1999

22.3

Curiously, the only consistent topic for public discussion generated over The Blair Witch Project is the hype itself. The film is a success because of its success, more and more people lining up at the box office because so many have already lined up, and this in spite of lukewarm and even poor reviews. And these are not the type of bad review that is common to big budget studio films that abandon story telling for graphic violence and special effects, yet still draw crowds. Rather, these are bad reviews that should—one would think—deter audiences from attending the film: shaky ill-aimed cinematography and annoying, histrionic, and repetitive dialogue. The media have been occupied with the unusual circumstances surrounding the creation of the film and the process used to market it, but more than anything else, print sources have been fascinated with the project because it seems to confirm the continued validity of the American Dream: two unknown filmmakers spend a small amount of money and generate fabulous wealth, and a small production company, Artisan, transforms a potential cinematic disaster into an extraordinary success. Consequently, the reading public has been subjected to a multitude of articles about how frightened Hollywood is of the film’s success and how cleverly the internet was used to advertise the film, while the television audience has witnessed a legion of advertising parodies, capitalizing upon the film’s successful marketing, ads such as the trailer for Detroit Rock City and the promotional ads for Two Guys and a Girl and the new comedy Stark Raving Mad.

Despite the preoccupations of the media, The Blair Witch Project is not spectacle without substance. The work has considerable artistic and intellectual merit, particularly when considered in relation to the contextual productions that accompany it; however, the laudable content may be, in some ways, an absence of the same. Aptly titled a "project," the film challenges the audience’s expectations regarding the spatial, temporal, and narrative limitations of the medium. Traditionally, one could count upon a movie remaining a self-contained whole. The audience has not been required to supplement its experience in order to attain a satisfactory viewing. Even in the case of movie blockbusters, such as the recent Phantom Menace, the related merchandise (computer games etc.) serves only as an adjunct to the film, prolonging the Star Wars experience; it is not requisite to an adequate understanding. Indeed, in many ways, merchandising may detract from the cinema itself . The proliferation of Jar Jar Binks puppets, candy dispensers, action figures and other frivolous marketing ploys may do more to repel than to compel adult audiences. Whereas quasi-documentaries about the technology used to generate the film’s imagery do urge the audience to seek a prolonged examination of the work product (the special effects), such addendums to the movie are not required in order to understand the narrative.

The Blair Witch Project, on the other hand, may be one of the film industry’s first truly intertextual productions. The film itself is merely an artifact in a proliferating cultural phenomenon that threatens to eclipse and dislodge the original creation. Indeed, the "mockumentary" that appeared on the Sci-Fi Channel is arguably the primary text. The filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick have indicated that their original plan was to create a fake documentary, featuring excerpts from the lost reels, along with interviews of the friends, family, and neighbors of the missing adolescents as well as local folklore experts who delineate the Blair Witch legend. However, as it turns out, the film consists only of the footage presumably completed by the students in the woods. Curse of the Blair Witch, that first aired July 12 on the Sci-Fi Channel, is organized according to the original plan. Thus it is the television "mockumentary" that tells the whole story, offering a complete accounting of the fake history of the Blair Witch, as well as excerpts and interviews. The cinematic release does not offer a sufficient amount of information to elucidate even those aspects of the legend to which it obliquely refers. The comprehensiveness of Curse of the Blair Witch and the book, The Blair Witch Project: a Dossier, tends to prioritize them, rendering the cinematic release a merely supplementary text, an illustration of only the most recent atrocity in the long sordid history of the Blair Witch. This confusion of primary and secondary sources and the destabilizing of the boundaries between traditional textual categories is a particularly postmodern feature of the Blair Witch phenomenon.

The film’s intertextuality (the quality that undermines the audience’s ability to identify the primary text) may be a clever effort on the part of the directors and marketing experts to create a cultural phenomenon reminiscent of the internet. As we all know, the whimsical organization of the internet resembles a pastiche with sites linked together in an endless chain of marginally related information, a deconstructed realm where information is not prioritized, where scholarship and high art are indistinguishable from gossip and kitsch. The individual websites are organized according to categories of information that can be sampled at random. Similarly, The Blair Witch Project constitutes a montage of related media forms, each adding to the widening cultural experience, which so far includes the film, two "mockumentaries," the website, the book, the CD (music from the missing students’ car stereo), and the legion of periodicals produced by the circulating social energy.

The context created by the collection of interrelated media items is the site within which the meaning of the film takes place. The screening of The Blair Witch at the Sundance Festival in early 1999 left many viewers unsatisfied, and the dissatisfaction went beyond the annoying camera angles and dialogue; some walked out complaining that the film was not scary, only boring. However, in February 1999, the website and the mockumentary had not yet been created. Only through the mediation of these latter productions was the environment created for a satisfactory and meaningful viewing of the original film, and that meaning was only achieved by displacing the original film from the primary place within the process of signification. The viewer was able to appreciate the meaning of subjects only alluded to in The Project, such as the significance of coffin rock, of missing children, and even of the final encounter in the witch’s domicile. The film became evidence for a larger murder mystery and legend, and thus the fiction of the Blair Witch expanded upon the limitations of the medium. The audience expects to encounter a fictional narrative within a movie theater, but does not expect the fiction to expand into the film’s cultural context. Thus The Blair Witch Project does not begin or end with the theater release; the film is a piece of a broader narrative.

