FATHER GEEK has seen THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT twice already. I can't wait for Harry to get back from Holland so I can see it with him. He'll love it! His sister did, she was squrimming in her seat the whole time, and when it was over... well she babbled on about it for hours on the phone with different friends. Geeks the real feel of this one is complete, but here read Daniel's report...

The last original horror film is nigh and it will blow your mind.

Faux Cinema Verite has always yielded interesting results. Films such as Spinal Tap and Man Bites Dog are mostly improvised films which, through the use of hand-held photography and location sound recording, further the illusion of truth which cannot be captured while lugging a 100 person crew. Through the use of hand held home video and 16mm footage The Blair Witch Project pushes this use of Cinema Verite technique to extremes uncharted in narrative filmmaking.

Emerging alongside three years worth of post-Scream horror film parodies (with more to come) this cinema verite/horror film takes it’s place as the final chapter in horror. One which is defined by true terror and not a comic derivation based on psychologically disturbed mask wearers. Once you see The Blair Witch Project, the horror film as you know it will be forever affected and ridiculed.

In 1994 three film students disappeared into a Maryland forest with hopes of making a documentary film about the local hoax of the Blair Witch killings which supposedly took the lives of several hunters years before. Neither the hunters nor the students were ever found. What you will see is the recovered footage these kids recorded (Video and B&W 16mm), edited into an exhausting 87 minute home-video style masterpiece.

The Blair Witch Project plays upon the fears that everyone experiences while walking in the dark after being told a horrifying campfire story. It takes the Boogey Man concept to the next level as someone unseen and even more frightening and unbeatable than you can even imagine. It will turn you into a bunny rabbit, so scared you cannot move an inch one way or the other, for fear of a wrath too gruesome and painful to imagine. It relies on the genius of your own rampant imagination and of what you are afraid to see and it is petrifying and exhausting to watch. You are with those kids in the forest for days. You feel their constant tension and fatigue. You feel their hunger and delusion. You feel their camaraderie and dissent. It is real and your body is clenching. I sold myself to this film and paid the price you pay with all great horror. My demons were laughing with glee.

Being a filmmaker myself, the most fascinating aspect of the film to me is the relentless documentation of the event by the main character, Heather, who refuses to halt filming with her video camera even in the most dour of times. She is constantly recording personal moments of naked emotion and raw nerves touched by the thought of terror, sometimes causing her two friends to turn against her for exploiting them. I have experienced these emotions of being exploited as well as exploiting the emotions of friends for the purpose of film and found the character’s disdain for her eerily ringing true.

The film is so tense throughout that I began thinking that no possible pay-off would be climactic enough to satisfy, but the end is so poetic and is just perfect. Also, the climax is shown to us from multiple points of view as the Home Video and 16mm are cut together to provide double the terror.

In my opinion The Blair Witch Project belongs in a category of horror films that have advanced and perpetuated the genre at the time of their release. Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, Chainsaw, Rosemary’s Baby, Exorcist, Suspira, Evil Dead and Scream (even though the latter two rely on the comedic archetypes of horror to be effective). These films are responsible for the mass of schlock horror that pervades the video store aisles. For the most part, I hate these contrived films, no matter how "funny and stupid" they are. Schlock involves the audience by placing the cute metaphorical bunny on screen and then twisting its neck. The Blair Witch Project is a wholly original concept which will have you rigid with fear, but not out of sympathy for the bunny, which is the reason why teen slasher films are effective, but out of fear for your own life once the film is done. Yes, this time, for the first time, the bunny is you. Thank you, sweet Lord for allowing me to experience this film in a packed theater and not at home, alone with those witches.

Daniel