The Blair Witch Project (1999)

THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART

by Erica U.

My older sister went to see The Blair Witch Project before I did; she was always the cool early adopter.  She was the first to play me Morrissey and Cure tapes, which she borrowed from the emo boy who stocked shelves at our small town grocery store. You could watch the overnight workers shuffling like ants in a glass farm, restoring inventory behind all those locked and fogged glass doors. We played the tapes for a few months, driving around in her fourth hand Ford Escort with the windows down and her black hair dancing madly until we lost them and even then, he never got mad at her at all.   

The night I followed her orders to go see The Blair Witch Project, it had only been out a few weeks and the hype had not yet become a cacophony. It was still just this strange little $60,000 budget movie that was scarier than it should have been. 

I drove home from the theater on one of those nights where a fat moon tucks behind clouds, illuminating all the heavenly shapes and drifts like a crystal ball. Unsettled in the way only the smartest horror movies leave you - both hands on the wheel and my eyes on every wooded expanse, up to and including the neighbor’s row of midget pines, slowly growing into a snow break.  The house was dark when I parked. No porch light left lit, no overhead light welcoming in the entry way. After I ran up the walk, unlocked the door and flipped on the switch inside the frame, it took my eyes a moment to adjust.  

As they did little clusters began to come in to focus.  

Piles of rocks around the foyer. 

Twigs tied together like figurines, like hanged men, dangling in the shadows of the dusty old chandelier. 

Skittish already, I lost it. Rocketed backwards into the wall and cried out in something embarrassingly close to tears.  All these sinister talismans, so creepy in the movie, were unthinkable in your own house. Turns out, there is little scarier than the implications of celluloid come to life.  

I trampled down to her bedroom, rammed open the door and pounced on her sleeping form, still screaming. Despite waking to my fists pounding her body like grief, her only response was laughter.  

She was always laughing. 

What a terrific joke. 

I didn’t camp for two years after the night I saw The Blair Witch Project. I didn’t feel comfortable in the woods for even longer and still, the night I rewatched it in my grown up home, no longer suspecting it is real, the bare tree limbs outside my third story bedroom are tormenting. Still and again I watch them as though they have been waiting all this time to turn on me. As though they are sleeper agents and my safe wooden floors will be riddled with stone rituals again come morning.   

The Blair Witch Project opens with a black screen and a simple explanation: 

“In October 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkitsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”  

We walk into the movie and meet Heather, the alpha female of the group.  She has hatched a plan to film an investigation of the legends surrounding Burkitsville – tales of an unusually high number of children killed in the 1940’s, girls disappeared for days and turned back up incoherent and men lashed together, gutted, and left to decompose on river rocks.  Heather’s friend and fellow film student Josh is her second in command and she boasts to him of ample preparations – field guides and maps and “How to Survive In the Woods” - as they pack up.  Mikey, an acquaintance of Josh’s, joins the group next and the trio heads out to interview townspeople on Blair Witch lore. 

Armed with a foundation of foreboding hand-me-down stories caught on tape and overly dramatic shots of child graves, the filmmakers drive to the edge of a remote woods and head in. The first day’s destinations are mildly creepy but no one is taking it too seriously and the only tension surrounds squabbling over maps and trails and Mikey forever lagging 20 feet behind like an insolent child. 

Over the next few days, however, the trip begins to dissolve. Mikey challenges Heather’s waning directional aptitude.  Josh works to keep the peace. Heather insists she has always known where they are going and yet soon and forever, the trail is gone. The troops’ bickering rises into a frantic boil after they find themselves lost night after night – long after they are meant to return to work and school. After food and cigarettes run out, the map is lost and the rain comes. 

I don’t know how the movie holds up to a fresh audience now, ten sophisticated years later. Back then, it was effective. The dialogue was so improvised and the characters were so awkward and pettily human that it worked. You just bought it. Everything felt real. 

After its unaffected style, the film is most masterful in its understanding that if we are left without adequate information, we will fill in the gaps with the worst possible thing we can imagine.  

Take the movie’s portrayal of nights. 

The noises begin subtly.  One 3 am, in the surrounding distances of the tent, it is the sound of rocks hitting rocks in the echo of gravel pits. The clap of stones.  The next, it is the muted calls of children.  

Each time, the group clamors out of the tent with cameras and lights and sound equipment, frantically aimed in a questioning 360. They capture nothing but trees and noises undeterred by their presence.

The daylight brings its own unwelcome omens. Three balanced piles of stones surround the tent one morning. Built up like cairns, which troubles me. Is this ritualistic or logistical – marking someone’s way back to them?  

There is no justifiable reason we should be afraid of clapping in the night. And it shouldn’t be dread inducing when the group wanders in to a pause in the forest, tangled with dozens of wooden hangings.  Sticks bound together like clumsy pentagrams, like men splayed out, spinning and dangling from the tree branches above.  But captured on Heather’s 16 mm black and white memory, even in broad daylight, the gallery is dreadful. As menacing as it is indecipherable. 

