The Blair Witch Project (Sánchez and Myrick 1999, henceforth BWP) is probably more famous for its low-budget production and marketing history than for its aesthetic qualities. Most academic research has focused overwhelmingly on the Blair Witch phenomenon’s transmedia intertextuality, its innovative cross-platform marketing campaign, and the unconventional methods used in shooting the film (Higley and Weinstock 2004, Roscoe 2000, Turner 2015, Velikovsky 2014). Months before BWP premiered in New York in July 1999, audience interest was piqued by auxiliary media products. Two days before its cinema release, a 45-minute documentary, Curse of the Blair Witch (Myrick and Sánchez 1999), about the Blair Witch legend and the missing filmmakers was broadcast on the Sci-Fi (SyFy) Channel (Roscoe 2000, Turner 2015). That documentary featured shots of forensic evidence, clips from news broadcasts, and interviews with law enforcement personnel, historians, and relatives of the three filmmakers. It was all fabricated, of course, but made to look authentic. Prior to that, missing persons posters with images of Heather, Josh, and Mike were distributed on university campuses (Keller 2004). And in June 1998, the website www.blairwitch.com was launched. It was the 45th most visited website on the entire web (Katz 1999), garnering 75 million hits in one week, according to one source (Roscoe 2000). Like Curse of the Blair Witch, the website featured forensic photos, background information on the witch legend, and information on the missing film students. Dozens of fan websites were constructed, with passionate discussions about the ontology of the Blair Witch and whether it was all a hoax. Many people just didn’t know. For some time after BWP’s premiere, the Internet Movie Database listed Donahue, Leonard, and Williams as “Missing, presumed dead” (Newman 2011, 439). The book The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier (Stern), released in September 1999, included more fake police reports, entries from Heather’s diary, and other bits of pseudodocumentary material that presented BWP’s premise as fact. This was all part of directors Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s plan. They did not set out to construct an elaborate hoax, but they did equivocate and they did encourage doubt (Klein 1999, Roscoe 2000). The incredible commercial success of the whole project—the film was produced for $60,000 plus advertising costs and has grossed close to a quarter of a billion dollars—landed Sánchez and Myrick on the cover of Time magazine in August 1999.
While most critics engaging with BWP have focused on its extraordinary production and marketing history, a few have engaged with the symbolic content and subtext of the film. None has gotten into clear focus the psychological underpinnings of the film’s commercial success. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (2014), approaching BWP from a feminist perspective, sees it as a misogynistic film. She suggests that Heather is being punished for assuming control over the filmmaking process—for attempting to take control of the male gaze embodied in the camera—and for thus attempting to “demasculinize” Josh and Mike (Heller-Nicholas 2014, 109). Heller-Nicholas claims that the late scene depicting Josh’s verbal assault on Heather for “still making movies” despite their desperate situation meaningfully mirrors an early shot of a bag of marshmallows in a shopping cart. Zooming is involved in both shots. The first shot zooms in on the marshmallows, the second one on Heather. This formal parallelism, suggests Heller-Nicholas, signifies “the instinct of the masculine gaze to reduce female flesh—and a woman’s suffering—to a soft, accessible commodity” (109). It’s a stretch, one that distorts the meaning and narrative function of these scenes. The early scene with the marshmallows shows us carefree film students preparing for what they assume will be a camping trip with bonfires and marshmallow roasting. The function of that scene is to provide a stark contrast with the later shots of film students who are exhausted and terrified, and for whom the state of their marshmallow stash is the least of all worries. In the latter scene, Josh is scolding Heather for failing to recognize the danger they are in, for prioritizing the film project over the group’s safety. That scene contributes to the film’s theme of danger overlooked, and it implicitly justifies and motivates Heather’s continued filming (without which there would be no film)—“It’s all I have fucking left,” she sobs in response to Josh’s assault. Moreover, Heller-Nicholas attempts to bolster her ideological reading by claiming that the film itself suggests that there is no witch, but that viewers irrationally maintain their belief in the witch “against the film’s own internal logic” because they feel comfortable by “blaming women” (107). What really happens, she says, is that Josh goes crazy and kills his comrades, yet viewers are reluctant to blame a guy. The claim is unconvincing because the film’s internal logic strongly suggests supernatural agency. The film gets most of its power from the suggestion of supernatural agency, and it offers many cues to suggest such agency—most prominently, the nightly disturbances documented from within the tent, with Josh present—and no cues to suggest that Josh is homicidally insane. Like poststructuralist readings that see the Blair Witch phenomenon as a collection of signifiers bopping around in a textual funhouse (Keller 2004), Heller-Nicholas’s ideological interpretation does little to explain the imaginative and emotional power of the film. An adequate explanation of that power gets into focus the psychological dispositions targeted by the marketing campaign and by the film itself.
