: The Blair Witch Project
Author: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez
Director: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez
If you haven’t heard of Blair Witch, you must be living under a rock. This movie has turned Hollywood on its ear. An extremely low budget ($22,000) independent movie, it’s made over $100 million! Released in theatres in July, it’s now out on video. I got my copy on DVD and was very impressed. First, it’s not scary at all. But it is authentic. It’s presented as the video diary of a group of film-makers who go off to film a documentary on the Blair Witch and never come back. The "scary" stuff is nothing more than strange sounds and mysterious piles of rocks and sticks that appear during the night. There’s no blood, no "fake scares" that populate so many of today’s movies (where the killer turns out to be a neighbor visiting or a cat looking for food). It’s just a simple tale of a group of frightened, nervous college students going insane. The script is remarkable — I couldn’t detect a flaw in it, which is good, because this kind of "real video" would suffer tremendously if there’s any flaw in acting or dialog. Apparently a great deal of the movie was improvised, which explains why it feels so authentic. (My hairdresser complained that she thought it realistic until she noticed the girl’s hair, after a week in the woods, still looked groomed.) To summarize: not a great film, but a good one. Don’t expect too much or you’ll be disappointed. But it’s a remarkable achievement in this day where a typical Hollywood movie costs $30-$50 million!
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