That is the brilliance of this movie – its ability to drill into and then magnify our propensity to be scared even by the gentle suggestion of something we don’t understand. 

The night Josh disappears is the worst. They wake frantically to the sound of collective but disembodied murmuring and then the tent is shaking. We see two figures, running from the tent in the dark. 

It’s hard to say afterward if Josh was lost in the chaotic escape from the tent, or if he was gone before they ever woke. Your mind runs back to examine those 15 seconds of footage and you decide his space in the three-person shelter was already empty when the camera clicked on. But then tell me why. Was he snatched by something? Was he lured out?  

Not understanding the siege, Mikey and Heather shake and huddle in the blackness until dawn. The frame is dark and we switch to audio alone. To just the sound of their breathing clotted with fear, and the occasional swoop of their flashlight still searching for Josh.  

There is no tangible incarnation of our antagonist - no ghostly presence, no serial killer. And it still is hard to imagine anything more terrifying than crouching, unprotected, in these hostile woods. Not alone. 

They hear Josh call like a siren in the nights after that, echoing from all directions. They crawl out of the tent and scream for him. You scan the woods with them and you begin to see things. Is that someone hunched down? Is that a body? Is that a face? And for years afterward, these invented visions are what you will see amongst any collection of trees. 

Heather films herself in one of the unsleepable nights, crying and apologizing to their mothers for this uncareful trip and the loss of Josh. I always liked how unattractive this scene is. Her stocking hat over horse eyes, bulgy with fear and grief. Nose running and quivering with tears that aren’t dainty or pretty. I like that she is not a sexualized victim in the waiting. And when she tells us “I’m scared to close my eyes. I’m scared to open them,” you don’t even begrudge her the line.  

There was always a moment at grade school slumber parties, in which some blonde pre-teen with a premature mischief in her smirk would suggest a game of Bloody Mary. 

There are only so many ways to dodge this sort of experience.  Be the last one into the bathroom – the one who, oh damn – no that’s ok, I’ll be fine out here, doesn’t quite fit in.  Or slink up and around the carpeted staircase of her split level, quietly hiding in the entry way until the game spends itself in an ejaculation of screams and uneasy giggles. Of promises that “I Saw Her! I really saw her!”  

And so, from time to time, you would have to man up and do your time in someone’s wallpapered guest bathroom, pressed flush to the vanity by the surge of a half dozen wiggling girls behind you.  

There is something terrible in the almost reflections of a dark mirror.  In watching for the possible threat of something you haven’t decided to believe in. In your own eyes flickering and straining for proof. I never wanted any part of it. 

When I saw The Blair Witch Project, in those early days, it was still presented as a possibly-real documentary with a shrug and an eyebrow raise. With a very Bloody-Mary-reminiscent dare to believe. And if we didn’t buy it completely, we were secretly confused enough by the rumors and legends to have to consider it potentially true through all 82 minutes of the movie.  

At 11 or 22 or 33, this was always the basis of my fear: If you can’t get a grasp on a thing’s chemistry – on whether it exists or what it might do to you - how do you know how much to be afraid of it? 

On the last night caught on film, Josh is not crying anymore. He is calling to his friends, plain and calm. For some unfathomable reason, they venture out in to the dark again and follow the noise to a house with windows blown out and piles of wooden planks on its porch, macro versions of their stick bundles. Scrambling through the wrecked house, they can hear Josh better. Up the stairway, there are small handprints and the camera doesn’t stop and over-accentuate them like it would if this was a blockbuster Hollywood horror flick. Our lens pans past them just long enough for you to understand that these handprints are small and probably made of blood, though you hope – and the movie lets you hope – it is just mud.

The last minutes of the film are ones I can’t get out of my head – like the skull stomping scene in American History X that I would give almost anything to unsee. It takes a long time to stop thinking about Mikey facing the corner of that unholy basement, his head hung and waiting in the silence. 

Rewatching this movie, I decide all our fears are based on two base phobias: the fear of the unknown and the fear of losing control. 

I avoided the woods so long after I saw this because I didn’t know if I needed to or not.  

Because I didn’t know if every hunch I had overcome in order to love the darkness of the forest was suddenly validated. More hefty and logical than I had given them credit for. 

At this age, I am still afraid of the laundry room in my building, and the storage room and the industrial hallway between them if it is late enough and dark enough. I feel uneasy waiting for the water to fill coin operated machines in that low ceilinged echoing room and my pulse skitters as I run back up the three stories to my apartment, which I have left unlocked of course. I am afraid, a bit, of the man who lives next door and cries out sometimes at night, whose handshake is too light and words too slow. Of the trees watching me through old storm windows and the way the yellow lights hover over the park across the street, waiting for something. 

I am afraid of everything that probably won’t hurt me. And not at all of the city or all the things with likely more treacherous constitutions, because I understand the risk. It is the uncertain, the ephemeral threat that undoes me. You could spend your whole life scanning the horizon with your camera and not capture anything on tape.  But that doesn’t mean nothing is out there. 

 

Erica U. is still afraid of foreboding woods and basement corners. She specializes in phone photography and TL;DR writing here.