And--oh, look! They left behind a custom logo, the first of its kind!
I now declare the Halloween festivities well and truly begun! Come with me, if you dare...
Okay, I
will make my confession right now: I have yet to see The Blair Witch Project. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem,
because I’m here to explain how it fits into the overall Millennium puzzle, not
to provide a detailed review of it. I haven’t seen it, that’s true, but I have
done some research on it, and from that I’ve gained a pretty good insight on
its significance.
The
first thing to remember is that Blair
Witch was the first successful “found-footage” movie released in the United
States. Up to Blair Witch’s release
in 1999, horror movies were by and large slickly produced, multi-million dollar
projects with celebrity casts and creative teams. Also, most of the releases
tended to be franchise-based, such as the Scream
series and Halloween H2O
(I know it’s supposed to be “Halloween 20 Years Later,” but…honestly, a casual
glance would suggest that it would have something to do with water), or even
remakes, such as House on Haunted Hill 1999
(although I suspect that was the only one in the 90s—I don’t quite count Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, because
those are fairly highbrow literary adaptations).
Blair Witch, on the other hand, was
something moviegoers had never seen before…or since. It was a small movie made
on the cheap, with jittery camcorder work and not one star to its name. None of
that means it’s of lesser quality by any means. Its lack of star power and
finesse added to its mystique and made the horror that much more intense…because
there are no big-deal names, there’s no safe “curtain call” at the end. You’re
left thinking, “My God…was that actually real?”
The
second thing to remember is that it set off a new subgenre of horror in America:
the “found-footage” drama. I mentioned already the tension of “real” and “not
real” on a purely technical level, but the key premise is that we’re watching a
documentary in which real college students accidentally uncover something
ancient and terrible…and real. Earlier
movies claimed inspiration from true stories, but Blair Witch upped the ante by having that true story actually
unfold before us. It gained a legion of
successors, including the wildly popular Paranormal
Activity series and J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield.
The
third thing to remember is that it was one of the first multimedia experiences
and one of the first movies to take advantage of the Internet as a storytelling
device. There was a book (The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier), a series
of young-adult novels, and a viral marketing campaign that influenced how
movies are advertised. In an article about social media campaigns, Forbes
said of Blair Witch, “The marketers
behind this horror flick were able to generate big buzz for a movie with a
teeny budget by using Web sites and
message boards to stoke interest in the flick months before its release in
the summer of 1999. Was the story of young documentary makers lost in the woods
true or false? Fake newspaper clippings about the disappearance of the movie’s
main characters and police photos of their missing car were posted[i].”
Keep in mind—and I’ve said this before, when I reviewed My History is
America’s History—that 1999 was the infancy of the Internet, and using it
to advertise on Blair Witch’s scale
needed a lot of creativity. This was before Facebook, before Youtube, before
just about everything we take for
granted today.
The
movie’s Wikipedia article also mentions a trilogy of computer games[i]. While
licensed tie-in games were by this point nothing new, these were unique in
that, again, they were pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle. According to the
article, they took place before the
events of the movie (the first game took place in 1941; the second, during the
Civil War; the third, during the era of the Salem Witch Trials), and shine
light on some of the central movie’s unexplained mysteries. (Whether or not
this is a good thing depends on one’s determination to finish the puzzle…some
of the explanations are downright horrifying.)
Needless
to say, I don’t remember very much of The
Blair Witch Project at all, except that it was a very popular theme for
Halloween gatherings for about a year or so. I do
remember the figurine of the Witch herself, released by McFarlane Toys. Let’s
just say that she won’t grace the cover of Maxim any time soon. As I
said, though, it sparked the public’s imagination, and just…faded away. Who
knows? Maybe the Museum will spark new interest in it.
One
thing’s for sure: She and all the other forgotten ghosts of 2000 can make
themselves at home in the Museum. That's why it exists in the first place: it's a home for a forgotten year.
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