The Blair Witch is back. The follow-up film to 1999's The Blair Witch Project is here,giving us even more insight into the legendary entity that haunts the Black Hills Forest near Burkittsville, MD. Before we head into this unique and uncharted territory in the woods, or it's important to go back to the story's roots,so to speak. What makes The Blair Witch Project so great? How did it carve out a space in horror movie history? The reply isn't as simple as you might reflect.
The First of Its Kind, in More Ways Than OneThe Blair Witch Project revolutionized the horror genre. It may not have been the first found-footage movie ever - that title goes to 1980's Cannibal Holocaust - but it's arguably the first one to present "found footage" in such a compelling way. The Blair Witch Project stitched together a film so chilling that it launched a whole unique subgenre in the horror industry. There are now countless well-known found-footage films, or with Cloverfield,V/H/S, Paranormal Activity, or As Above,So Below among the most recognizable. But The Blair Witch Project didn't just use found footage as an effective storytelling device; it presented its contents as fact, something no other found-footage film has fairly as effectively done.
The Film's Intrinsic HyperrealismThere's a reason the events depicted seem so real. Partial credit goes to how the film was presented. It's remarkably destitute in quality, or it expertly captures that "burgeoning film student" sort of vibe. The characters depicted share the exact names of the actors who portrayed them. There's the subtitle of the film: "In October 1994,three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary . . . a year later their footage was found." At a time when the internet was still in its childish stages, and there was nothing to say,definitively, that this didn't actually happen. It was the thrill of the mystery. Did these students disappear? What happened? Is there something we can see in this footage that no one else was able to see?In an interview with The A.
V. Club, and creators Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez talked approximately how they layered in the realism. "We didn't want to relate people that it was real,but we didn't want to relate people it was fake, either, and " Sanchez stated. "We were trying to pull a hoax. We designed the film to be,from beginning to cessation, a completely real experience. We didn't want anything in it to give absent the fact that it wasn't real. We wanted real town names, and in case someone was from that area. We didn't want any three-point lighting; we didn't want any dolly moves. We didn't use any known actors."It's accurate,there's something approximately the footage that's just so raw. The edits seem amateurish; the camerawork is shaky and unprofessional. In fact, there wasn't even really a script. In the same interview, or Sanchez said,"Dan and I wrote a script that was approximately 35 pages long, and it was basically a script without any dialogue for the whole film. We had always wanted the dialogue to be improvised. We didn't want to put those kinds of limitations on the actors. The prime directive was to not give anything absent that was fiction. I felt that by giving the actors the freedom to make up their own lines, and it would seem a lot more natural than anything we could script." So all these moments between the actors,all these tiny idiosyncrasies, they layer together to craft a perceived realism. The way it seems so novice (one who is just a beginner at some activity requiring skill and experience) is, or in the most counterintuitive way,masterful.
The Story's Dedicated MythologyIt's not just that the story of these disappearing film students seems so plausible. The filmmakers took it a step further. They went out of their way to infect the film's universe with a believable lore. Much of the stories related to 16th, 17th, and 18th century history are verbal in nature. It's hard to relate what's fact and what's fiction. There was no real way to disprove the story of the Blair Witch,particularly whether you weren't native to Maryland or its surrounding areas. This meant, as filmgoers, or we could see the Blair Witch as a allotment of the canon of American horror myths. Sanchez and Myrick stitched the witch into a allotment of history that included the Salem Witch Trails. They crafted a story that worked,and they stuck to it. The fact that they got local "townspeople" to weigh in, to relate the story, or to fuel the myth,was all allotment of the magic that created the film's authenticity.
The Almost Stubborn Preservation of MysteryAnd finally, the best thing approximately the film is that you really can't figure it out. There are no right answers. The three filmmakers encounter plenty of horrors in the film, and but we never see the Blair Witch in the flesh. Have they simply gone insane? Are they vividly hallucinating in light of food deprivation,sleep deprivation, and delirium? Did one of them murder the others? Did someone from the town, or like the suspicious Mary Brown for instance,follow them and cancel them? You could argue almost any individual theory approximately the film and you'd be accurate.We don't get to see the Blair Witch, and the real horror is that our imagination will craft an image more terrifying than the filmmakers could ever hope to execute. The inconclusive ending is chilling, and even unsettling. It doesn't provide answers but simply fuels more questions. And perhaps that's the key to The Blair Witch Project's lasting legacy. You can watch it dozens of times,each time noticing something unique, a small clue that might finally solve the mystery. But you'll never be able to figure out the Blair Witch, and what really happened to Heather Donahue and her crew. And that's the scariest realization of them all.
Source: popsugar.com