For a movie with such a seismic impact in terms of marketing and production, The Blair Witch Project didn’t really inspire any other films as far as I can tell–particularly compared to the other big horror hit of Summer ’99, The Sixth Sense. So my question is this: Between Cloverfield (Blair Witch meets Godzilla), Diary of the Dead (Blair Witch meets Night of the Living Dead), and The Poughkeepsie Tapes (Blair Witch meets Hostel meets Henry), are we finally seeing the wide-scale birth of the Blair Subgenre?
And hey, did it take the rise of YouTube to ultimately make first-person docuhorror feasible?
Well, no, it’s not the birth of anything. I just discovered this like last week, and it kinda made me rethink what I “know” about docu-horror, specifically how new I thought it was (and that’s not even mentioning the obvious War of the Worlds thing):
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/ghostwatch.html
What I learned in the years I lived near a fantastically well stocked video store (Video Madness, Portland, OR; astounding place) is that people have been making these sorts of movies for…well, as Ken says. For ages. According to Video Madness’ owner, who loves to talk about this kind of thing, the bottleneck’s always been distribution, and what make Blair Witch Project distinctive was a combination of greater than usual schmoozing skills on the part of the producers and some good luck. He was an early prominent booster of Netflix as a way around that, and I’d say that it’s the combination of Netflix and Youtube that’s really helping at this point.
The genre has obvious antecedents, but I’m mostly talking about first-person docu-horror.
Well, there is Cannibal Holocaust, of course…
Well, there’s The Last Broadcast from 1998, with attendant controversy. I feel like I’m forgetting some interesting precedents from the ’80s too.
I guess I should also say that what makes Blair Witch important in light of these new films is that articles about them will inevitably cite Blair Witch, rather than any of the other examples y’all have brought up. (Possible exception: Welles’s War of the Worlds, usually in a phrase like “dating all the way back to Orson Welles’s infamous 1939 War of the Worlds radio broadcast.”)
Dropping the ball
I thought that in light of tonight’s big Times Square soirée, this article by the New York Times’ Sewell Chan on filmmakers’ penchant for destroying New York City with aliens, monsters, natural disasters, nuclear war, terrorist attacks, rampant crime, …
Well, I think BLAIR WITCH is important; also, scary as hell. And you’re right, it seemed to be the major bump for the next generation of horror movie-goers and is now recognized as a touchstone of the genre. And yeah, I think it kicked things in a potentially new direction. I suppose you could say its highest achievement is its prescience; CLOVERFIELD’s premise is a logical extension of the current media landscape, but BLAIR WITCH seemed to anticipate it.
Oh yeah, there’s also MY LITTLE EYE, done like an edit from a persistent webTV reality thing that goes all horror. Loved it.
Blair Witch wasn’t really replicable early on, I think, because:
1) it was such a departure in terms of style that immediatley aping it would have seemed desperate. Hell, even the Blair Witch sequal didn’t try for the faux documentary thing. Enough time has passed now where that style isn’t seen as an immediate cash grab.
2) moreso than the style, what Blair Witch really traded on was the whole early internet as an alternative source of information thing; the whole web site, “is it real, OMG look at this stuff on line” phenomenon. I know lots of people who went in not sure if it was real or not, or what they were actually going to see. Blair Witch wasn’t just a movie, it was a cultural moment. Once the man behind the curtain is exposed–once it’s just a movie–it pakcs much, much, much less punch. And having played that joke it takes it from the arsenal of other films, and makes them trade as sheer entertainment, which is a harder sell–at least for those looking to replicate Blair Witch.
Trendspotting 2
Speak of the devil: Ann Thompson of Variety pens an interesting article on the new wave of first-person docu-horror, focusing on Cloverfield and the indie haunted-house film Paranormal Activity and emphasizing both the format and the “less is more” app…