The success of BWP is not exclusively a function of an efficient transmedia marketing effort, nor of postmodern intertextual mind-games or misogynist spectacle, but crucially depends on the film’s (and the auxiliary media products’) ability to target evolved psychological mechanisms. The very premise of the film—individuals becoming lost in an unknown, hostile environment, hunted by some malignant, apparently supernatural agent—is highly salient because it engages powerful defense mechanisms in human nature. BWP’s premise resembles the central scenario in hunter-gatherer stories about the dangers of wandering into the wilderness and the risk of getting lost, of starving to death, of being attacked by terrible antagonists. Such stories have been told through the ages to children in forager communities to discourage them from wandering off by emphasizing and exaggerating the attendant dangers (Scalise Sugiyama and Scalise Sugiyama 2011). The scenario of wandering off, getting lost, and perishing in the wild has been a real prospect for our ancestors for millions of years, and it is compellingly evoked in BWP. This film offered a depiction of three hip, ordinary-looking, vulnerable characters’ eminently plausible reactions to a primal danger scenario. They were savvy youths who knew how to navigate socially—an early scene shows them relaxing and bantering in a motel room in Burkittsville (see Figure 12.1)—and handle high-tech audiovisual equipment, but who found themselves utterly powerless against the hostile forces of nature, including the supernatural agent who appeared to be stalking them; forces that they grievously underestimated. They ventured insufficiently prepared into a dangerous place, messed with a vast and evil force, and paid a terrible price for these transgressions. Moreover, the film’s lure of authenticity, its implicit promise to show us authentic recordings of what actually happened, made the narrative premise even more salient. To most audiences, BWP promised more than make-believe. It promised access to real horror—to something that had actually happened, or might have happened, or at least looked the way it would have looked if it had actually happened (Heller-Nicholas 2014, 7).
Figure 12.1: Sánchez and Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) depicts fun-loving, hip American youths venturing into deep and dark woods on an ill-fated expedition to document the Blair Witch legend. They are good at handling high-tech audiovisual equipment and at having fun, but they grievously underestimate the hostile forces that lurk in the Black Hills.
The hype and expectation generated by the prelaunch campaign fed into an evolved disposition for morbid curiosity. Like so many other animals, we are captivated by the spectacle of violent death. Black-headed gulls, for instance, flee when a conspecific is attacked but hover in the distance to observe, to “learn what kind of adversary they are facing” (Kruuk 2002, 169). The adaptive rationale behind morbid curiosity is tha
t paying attention to attacks on conspecifics and to the causes of violent death helps us avoid a similar fate (von Gersdorff 2016). The BWP marketing campaign lured audiences with intimations of strange and violent deaths at the hands of a malevolent, possibly supernatural agent. The website and the fake documentary provided pieces of the morbid puzzle; pieces of information, lore, and evidence that, if put together correctly, would lead audiences closer to the truth about the mysterious disappearance of the filmmakers. The film itself was the biggest puzzle piece, the main attraction, and the only part of the Blair Witch media complex that still draws a substantial audience. The ontological ambiguity that attached to the legend probably compelled many moviegoers to read up on the legend and buy movie tickets to get closer to the truth. The claims of authenticity and the multimedia campaign prompted audiences to take the film seriously and by doing so absolve in themselves the kind of error that led to the death of the protagonists. The film’s “supplementary materials,” with their information on the witch legend and pieces of forensic “evidence,” were “enthusiastically embraced” not because they allowed audiences to retain their misogynistic understanding of the film as a supernatural story about an evil witch (Heller-Nicholas 2014, 111), but because they were felt to satisfy audiences’ morbid curiosity and efficiently tapped into an evolved vigilance mechanism.
