When One of Your Favorite Writers Whines About Plot Holes

“The Blair Witch Project”, a fictional found footage horror movie in which three teenagers disappear in the Maryland woods when attempting to film a documentary about the supposed eponymous specter, is 20 years old, meaning it has been dutifully covered in the ongoing cavalcade of 1999 Film retrospectives, usually in conjunction with its influence and marketing. (This blog wrote about it 3 years ago.) How The Blair Witch Project changed horror for ever, proclaimed The Guardian. How a Tiny Indie Film Became a Horror Sensation—and Invented Modern Movie Marketing, declared The Ringer. If these arguments are valid, they nevertheless tend to distill “The Blair Witch Project” down to a product rather than a film, disregarding, unintentionally or otherwise, its harrowing, minimalist aesthetic. And if a film is seen first and foremost as a product then arguments for or against are frequently lobbed through that commodified context.

Sigh. This blog loves Charlie Pierce. We are proud, annual fee paying subscribers to Mr. Pierce’s Esquire Politics blog. We tried to subscribe quick enough to get a free Esquire Politics tote bag but, alas, missed the cut. We would, however, have proudly carried that tote bag to the grocery store. Nevertheless, writing off “The Blair Witch Project” as a “scam” makes the movie sound like a piece of manufacturing rather than a work of art for the film de cinema. Lamenting, meanwhile, that the characters do not adhere to the tried & true boy scout tactic of following the river out of the woods is cut from the Reddit school of film analysis, which isn’t really analysis at all, just picking out plot holes, not engaging with the movie but exerting a sense of superiority, the ethos of the Neil DeGrasse Tyson Film Critic Academy.

This is all the more sorrowful because Mr. Pierce is more than capable of acute movie insight. He opened a 2012 piece for Grantland (rip) about Notre Dame football by citing a passage of the 1940 film “Knute Rockne, All American” in which the youthful version of the future Fighting Irish gridiron coach admonishes his father for speaking Norwegian since they were now full-fledged Americans. “Notre Dame,” wrote Pierce, “stood for the education they’d made central to their purchase on a place in their new country.” If the invaluable sports historian Murray Sperber has written about “Knute Rockne, All American” shaping how we view college athletics, akin to How a Tiny Indie Film Became a Horror Sensation—and Invented Modern Movie Marketing, Pierce read the movie’s inherent drama as a reflection of Irish immigrant values.  It’s an astute analysis of the actual film framed through a socio-political context, with which this blog, it probably goes without saying, has no issue.

Still, Pierce’s cogent argument is informed by his satisfaction with seeing the immigrant experience properly portrayed, suggesting a summation of a reality he knows well. And while I might be extrapolating, perhaps that lack of reality is what informs his opinion that the original “Blair Witch” was a scam. After all, Pierce is a former forest ranger. But merely reading the characters’ failure to follow the river out as a pesky plot hole fails to take the moment in the film’s full context. If these characters are pointedly portrayed as dismissive of the Blair Witch legend, indifferent to the area’s history and ignorant of their environs then all these elements rise up to disorient and eventually claim them; this cuts deeper than geography; this is a dark night of the American soul.

It’s Pierce who summarized modern college basketball best when he wrote: “There are, of course, no poets left in basketball. There are only salesmen, some better and more entertaining than others.” That still cuts straight to my heart. And I fear when it comes to “The Blair Witch Project”, like so many focused on its marketing rather than its aesthetics, that Mr. Pierce is only choosing to see the sale, not the poetry.

Some Drivel On...The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch of “The Blair Witch Project” is a spook that got inside the head of a guy who said the witch commanded him to take six kids to his house in the woods and murder them. This is how a few locals in and around Burkitsville, Maryland, who are interviewed by three kids, Heather, Mike and Josh who are making a documentary about The Blair Witch, explain it anyway. The story they tell is inherently terrifying, but it’s been blunted with the passage of time. The murders happened half a century ago. The witch hailed from the 18th century. This means they have passed into folklore. They are half-remembered, told cheekily. A couple fishermen Heather interviews briefly debate the Witch’s merit, wondering if it even happened. After all, it becomes hard for people to take something like it seriously because time wipes away so much.

Time was the ally and is the enemy of “The Blair Witch Project.” It was released in 1999, a pre Y2K-world where information was not quite so over-accessible. Its makers, Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, used this to their advantage. They filmed it in a documentary style, pitched it as authentic, making the jumping off point that the entire movie was found footage, tapes discovered in the woods of these three kids who went off to film a documentary about the Blair Witch and disappeared. Sanchez and Myrick backed this up by creating a web site and paying the actors to keep on the down low in the run up to its release, as if they weren’t really out there, as if they had disappeared. Wesley Morris is among the critics who have copped to not really knowing the truth when they went to see it, a critic’s blessing. By the time I got around to it, at the point of its official release, the cat was out of the bag. Then more time passed, of course, and found footage films became the norm for horror and shaky cam became de rigueur and the Internet became so prevalent that the “Blair Witch’s” pre-movie secrets now seem quaint. In all that there seemed to emerge the idea that “Blair Witch” only got by on its gimmick, which never felt right to me.

It is, to this very day, the scariest movie I have ever seen. And when I say it was the scariest movie I have ever seen, I want to make clear that I already knew it wasn’t true and that it not being true did not matter one single iota. Lord help me, it felt as real as anything I’d ever seen. I had nightmares. And I had nightmares, I think, because “The Blair Witch Project” isn’t so much shock and awe as an insidious burrowing into your brain. It’s not so much about scares as it is about slowly settling fear, the way you dismiss it initially, this idea of a Blair Witch, which is similar to the way in which Heather, Mike and Josh dismiss it, and the way locals who have heard the story so many times dismiss it, because you know it can’t really be real. And even when weird things start happening, it’s easy to brush aside, until you can’t brush them aside any longer, at which point fear has overtaken you without you even realizing it. What you do or don’t believe at that point is immaterial; “it’s” got you. In that way, the pre-movie ad campaign, stoking rumors of “Is this real?” underscored that very idea.

As with so many things, the passage of time has blunted the initial phenomenon of “Blair Witch.” Now, with the release of a third sequel, which did its best to ape the original’s obfuscated ad campaign by acting as a different movie until it premiered, at which point it revealed its real title, so many remembrance pieces have cropped up, measuring “Blair Witch’s” impact, talking about its influence, dissecting its marketing. Its inherent nature as a horror movie almost seems beside the point. Its scare tactics of sticks tied together and stick figures hanging from trees are laughed off. Yet the people laughing them off then start to sound like chest-puffers who don’t think much of haunted houses. They start to sound like the one fisherman in “The Blair Witch Project” who doesn’t think much of the Blair Witch legend. And you realize that’s where we are, seventeen years later, the original sensation that was this movie having transitioned into something approaching folklore, where those of us who lived it gather those who did not around the campire and do our best explain that yes, this cheap-looking little movie really did terrify us. “The Blair Witch Project” is no pre-millennium marketing myth, not to us; to us, it’s still real.