!"

The irony that they had bought the lie and thought the movie was real—the intention behind Artisan's marketing—was lost, not to mention dripping with the subtle and creepy inference that audiences were disappointed to learn those kids in the film were actually quite alive and well. Audiences wanted them dead...strewn about in bloody bits and turned into witch hats. Especially Heather.

And since then, found footage movies have received lukewarm receptions by movie goers. Whatever steam had been established, up to the release of The Blair Witch Project, had suddenly dissipated.

None of it was real, you see. And that sucked.

But almost ten years later came a rebirth of the sub-genre, thanks to the recent success of Cloverfield and The Last Exorcism, movies which proved that money is to be made, and critics are to be wowed.

And so the found footage is back in a big way.

As I write this, there are more than 30 found footage movies (and probably more, considering my half-hearted Google attempt) either in production or waiting to be released. They range from low budget indies with casts of unknowns to crews of A-list talent (and Barry Levinson). Some of these films have already enjoyed film festival screenings, or await major wide releases, but regardless, they're coming. 

Break out the Dramamine.