| All the shit I've ever wanted to say about movies... | |||
The Blair Witch Project
 I'm only nine years late... I finally got around to seeing The Blair Witch Project a few days ago, and after hearing the hype of how great it was for a couple months, then the backlash of how terrible it was for about nine years, I am here to tell you that this is a great horror movie. Never have I been more reminded of a ghost story than when watching The Blair Witch Project. Now when I say ghost story, I don’t mean because the main villain is a ghost. I’m talking about an actual ghost story. Sitting around the camp fire while one guy tells you a tale about ghouls and goblins. The thing that both an old fashioned ghost story and this film have in common is that they both rely on the imagination of the audience. Not the film maker or the story teller, but the audience. You could have the greatest story teller in the world in front of you, but if you don’t picture the images he weaves with his words, and if you don’t place yourself inside the world he is creating, it will mean nothing to you. A new born baby isn’t going to have nightmares over a ghost story, because a new born baby doesn’t understand what it is supposed to be afraid of. Crash a pair of symbols by its ear and it will jump and cry, because it naturally knows that loud noises are bad. But a baby doesn’t understand a guy staring at you from a dark corner could be something sinister, or a strange noise in the attic is something creepy. It has to be taught to be afraid of those things. That’s what a good ghost story does. It relies on things we have been taught are scary, and it relies on our own imagination to make them scarier. And that is exactly what The Blair Witch Project does. It teaches us in the beginning that there is supposed to be a ghost in the woods, and then relies on our own imagination to come up with what that ghost looks like and what that ghost is doing. The tiny braches we hear breaking in the night could be a squirrel, but our imagination tells us it’s an evil spirit, our imagination tells us it is coming to kill us. That is why I call The Blair Witch Project a great film. It does something few horror films ever ask of its audience (they hardly ever ask it of us today). It asks us to think. No, that isn’t really fair. It doesn’t ask us to think, it demands it. It requires it. If you turn your brain off you will get nothing from this film. But if you let your imagination run wild, you will be terrified and disturbed. Let your imagination take control, and you will forget the about the hundreds of parodies you have seen of Heather speaking to the camera, and you will see a girl literally scared to death, pouring her heart into a camera lens because she knows that is all she has left. And when you come to that house at the end, the old callings of “Stupid teenager, don’t go in the house” will be forgotten. Your imagination will have done so much that you won’t care how stupid it is to go in the house, you will want her to go inside because you will need your curiosity answered. You will need to know if that house could hold anything as terrible as what you imagined. 2008-03-10 17:35:04 GMT
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