The Blair Witch Project And Me
Posted on April 5, 2009 - Filed Under Film, Personal | Leave a Comment
I have ALWAYS FUCKING HATED this film, and I’ve never even watched it fully. It’s not the way it’s shot, nor the acting, nor the plot, nor anything else related to the production. Instead, I hate it because I’m scared shitless of it.
Some background information is necessary here. The film came out around 1999, and back then I was 13, and a big WWE fan. Thus, one night I stayed up to watch one of the big monthly events that used to be broadcast live from the US on Sky Sports or Channel 4 in the early hours of Monday mornings. American television is afflicted with a high frequency of ad breaks, and so whatever station I was watching went to commercial breaks every 10/15 minutes or so, and every goddamn time I got hit with an ad for the film, the one with the girl looking all pale and teary-eyed and staring into the camera. Also, earlier on that week I’d had the grave misfortune to see some promotional ‘documentary’ about the film on Sky One, which was really just a big long ad full of fake interviews with actors who were presented as real people who had known the characters in the film.
Point is, I thought the damn thing was real, i.e. that the film was real documentary footage that someone found in the woods of the single most terrifying story/plot/ordeal my dopey little 13 year old mind could conceive. I’d lived a relatively sheltered childhood in terms of film watching; while other kids’ parents would allow them to watch all kinds of age-inappropriate stuff, mine always stuck pretty rigidly to the age-ratings. In many ways this was a very good thing, but it didn’t help me develop any kind of horror/shock hide, with the result that even to this day I’m quite jumpy in horror films.
This isn’t to say that I abhor gore or violence in films; in fact, I’m a big fan of well-made zombie films and American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman is one of my favourite ever film characters. There’s just something about the tension and suspense in effective horror films that sets me on edge in a very uncomfortable way and I do not like the feeling one single bit. It’s unpleasant and disturbing and frankly I just don’t see the appeal.
So yeah, take a life-long intuitive dislike of horror films, a 13 year old mind with no frame of reference for such films, and about 10 visually arresting ads for a particularly unpleasant horror film that said 13 year old mind encounters around 4 a.m. in the dark. And then add to this jarring stew the fact that the naive 13 year old thinks that the film is a real-life documentary of true events.
The thing set my nerves on edge for months. I hated reflective moments of thinking during this time, because if ever had a few moments of idle thought and started meta-thinking (by which I mean thinking about thinking, in the sense of choosing what thoughts are rolling around your skull), that pale, terrified face would launch into my consciousness with a debilitating, animal fear. The fact that I live in a rather secluded area, with plenty of nice trees, probably didn’t help much either. My aversion to the film, and any thoughts about it, was so bad that I’d rip ads for it out of my computer game magazines and throw them away so I wouldn’t have to see them more than once.
Eventually, with passing years, I got over this, learned that the film was not, in fact, an audio-visual account of real events, and forgot about the film almost entirely. I never watched it, but it stopped forcing itself into my head and so it no longer concerned me. However, any time I thought much about it I still got a distinctly unpleasant feeling, so I steered clear of it entirely whenever it was on television.
And then tonight I tried watching it, and all that shit came back with a vengeance. I’m now 22, and I’ve watched hundreds of 18s film (though admittedly not too many horror ones). I’ve seen countless ‘shock’ images and videos on the internet without batting an eyelid. I don’t think I’m particularly easily frightened. And yet, I kept flicking away from the channel, unable to stomach watching what was unfolding onscreen. Stomach is definitely the right verb for it, because my reaction was physical as much as mental. Watching it made me feel sick.
Towards the very end of the film, when the girl and remaining guy are in the house (spoiler alert here, but I’m presuming most people have seen it by now – you’ve had 10 years) I couldn’t look away as they stumbled around the ruins, with the shouting off camera and the confusion and all-round awfulness of the situation, and I felt a tangibly better when the camera finally broke, seemingly during some kind of struggle. The last shot of the guy was still on my mind though. Why was he standing like that in the corner, facing the wall? It didn’t seem like the most disturbing thing the director/writer could have closed with.
I didn’t much feel like going to bed right after something like that, so I stayed up for a few hours more watching dreadful television and playing videogames with my brother. When I eventually headed to my room at around 5 a.m. (which is even quite late by my own screwed-up insomniac standards), I went online with a mind to reading the Wikipedia entry on the film before bed, and I instantly felt that sickening discomfort when I saw the promo picture. Even reading though the plot made me uncomfortable. I got as far as the thing about the 1940′s serial killer and the house and the pairs of kids he’d kill, making one stand facing the wall as he killed the other first. I think that’s part of the made-up back story that’s alluded to in the film. Frankly, I’m not going back to the article to check.
I guess that’s about all I have to say about this bête noire of mine. Ordinarily I’d dig up some picture to go with a post like this, but that’s certainly not happening with this one. It’s getting bright outside now so I think I can finally go to bed and sleep. Maybe this post makes me sound like an enormous coward, but whatever. At least it’s off my chest now. I think, looking back, that this is easily my worst childhood memory, so writing about it has got to be helpful in some way.
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