The expansion of the story beyond the confines of the cinema results in a blurring of the distinction between fiction and reality. In her widely read journal included in D.A. Stern’s A Dossier, Heather Donahue remarks that truth and legend are very easily confused (154). The audience of the film is encouraged to look past The Project itself to folklore for a continuation of the narrative, only to find that the legend exists exclusively in other forms of the media: television, internet, periodicals etc. Melissa August of Time reports that some Blair Witch enthusiasts, even after having been told that the legend is a fabrication, have, nevertheless, sought confirmation of the story’s validity by venturing to Burkittsville, MD to interview local townsfolk (62). Whereas initially one would assume the denial that such a legend exists in Burkittsvile would be sufficient to put the quest for the Blair Witch to rest, the fact only alters the nature of the search, refocusing it on the text once again. This circular inquiry into the legend is rendered still more problematic by the peripheral position of myth and legend within the truth/fiction dichotomy. While the Blair Witch does not exist in any physical sense, and whereas the legend itself has been revealed as fraudulent by filmmakers Sanchez and Myrick, the question of the myth’s veracity is still not settled. While the violent history of the Blair Witch may be a complete fabrication, it is at least as real as any other legend of the supernatural, all of which exist only in the retelling of the pertinent tales. Thus the division between fiction and reality dissolves whenever the issue of myth and legend is broached. These tales, just like the Blair Witch, have only a textual reality.

The technical process of producing The Project itself reinforces the paradoxical qualities surrounding the subject’s authenticity. The film draws attention to its own fictionality and artifice at the same time that it seeks to convince the audience of the verity of the events depicted and the legitimacy of the Blair Witch legend. This contrast is accomplished through the use of unsteady and ill-aimed camera shots, as well as complete blackouts, all of which draw attention to the camera as a limited and limiting artistic medium, as opposed to a window on reality. The audience becomes hyper-conscious of the camera’s presence, not because of the artful well designed images, but because there are so few of them. A significant portion of the film is aimed at the ground, as the actors (sometimes panicked, sometimes only frustrated or irritated) drag their equipment through the woods. At night, the screen goes completely black for longer than one would think appropriate, not because the equipment is switched off and the filming temporarily interrupted, but because the filmmakers have not provided sufficient lighting; the equipment, nevertheless, continues to record the dialogue. While in most cinema, the camera erases its own presence by offering a glimpse into an ulterior reality, the aforementioned qualities constantly remind The Blair Witch audience of the presence of the camera and production crew. Even in documentaries where the director is purposefully trying to chronicle a real phenomenon, the only indication of the camera’s presence is the voice that emerges from behind the scene to question the interviewee. Periodically, as in the case of Roger and Me and Kurt and Courtney, the filmmaker may appear on camera, and the effort to get the appropriate shot may become the subject of the scene; however, the camera and the cameraman do not generally become principal players within the film, as in The Blair Witch, where the cast is actually the crew: Director, Heather Donahue; cameraman, Joshua Leonard; and sound man, Michael Williams.

Paradoxically, The Blair Witch Project invites its audience to believe in the legitimacy of its content while it is also exposing the mechanisms of its craft. Many of the qualities that have been cited as indicators of artifice, alternatively, suggest reality. Within the semiotics of film, the same unsteady images that reveal the presence of the camera also suggest "reality television," a genre of film that lacks the polish of cinematic realism, but signifies the authenticity of the event depicted. The muted colors, the grainy and unedited imagery, and the poor lighting imply the immediacy of actual events in which the filmmakers did not have the opportunity to construct and plan their scene adequately or to make expected alterations in the footage that would constitute an imposition of artistic order. Ironically, the very small budget of the film also contributed to its seeming authenticity. The Hollywood audience has become accustomed to the visual paradox that a clean, colorful, and slickly edited film signifies realism, but, at the same time, is most likely to be a complete fabrication. Alternatively, the footage that least reflects the vibrancy of color and clarity of imagery in actual experience is most likely to depict reality. The unscripted dialogue also reflects the immediacy of real events. Whereas one might wish that people spoke in pithy, glib, and well structured sentences of succinctly written scripts, actual dialogue is more likely to resemble the repetitive, hysterical, and directionless bantering of the three players lost in the woods, yet, ironically, the audience trained by the Hollywood cinema is most likely to associate well-scripted dialogue with cinematic realism. Thus Sanchez and Myrick have achieved a sense of actuality by systematically repudiating virtually every feature of the film industry’s formula for realistic drama. They have achieved realism by rejecting realism and by rejecting art they have created one of the most successful art films in cinematic history.

