Boxoffice-July.1999

Sneak Preview
Bewitched^ Bothered
and Bewildered
Fear Has No Face in
The Blair Witch Project"
How
scary is a hank of hair? When it's
ritualistically tied in a bundle of sticks
along with some blood and an unprofessionally
extracted tooth in a foreboding
implementation of sorcery, it's infinitely more
frightening than even the most graphic disembowelings
of such wildly popular horror thrillers
as "Scream" and their ilk.
Having eUcited spine-tingling, palpitating,
begoosebumped reactions from audiences at
Sundance and Cannes, the chillingly imaginative
"Blair Witch Project" is destined to become
a Halloween classic. A sort of "Real
World" meets the Necronomicon, "The Blair
Witch Project" is a largely improvised faux
documentary in which three filmmakers
(played by Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard
and Michael Williams) hike into Maryland's
Black Hills Forest to investigate the legend of
the eponymous mystical murderess. They are
never seen again, but their footage is found
buried under the foundation of a 100-year-old
cabin
a year after their disappearance. This
film is purportedly that footage.
'The horror genre is very successful [right
now, as are] verite TV shows like 'Cops' and
'America's Stupidest Criminals,'" points out
the vivacious (and very much alive) 24-yearold
Donahue, who plays the fihn's strongwilled
director. "And you have [the element of
those shows] combined with horror combined
with people's desire to look at accidents, and
that's 'The Blair Witch,' basically."
The fact that the characters share the same
names as the actors portraying them helps blur
the line between fact and fiction. "It's a little
creepy, quite frankly," Donahue admits.
"[Friends and acquaintances] who see the
trailer [proclaiming the protagonists' presumed
demises] are like, 'Nuh-uh!' And they
call my mom, and my mom's like, 'This is
awful! I can't believe this! You finally get a
good thing and you're dead! Why?!' I'm like,
'It's okay. Mom. It's a small price to pay.'"
Even sophisticated filmgoers have been
sucked into the illusion. "We were in Sundance,
doing question and answer periods after
each .screening, and still, people would come
up to us and say, "Oh my god, you're alive!,"
Donahue recalls. "So even when they see you,
because they're seeing you in such a different
context, it's still effective. Because it's not even
about us, really. And that's what
is cool about this movie. It's not
really about us and our experience.
The whole experience of
the filmmakers in the movie is
very non-specific, really. What
makes it so cool and what makes
it so scary is the fact that it's your
what scares
boogeyman, it's
you, that comes out in it. It's not
so much about the experience of
the people in the movie as what
it does to your head."
"A lot of people have their
own Blair Witches in their own
neighborhoods, and it's really
easy for them to make the jump
from ours to what they envision
it being," agrees Dan Myrick,
who co-scripts and co-directs with Eduardo
Sanchez. "We let people draw from their own
imagination and past experiences with their
own folklore."
"It's kind of like why Stephen King novels
are most of the time better than the films,
because he can describe something to you but
what you create in your mind is so much more
horrifying than anything that anybody can
come up with in the form of special effects,"
"A lot ofpeopl
their own Blair Witches in
their own neighborhoods.
VJe let people draw from
their own imagination and
past experiences with their
own folklore."
— Dan Myrick,
co-writerlco-director
adds Sanchez. "So the night scenes in our film
when you can't see anything, your mind just
kind of steps in and fills in what could be out
there, and it's all the more frightening."
Equally frightening is
the tale of how this
film actually came together. The actors had to
find their own way through the woods (with
the help of Global Positioning System satellite
technology, admittedly); the filmmakers kept
scaring the bejeezus out of them in the middle
by Christine James
EYES OF THE BEHOLDER: A terrified Heather Donahue turns
the camera on herself in "The Blair Witch Project.
of the night in order to generate authen
reactions of terror; and they had to subsist
less and less food in a De Niro-caliber exam[
of method acting. But most harrowing of i
at least for Donahue's mother, was the cast!
call itself. "I saw this ad that said, 'We're goi
to do a ftilly improvised feature in the woo
for eight days, '" says Donahue, who admits t
scenario did give her pause. "But it just got i
all the more interested in a way. It didn't j
my mother very interested. My mother w
like, 'What are you, nuts?!' But I thoug
'Well, this sounds completely crazy, and i
got killed doing this, people would be lil
"Oh, she was so stupid." But, you know, wl
if...?' And this is just the ultimate payoff" of tl
'what if,' because the 'what if* turned out to
very, very positive. It could have been just
absolute death trap, or it could have turned c
to be a really, really cool movie. And lucki
instead of a death trap, it turned out to be
really, really cool movie."
Who knows what would have happened h
she followed through on another audition a
vertised in the same reputed thespian tra
publication: "There was this one [audition
went to that was at some guy's apartme:
When I saw it was an apartment, I wasn't goi
to go up, and dien I was like, 'Oh, what the he
I'm already here,' which is just idiotic. T
things actors do—but you have to put it in t
young actor context, which is a very dire c
cumstance to be in. But I have this thing on r
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