Directed by Ed Sanchez and Dan Myrick
Starring Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard and Michael Williams
I'll admit it - the new trailer got me. When I saw that Adam Wingard was going to be directing a movie called The Woods, I was confused...yet interested. So imagine my shock when the curtain gets pulled back from this film and we all learn out that it's actually a new Blair Witch movie. All three of you who follow this series of masturbatory reviews know that my town of 13,000 people is currently bereft of a movie theater, so thus, making me drive 40 minutes to the nearest multiplex means I'm way more than just confused...yet interested. Nonetheless, I was there for Blair Witch 3, ready to be riveted just like I was all those years ago when this flick hit me in the face in a movie theater.
Spoiler alert: It sucked. But maybe that will be a tale for another day.
Confession time. I hadn't watched the O.G. 1999 Blair Witch Project in something like 15 years, because it's actually one of the five or six movies that I won't watch by myself, at night. I was far from the only one back then. I still remember being directed to the web site for this movie by a friend in late '98, reading through that timeline and looking back at the "Missing" posters crafted for the three lead actors. This flick had buzz, and it seemed to be everywhere in the early days of the internet. Then came the first TV ads a few months later. And then came that ungodly "Curse of the Blair Witch" documentary that aired on the Sci-Fi channel. I don't think that anything had ever frightened me as profoundly in my life as that stupid thing did back when it aired. I shit you not, I was up almost all night sweating bullets. Of course, we all know now that all of this stuff was simply a brilliantly executed marketing tactic for this cheaply shot but chillingly effective film made by people who wanted to actually, you know, make movies scary again. All these years later, I can report after another viewing that I still think they succeeded with flying colors.
This review is going to be a little different. Don't expect my usual bit of waxing where I look at characters, three-act structure or gore FX. This is going to be a blow-by-blow of how this whole movie came to be.
The Blair Witch Project was the creation of Haxan Films, in particular a couple of film students named Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez who noticed (correctly, IMO) that documentaries about serial killers and paranormal phenomena were actually way scarier than horror movies were in the '90s. With no money and no investors on their side in the day and age when Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay were already on their way to killing popcorn cinema for good, they hatched on an idea that would combine that belief with storytelling - a faux documentary in the vein of The Legend of Boggy Creek, a.k.a. the movie where Charles B. Pierce went stumbling around the Arkansas sticks looking for Bigfoot. Somehow, that film worked. Surely, one about a friggin' murderous witch could. Time to craft a background.
Now, anybody can go on Wikipedia and learn what they did. The phony history of the Blair Witch was written, "documentary" footage was filmed involving some of the good people in Burkittsville, Maryland, and a trio of unknown actors trained in improvisation were hired to head off into the woods and get hunted down by an unseen force. The Blair Witch Project was far from the first "found footage" film, but it DID invent the term, as the prologue contains the sentence "A year later, their footage was found" to describe what we see from the three student film-makers. We've had something like 9,781 found footage movies in the years since (although, weirdly, the massive wave didn't come until a decade later starting with Paranormal Activity). For my money, though, this is still the most effective of the lot by FAR, because everything they did to these people was, in effect, real.
The shoot started with a quick course given to the actors about how to use the film-making equipment, and then it was off to the very...um, wildernessy...wilderness of Maryland for what Myrick and Sanchez thought would amount to something like 20 minutes of their finished film. Shooting mostly in Seneca Creek State Park, the actors were given GPS tracking devices and were fed coordinates every day to hike to. Every day, each actor would be given a separate sheet with some very bare-bones instructions about how to act that day, along with directions to a milk crate containing food and supplies. Everything that they did in between was completely improvised, with the actors staying in character pretty much 24-7. Picturing the giant trailer that George Clooney undoubtedly retreats to every time he gets done looking down, looking up and squinting, it really does give you an appreciation for what these people went through.
The sense of suspense was heightened on the actors as each day ticked by. They were given less food and more detailed, angsty instructions about the in-fighting between the characters. By night, Sanchez and Myrick - along with partners in crime Gregg Hale, Kevin Foxe and Mike Monello - would do everything they could to get the actors to piss themselves on camera.
This approach is what gives this movie its edge; in a sense, it really was all REAL. There are things that take me right out of movies like Paranormal Activity, where we get the oh-so-convenient plot device of the demonologist guy who suddenly has to vanish for a conference just as the climax hits and that incredibly hokey ending of The Last Exorcism that turns the damn thing into a monumentally stupid movie. For my money, the only thing in this movie that feels staged is the fact that it occurs to nobody to follow the river instead of just picking a direction to walk every day. That decision is still a little iffy.
The film-makers crafted this story while looking at the dailies every night, and as this thing went on, they knew that there were about to be some big changes to their planned fake documentary featuring the story of the three kids who got lost in the woods. They realized that what was happening in Seneca Creek was enough for an entire narrative story, and the plan started to involve less and less of the fake documentary that didn't quite crank it up to 11. When shooting was finished and it was time to cut everything together, Myrick and Sanchez eventually decided to make the entire film the stuff that Donahue, Leonard and Williams shot, with the documentary getting recycled into the aforementioned "Curse of the Blair Witch" Sci-Fi special that terrified me to my very soul as a teen-ager who knew about this movie from its slick web site.
From there came the buzz. And from there came the sale to Artisan Entertainment. And from THERE came the marketing budget that dwarfed what this movie cost to make, and from there came the quarter of a billion dollar box office gross, contributed to by this guy. I'll never forget sitting in the theater watching this tick by with rabid anticipation, hating Donahue's character along with everybody else and feeling the sense of dread sweep over that entire darkened room. The movie closes with a slam-bang double-dose of classic scenes, as Donahue cuts that classic snot-covered speech that's been spoofed in a zillion crappier movies since and that chilling final shot. End communication (/Kodos).
When this movie was released, it got a boatload of critical praise to go along with its Scrooge McDuck-esque box office haul. But it polarized audiences; some, like myself, found the whole thing to be an ingenious concept pulled off to near perfection. Others found it lame, a movie where nothing happens and were disappointed that the witch never shows up on camera. To those people, I would point them to The Last Exorcism, 'cus that one has everything you're looking for and then some, believe me. Nevertheless, all these years later, I was able to get somebody else to watch this flick with me after it sat on my DVD shelf untouched for a decade-and-a-half. And it still holds up, just like it did in 1999 when this was one of just a few movies that has ever legitimately kept me up at night.
**** out of ****. The granddaddy of all found footage flicks still has the title. The kids out there are advised to give this one a watch, because it's a bigger mindf**k than any of the gazillion hidden-camera films that popped up post-2009.
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