The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to the game-changing “found footage” 1999 horror film The Blair Witch Project, starring a bunch of unknowns and lots of wobbly-cam footage.
Hype. Is there anything worse? The “buzz” about the latest “sensation” from Cannes; the movie with “the biggest budget ever”; the flick featuring such-and-such’s “career best performance”; the film that will “blow your mind”; and the piece of celluloid that will “change everything.” You’ve heard it all before, and 99.99999% of the time, it’s complete, absolute, unadulterated bullshit.
It is inevitably just crap cooked up by a movie studio’s publicity department, or the result of an over-excited blogger starting a cyber-fire of unjustified interest with a few misplaced words. In most cases, nobody is interested in the film by the time that it hits cinemas. Remember waaaayyyy back that idiotic pile of bilge called Snakes On A Plane? Remember the pre-release giggles from online punters aroused by the “in your face directness” of its title? If it really wanted to be truly direct, Snakes On A Plane would have been called A Shithouse Movie That Only A Fuckwit Would Like. Hype, pure and simple.
If you’re talking hype – and there sure as shit has been a lot of it, and there continues to be more of it, and it will never really stop – you can’t overlook 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, a film that would allegedly “redefine the horror genre” (how many times have you heard that?), and that many called “an instant classic.” Critics and horror fans tumbled over themselves to praise the film’s “found footage” conceit, and its grim realism. Really?
With the kind of wobbly, hand-held camera work that would have sent the late David Stratton staggering to his psychiatrist complaining of post-traumatic stress disorder, the scariest thing about The Blair Witch Project is the amount of time that the camera spends peering into actress Heather Donahue’s nostrils.
Though apparently terrifying, the bulk of the film’s running time is taken up with the irritating Donahue and her equally obnoxious film student buddies wandering aimlessly through the woods looking for the eponymous creepy myth. They argue, squabble, and compete with Al Pacino in Scarface for the most incessant use of the word “fuck” in one movie. You think that’s scary? You should see The Butcher on a bushwalk!
One of the first films to pioneer internet marketing (thanks for that!), The Blair Witch Project is a horror film that succeeds in being truly horrible.
