Lost in the Woods: The Blair Witch Project

lost in forest in the blair witch project Subject of Puritan wrath, symbol of darkness, child of wilderness, the Blair Witch lives in the forest, kills in the dark, and turns the heads of her victims towards her cellar wall to avoid their deadened stares. Three student filmmakers in The Blair Witch Project find themselves deep in the forest, stalked by the witch, documenting with 16 millimeter and video their collective disbelief that in a day and age of intestates, airplanes, and GPS, they are truly “lost in the woods.”

Outdoor environments like the one in The Blair Witch Project are popular settings for horror movies. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is a traditional notion of “the woods” as a place of danger and the unknown. Many fairy tales take place in dark forests and this literary tradition lends itself likewise to film. Potentially, there is a psychological tradition as well, since many outdoor areas still offer one with the possibility of being lost, killed by animals, and stuck without light. In this regard, outdoor environments are capable of rekindling childhood fears of isolation, monsters, and darkness.

Interestingly enough, although much horror is set in the woods, the danger is rarely the woods themselves. This is the case in The Blair Witch Project, where the killer is never seen but presumably a human monster of some kind. Nonetheless, nature and killer are intimately associated in the Blair Witch Project. The Blair Witch is identified through piles of stone and bundles of twigs — forest implements which give character to an otherwise invisible phenomenon. The Blair Witch is also confused with what are ostensibly normal sounds in the woods — the crackle of brush under animal legs, a childlike laughing not unlike the banter of wild dogs, and the ruffle of the tent from a sudden gust of wind.

By making the correlation between nature and monster, The Blair Witch Project exercises a familiar literary trope (and cultural more) at least as old as the arrival of Puritan pioneers in America. Discovering forests without comparison to their native England, the Puritans referred to the American wilderness as “the green death” and viewed the woods as an impediment to settlement and the practice of religion. Their herbicidal philosophy was accompanied by a disdain for non-Christian practice, especially witchcraft, which they rooted out rigorously and dispelled with a fiery death of their own.

While The Blair Witch Project depends on the familiar trope of demonic wilderness, the student filmmaker victims in the film utilize a rather novel means of defense. Gone are the butcher knives and baseball bats of previous horror movies. The stalked students of The Blair Witch Project defend themselves with movie cameras.

waging guerilla warfare against freddy kruger The horror genre has a history of showing victims using desperate weapons and survival strategies. In Halloween, the victim utilizes clothes hangers and sewing needles to fight her attacker; In A Nightmare on Elm Street, the defender makes use of alarm clocks and bombs made from gunpowder and light bulbs. Many movies continue to cultivate the time-honored traditions of silver bullets, garlic necklaces, gold crosses, and wooden stakes as well. Additionally, many horror movies follow a predictable pattern in which the killer stabs his way through a field of potential victims (killing the dumb ones first), and is finally challenged by an individual or small team of more creative opponents.

This pattern is altered in The Blair Witch Project, since the student filmmakers never accomplish the creative resistance characteristic of the genre — nor do any survive. Lost in the woods and fearing for their lives, the students of the The Blair Witch Project do not build signal fires, fashion spears, or even crack a pocket knife. Instead, they reload their cameras, lift the boom mike, and record their own demise.

The camera is the defensive, creative weapon in The Blair Witch Project. The director (in the film) states that the camera is “all she has left.” In another scene, one of the students calls attention to the camera as a means of avoiding a true look at reality, since everything appears differently when filtered through the camera eye and is therefore not as frightening. Lost at night, the students affix a light to the camera and attempt to bring their stalker “to light” — pointing and shooting wherever danger lurks.

Despite doubts about what they are doing, the students use the camera no matter how bad things get. When the remains of one of the crew turns up in a bundle of twigs, the surviving students rigorously document their own horror.

The camera has a complicated role in relation to survival in this regard. Ultimately, the camera neither saves nor vindicates their lives. The students in The Blair Witch Project prove that the camera is no replacement for a Swiss Army Knife or something sharp from the kitchen.

The students film anything and everything. In many ways, they are like many other outdoor visitors — especially the tourists that frequent “main attractions” at National Parks. In a National Park, one can expect a symphony of shutter clicks and camera rewinds around any widely accessible waterfall, stone bridge, giant tree, or natural arch. Wild animals are popular subjects too: moose, elk, bear, and marmot are all subject to the outdoor paparazzi.

Of course, the students in The Blair Witch Project are not visiting a National Park — they are lost in some desolate woods in Maryland where the jurisdiction of the land is not defined. But they share with the camera-obsessed National Park tourist an impulse to record anything of estimated significance.

This photographic impulse — both in and out of the film — is largely colonial, and stems from a greater tradition (Puritanical included) that seeks to possess and contain nature. Just as the tourist shoots countless photos and video for later observation, The Blair Witch Project crew tirelessly documents their own perceptions. But perception, in this regard, is never spontaneous and direct — it is always mediated and distracted by the camera. Photographs are taken for future use while present experience is sacrificed.

The Blair Witch Project illustrates that this compulsion is not without danger. The moviemaking trio forsakes survival for footage and dies in the woods. The camera serves as a lousy weapon, and the trio lives on only as fossilized light.

What is less clear is the real-life danger of the outdoor tourist and his camera. With the tourist, the issue is not so much about defense as distraction, as the camera reduces the complexity and dynamism of nature to a handful of simplified, self-congratulatory, static shots. These shots not only represent a simplification of the natural environment (and a purely visual one as well), but mechanically isolate and prioritize particular elements in relation to their ecosystem.

This is inherently dangerous, since the continued survival of the ecosystem depends on the interdependence of elements within itself (not to mention our own contingency as humans as part of this natural system). Unfortunately, the neglected elements that are divorced from the larger environmental picture (by framing, focus, and selection) are the ones most likely to find themselves trimmed, harvested, paved over, cut down, and so forth — sending the entire structure into collapse.

The Blair Witch Project is not a call to the end of nature-based photography. However, the film calls into question the modern obsession with the recorded image and the compulsion of the camera. It also continues a regrettable tradition of correlating woods and the wicked. The Blair Witch, however, need not be seen in such negative terms: subject of Puritan hate, cut down and burned, she jealously guards her remaining terrain.