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Spotlight on Blair Witch

© Jim Beggs

I had the good fortune of seeing The Blair Witch Project on Friday the Thirteenth. It was a day filled with rain and lightning all the way to and back from the movie theater, and a power outage that affected a good part of the town I saw the movie in. Luckily, it didn't affect the theater. Not being able to see the entire movie could have ruined the experience of making an hour long trip to see the movie and wouldn't have left me with such a creepy feeling about the movie afterwards. Blair Witch is a movie that requires an alert viewing in its entirety, and a good deal of reflection. With an hour long return trip from the theater to my tiny home town, I had plenty of time to reflect on the movie.

As everyone already knows, The Blair Witch Project is about three young people who take a trip to the tiny town of Burkittsville to shoot a documentary on the local folklore of a figure known as the Blair Witch. First they interview some of the townspeople, asking each of them what he or she knows about the Blair Witch. They receive a few standard spooky stories and some others that I found pretty haunting well after the movie was over. One story, which I believe is crucial to the ending, talks about some guy killing little kids by twos in his basement. One of the most interesting interviews the three conduct is with the local loon, Mary Brown, who claims to have seen the Blair Witch in the woods and describes her in good detail.

After their interview footage is shot, the three begin trekking through the woods in search of Blair Witch monuments to capture on film. They make the first mistake of camping out in the woods over night. During the dark nights, they begin hearing strange sounds - they describe them as footsteps, but I thought it sounded more like trees being knocked over. Personally, I don't find piles of stones very creepy. Those didn't work for me. As the movie progresses, the sounds become even creepier and the discoveries more unnerving.

I'm trying my best not to spoil the movie despite my desire to discuss some of the finer points of the movie. Blair Witch is a movie you have to see yourself. It is going to be a seminal film. Most of it has been done before, but until now, the concepts and their execution have never met with such tremendous commercial success, and that's how landmarks tend to be made in Hollywood. The film's web site has been credited with the early positive buzz on the film, and now movie web sites are becoming a more important movie marketing tool.

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