BWP is produced to look authentic in order to heighten audience response. Real horror is more terrifying than artificial horror, and people who look genuinely frightened are more moving than people who are clearly just acting scared. The footage we see in the film is the footage recorded by the three actors. It is amateurish and shaky, frequently blurry—the raw footage of what actually happened, in other words. The audience is thus encouraged to view the film as a “neutral recording of real horror” (Roscoe 2000). The footage is shot on a consumer-grade video camera (a Hi8 camcorder) and a black-and-white 16mm film camera. The video camera is primarily handled by Donahue and used for behind-the-scenes footage, for documenting the documentary shoot, and the film camera is operated by Josh and used for shooting the footage that is to go into their documentary film. The actors themselves were cast on their ability to improvise convincingly (Turner 2015, 21–22), and they were directed to behave and react plausibly. Sánchez and Myrick gave the actors very little information about the movie. They received a crash course in the handling of audiovisual equipment and were sent to Burkittsville to interview locals. Some of the interviewees were actors themselves, others were real locals. Donahue, Leonard, and Williams were then given GPS units and sent into the woods, on their own, where they spent seven days, each day following GPS directions and finding fresh batteries for their cameras and sound recording gear as well as ever-smaller food rations and brief instructions on the day’s route (Turner 2015, 22–29). The actors became increasingly hungry, cold, sleep-deprived, and genuinely anxious. They were harassed in the middle of the night by unseen crewmembers ruffling their tent and playing audio recordings of eerie sounds, including children’s laughter. The many reaction shots of terrified, exhausted, panicking individuals (see Figure 12.2)—individuals who are genuinely frightened and under pressure—elicit empathetic mirroring in the audience and, together with the atmosphere of dread produced by the suggestion of malevolent supernatural agency, explain how BWP became “an extraordinarily effective horror film,” in Roger Ebert’s words (1999).
Figure 12.2: The Blair Witch Project (Sánchez and Myrick 1999) features many reaction shots of genuinely fearful characters. The actors were put under tremendous pressure and kept in the dark for much of the filming in a successful attempt to elicit genuine responses from them, thus more powerfully cueing viewers to feel strongly about the events depicted in the film.
