a real chilled walk in the woods
so i was going to write you a tinyletter about the conjuring 3: the devil made me do it, but then this morning i awoke as usual in the crawl space of the haunted manor in which i have dwelt lo these many decades and i peered into the fractured mirror that reflects only a twisted portion of my base and haunted visage and i thought to myself julia, why be predictable, so instead here's a tinyletter about the blair witch project.
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like everyone else in history, i first saw the blair witch project at a sleepover, in which the only other options on offer were the craft and rat race, and i remember being underwhelmed in the way that, as a thirteen year old, it was more or less impossible not to be about a movie in which nothing really happens. it was the mythology of the whole thing, of course, that really scuppered it. as a fixed point in the cultural landscape - and particularly in the early 2000s - blair witch has always been frankly impossible to approach as distinct from the endless discourse that surrounds it, to the extent that it barely seems to exist as a movie at all, so much as a moment. it's basically impossible to come at blair witch clean, without any knowledge of the watershed moment it represents in horror cinema or the longtime distinction it holds as one of the scariest movies of all time, and watching it fresh can be weirdly destabilising for this reason.
julia armfield: blair witch is the sally rooney of independent 90s horror cinema
[chorus of boos from surrounding villages]
of course, the other reason i didn't particularly go for blair witch at the age of thirteen is that thirteen year olds are idiots whose pleasure receptors are only set up to understand the movie signs as being in any way frightening, but more on that at some future time. the point is, as a teenager i did not appreciate this movie both because i was a dumb jerk mere months away from getting her mind blown by the secret history and because it is basically impossible to fairly evaluate a movie that more or less every critic reviewed like "I SHAT MYSELF - ROGER EBERT". i do, however, appreciate this movie now.
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in brief, then - blair witch is a movie about a bunch of assholes who go into the woods to film a poorly storyboarded documentary about an urban legend and in the process, get hopelessly lost and possibly haunted by an unseen malevolent force. over the course of the first thirty minutes, almost nothing happens whatsoever, beyond the three main characters each exposing themselves as a deeply unpleasant person, mostly by way of talking in insufferable film school truisms and being rude to the locals they encounter who just seem keen to warn them off camping on a flood plain with insufficient food. i wouldn't call it the focal point of this movie's charm in any way, but boy i would like to believe that a bunch of student filmmakers would get exactly what is coming to them after patronising a bunch of blue collar locals for being like be careful getting lost in the woods, please, and the blair witch project allows me that dream.
the abject slowness of the first half, of course, is key to the movie's creeping appeal. by the time anything even minorly unsettling happens, you're already keyed up to the point of anxiety by the sheer grindingness of the situation, and as strange occurrences rack up and the campers get more lost and more desperate, you quickly start to realise how long you have actually been experiencing dread. it's america, the main girl says at one point, it's not that easy to get lost any more, and your girlfriend turns to you like actually i read a book about this and all you have to do is wander off the trail at a national park and it's over, and you're like fuck i have been borderline sweating with tension for forty five minutes.
the fact that the denouement, when it happens, takes place almost entirely offscreen is obviously key to what some people find disappointing, but really the central horror of blair witch is barely about the ending at all. good horror movies are all about dread, about realising a choice can't be retracted, about confronting a bad reality too late, and this is what really makes blair witch so effective. the scene, late in the movie, when the campers realise they have been walking in circles all day is in my opinion far more effective than any of the folk horror flourishes or gestures towards the supernatural that most people will immediately think of in relation to blair witch. the dumb dread of that moment is the best point in the movie and i think most clearly illustrates the eerie core of blair witch's philosphy: you're stuck here forever because of a choice you've made and there's nothing whatsoever you can do.
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it's weird, in a way, to approach blair witch from the perspective of a three stars fine horror blog, when blair witch is obviously one of the cornerstone movies of horror cinema, but i would argue that it is also the alien queen that spawned an entire generation of three stars fine horror movies and for that reason deserves our attention. the bastard children of blair witch can be tracked throughout the found footage genre, of course - scratch paranormal activity and you get cloverfield and you get rec and you get trollhunter and you get unfriended and you get host and so on forever unto the heat death of the universe - but it also gave us digital internet marketing and low budgetry and restored to relevance a deadly straight folk horror aesthetic that had been floundering in the wake of self-aware 90s horror pushed forward by scream.
the fact that the movie was nominated for several razzies on release, including for worst picture and worst actress, is in my opinion symptomatic of several things, most centrally that the razzies are a garbage dump institution run by nerds, but also that people at that time were not at all comfortable with the idea of something so cheap making so much money. in addition, i think there's a weird point to be made from the fact that horror movie audiences, both then and to this day, really do not fuckin' like it when characters react the way all commonsense actually dictates they ought to do in frightening situations. the snot-heavy terror of heather donoghue's character in blair witch is endlessly parodied, but i think it's of a piece with how violently people reacted against shelley duvall's inelegant run in the shining. when a friend of ours went to see hereditary in the cinema, several people laughed when alex wolff's character started to sob like a child, which i think shows that this weird urge is still alive and well. sure, drew barrymore does some deeply unbeautiful crying in scream, but she also gets murdered directly afterwards and replaced by a main character who reacts to everything as though she's examining wallpaper samples, so it doesn't really count. that is not a diss, by the way, because nothing but love and respect for lesbian icon neve campbell, but you take my point.
there's something to this whole theory and i'll tell you as soon as it occurs to me, but i have to go away now and prepare to write a tinyletter on the conjuring 3: the devil made me do it, since my craven urges cannot be contained.