The Blair Witch Project

Title - The Blair Witch Project
Language - English
Genre - Horror, found footage

**SPOILER ALERT**

This review contains spoilers

I had heard a lot of bad things about The Blair Witch Project, that it didn’t have a good story, that the camera work made you sick, the witch does not appear & it is just a bad film but I wanted to see what it was like, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Blair Witch is sited as being the first of the ‘Found Footage’ films and follows 3 people as they try to make a documentary about the Blair Witch, an urban legend centred around a number of deaths that have occurred in a small American town.

Blair Witch starts off quite slow with the main cast (Heather, Josh & Mike) interviewing the residents of the town and one of the first strange things I noticed was that, when questioning the locals there are actually 2 legends mentioned, that of the witch who is described as being creepy woman who is covered in black, horse like hair and also one about a hermit who killed 12 children two at a time making one stand in a corner whilst he killed the first and then killing the second one.  Although both legends are mentioned there does not seem to be any major connection between the two, in fact the main characters just seem to brush off the reference to the hermit presumably because it is not the witch.

As the group head into the woods you get the normal character building and find out the team dynamics and also become aware that they only have two days to get the footage and get back to their normal lives.  As they progress small augments start, mainly about which direction to go in and how long it is taking to get to the sights of the legends.  After visiting the areas they wanted to see they find that it is taking longer to get back than planed and so they have to spend another night in the woods during which they hear noises, as if someone is outside the tent, the only other strange point is that the map has disappeared.  It later turns out that one of the group (Mike) has thrown away the map as he believes that no one knows how to use it anyway.  I’ve been told that this plot point makes no sense (That there is no reason to throw the map) but I think that is the start of the problems the ‘witch’ causes (I’ll explain what I think the witch is later) the map is thrown away as a release of tension as it is seen as useless and a cause of the problems.

With no map the group soon get lost and with each night they spend in the woods the disturbances get worst until one of the group has disappear (Josh).  As Heather & Mike continue trying to find their way out of the woods they keep hearing what sounds like Josh and in the night they follow his voice to a house.  They run around the house looking for Josh and for a short time Heather loses sight of Mike.  When she finds him he is standing in the corner and someone off camera kills her and then Mike.

No antagonist is ever seen which has coursed a problem for some people who have seen this film as there is no real closure (is the witch real) but I think that you can view the film in a number of ways, it is suggested that some of the locals have followed the group into the woods and it is them who kill the group.  It is also possible that there really is a witch (or hermit)but I think that the witch is a metaphor for the groups paranoia, as the film progresses the daylight scenes are filled more and more with the group arguing and fragmenting  and at night they are scared by the noises coming from outside.  The fist night Josh says he heard two sets of sounds, one may have been an owl but he thinks that the other was a person, he is the only one who heard one and during the first couple of nights the strangeness happens off camera when the group are asleep, things get stranger after Josh has disappeared and, like the witch/hermit he is never seen but is heard, he becomes one of the sounds, the source of the night time fear.  It is very possible that, with the slight anticipation from looking for a witch or evidence of a killer coupled with the growing tension between the group and the loss of the map that Josh snaps and that he is the killer.

The film did a good job of creating the sense of isolation of the group in the woods and I Found myself looking past the cast for any sign of a witch or anything else that should not be there and I was pleasantly surprised at how good the film was.