BWP infuses its depiction of youths lost in bleak and desolate woods with an insidious intimation of supernatural agency, but that agency is kept off-screen and unexplained. We never see any monster or any real violence. The closest we get to gore is a shot of bloody teeth. BWP effectively establishes and maintains an atmosphere of dread (Freeland 2004). Dread, in Cynthia Freeland’s definition, is “an ongoing fear of imminent threat from something deeply unnerving and evil, yet not well-defined or well-understood” (2004, 191). That evil, poorly understood force is the witch (or whatever is haunting the characters) who is never directly witnessed—we only see the effects of her (or its) actions. Shortly after the filmmakers realize they are lost in the woods, they are woken up in the middle of the night by booming and crashing noises. These auditory cues are ambiguous, but they suggest agency. Their cause is withheld, but it is clear that someone or something is outside the trio’s tent. They fail to capture the source of the noise on video. The next night something similar happens. The following morning they find three little piles of stones outside their tent, supposedly makeshift grave markers signifying their impending death and intended as a warning from the agent terrorizing them. The markers are especially unsettling because they suggest that whatever agency is about the woods, it’s not a passive force. It targets them specifically. Soon thereafter, they come across a number of human-like stick figures suspended from trees (Figure 12.3). As Josh says, “That’s fucking creepy.” It’s fucking creepy because the figures are clear signs of some obscure agency and because they connote death by hanging or crucifixion. The following night they are woken up as something rustles their tent and they hear children’s laughter. Heather runs into the night with her camera. There are no children to be seen. The attached light source provides a circle of illumination chaotically jumping around as she is running with the camera. “Oh God, what the fuck is that,” she screams, out of breath. We don’t see what she sees. Josh then disappears. Heather and Mike hear screams of pain in the distance and eventually find bloody teeth wrapped in fabric from Josh’s shirt outside their tent. We now know that they are not alone, and that whatever is hunting them has malicious intent and the capacity to inflict real damage. But because that agent is hidden from view, it is ambiguous and unknown, hence unpredictable. An unpredictable enemy is much more dangerous and thus terrifying than a well-known one, and this principle is exploited by BWP in its strategy of keeping the dread-evoking agent offscreen.
Figure 12.3: Sánchez and Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) elicits dread through its insidious suggestion of a supernatural, malicious agent hiding in the woods. That agent targets the three protagonists and leaves behind ominous objects such as the stick figures dangling from the trees. The meaning of these figures is obscure, but they seem to suggest death by crucifixion or hanging.
The three protagonists of BWP are depicted as lively, good-natured individuals. While there is in the film no sense that they deserve what they get, they do ignore warnings and foolhardily venture into a natural environment that they severely underestimate. The first scene shows Heather packing a book called How to Stay Alive in the Woods, but that does not help her much. They laugh at the old Burkittsville lady who tells them about the ghostly and dangerous Blair Witch, calling her crazy. They meet a pair of elderly fishermen in the woods who attempt to warn them. “Damn fool kids never learn,” says one fisherman. As Ebert observes, the filmmakers view the legends and horror stories about the Blair Witch “as good footage, not a warning” (1999). Early in the film, they come across seven little cairns, one of which is accidentally upset by Josh. Heather draws breath sharply. “You didn’t just knock that over, tell me you didn’t just knock that over.” The film implies a causal relationship between this act of carelessness and Josh’s fate. We have heard about Rustin Parr’s murder of seven children and assume these cairns to be grave markers. Josh’s carelessness is an inadvertent act of moral transgression, and the film subtly suggests that he is punished gruesomely for it. The greater transgression is the youths’ lack of respect not just for the witch, but for the woods themselves. As Heather says when they realize the map has gone missing: “it’s very hard to get lost in America these days, and it’s even harder to stay lost.” She
is massively, fatally wrong.
The Black Hills woods are depicted as a bad place, colorless and dying, “a hiding place for dread secrets” (Higley 2004, 88, Ebert 1999)—a place invested with a suggestion of physical and moral corruption. The moral corruption of the area emerges from its unsavory history: Parr’s murders, the witch’s murders, and the crimes perpetrated against the witch herself. The psychological tendency to invest a place with moral value grows out of an adaptive tendency to associate fitness-relevant (and thus emotionally significant) events with their physical setting. The tendency is adaptive because attributing negative value to a place where something bad has happened would make people avoid dangerous places. If something bad has happened once, there is a certain likelihood of it happening again in the same place—especially in ancestral environments where natural dangers could reliably be associated with place, such as a particular area haunted by predators, treacherous features of topography, or a particular food or water source being contaminated. The same psychological phenomenon is at work when people shun houses in which murders or other particularly violent or grisly forms of crime have taken place. The immorality—the wrongness—of the crime is felt to have contaminated the setting (as with the Overlook Hotel). When the young filmmakers laugh off the Blair Witch legends, they disregard the real danger of the woods and pay the price.
Why Horror Seduces Page 18