The process of marketing a film is generally a reminder of the artificiality of the product, an item for commercial exchange in an economy of manufactured commodities. However, marketing for The Blair Witch Project produced cultural artifacts intended to lend their materiality to the film. As early as the film’s screening at the Sundance Film Festival, Sanchez and Myrick, promoting the film as though it were a remnant of actual events, circulated and posted "Missing Person" flyers throughout Park City, Utah. As the marketing budget for the film increased, the techniques for advertising the work were more expensive elaborations on the original strategy. The website featured evidence photos of the missing filmmakers’ car, the aged and discolored pages of Heather’s journal, and the rusted film canisters of the project itself. Moreover, the promotional CD is presumably a copy of the tape in Joshua’s car stereo. The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier, includes a variety if items intended to make the disappearance seem like a verifiable incident: reports of a private investigator, press releases, newspaper articles, missing persons affidavits, letters, and photos of family members , witnesses, searchers, and investigators. These reproductions of tangible objects, however, are merely other types of text. The evidence of the disappearance and search has no more substance than the items they attempt to anchor in corporeality.

The idea that a text refers exclusively to other texts is consistent with the aphorism, postulated by Jacques Derrida in his seminal essay "Structure, Sign, and Play," that signifiers only ever refer to other signifiers, never to any materiality; the link between word and world is erased (249). Similarly, The Blair Witch Project is preoccupied with its own inability to signify; one might even say that the film’s inability to generate meaning is its principal meaning. The effort to point outside of itself to actual events is disrupted by the expansion of the narrative across conventional boundaries of fiction and reality. All of our experience is textual, is language. Meaning can only take place in a context created by additional texts. Roland Barthes describes the nature of the intertext: "the text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning . . . but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (146). The Blair Witch Project would have been unable to generate a satisfactory viewing had it not been supplemented with additional texts, creating a framework and background for the events depicted on the film,. The film obviates the centrality of circulating texts in the creation of meaning. The narrative events require a background in order to be comprehensible, and yet that context is still more text. The failure of the film to signify in isolation can be observed in the dissatisfaction of the audience members who have not previously experienced any of the multiplying promotional items that embellish on the subjects of the film.

The events of the film and the contextual productions demonstrate the deconstruction of meaning within the Blair Witch phenomenon. While Ferdinand Saussure taught modern linguists that meaning is generated by the interplay of concepts in binary opposition, Derrida’s Of Grammatology demonstrates that the barrier between these oppositions collapses, dispersing priority and meaning altogether (27-74). In the example immediately above, the meaningful distinctions between the physical/metaphysical, past/present, here/there, in/out, and even subject/object (me/you) are erased. It is within the context of this suspension of meaning and the frustration of expectations that the searchers and filmmakers try to find answers to their questions, but learn nothing. The most prohibitive deconstructions take place at the meta-dramatic and meta-cinematic levels of the film. The Blair Witch phenomenon defeats every expectation surrounding the creation and appreciation of the film. I have already discussed the means whereby the phenomenon shatters the boundary between fiction and reality; however, there are several related ideas that are worthy of further discussion. For example, the barrier between actor/audience is breached. The characters represented within the contextual works, Curse, Blairwitch.com, and A Dossier, ostensible enjoy the same connection to The Project as does the paying audience at the theater. The authorities, family members, investigators and search party members included in Stern’s Dossier comment on the film, often asking the same questions and directing the responses of the television and movie viewers. They, for instance, observe the shaky and grainy images of the film and even suggest that the entire project might be an elaborate hoax, a presumption shared by moviegoers (32), and yet, just like the theater audience, they have no final answers to the mystery of the disappearance, but only fragments of information. Similar cinematic paradoxes are created by conflating the roles of actors/directors, actors/production crew, and artist/subject.

The premise of The Project—a documentary gone terribly awry—ruptures the common divide between the performer and the production staff. While the presence of the crew is more likely to be obviated in a documentary than in a fictional narrative, seldom do the camera and sound people become the subject of the work itself, and even in news broadcasts where the speaker looks directly into the camera and occasionally refers to the process of attaining the images and information, the crew are not actually seen in the picture or identified by name, nor does the production schedule become a recurring subject of the dialogue as in Blair Witch. In fact, in many ways, the subject of The Project is the progressive loss of control of the cinema process: the cameraman disappears altogether, and consequently, the shots become increasingly unsteady and ill-aimed; the audio track is pervaded by unsolicited and inexplicable sounds at night; the director becomes so frightened and irrational that she is unable to guide the shoot; and the shooting schedule itself goes overtime and over budget and finally results in the complete disappearance of the production staff and their product. The actor/crew paradox is captured cinematically by the periodic shots of the two cameras filming each other filming.

The actor/director duality is even more problematic than the confusion of the performers and crew. Appropriately, this disruption of the subject/object binary even affects the ability to speak coherently of the film’s creation. When the critic/reviewer uses the expression "filmmakers," there are potentially two antecedent groups—Heather, Joshua, and Michael or Sanchez and Myrick hiding in the woods—and the problem is not just semantic. The former group are, in many important ways, independent of the latter group. Sanchez and Myrick may have initiated the project, but the actors were made to direct and film the project themselves. The unique circumstances under which the film was created have become legendary. The players were given rudimentary instruction in the use of the camera and a rough outline of a plot and set loose for eight days of hiking, camping, and filming in the woods. At night, Sanchez and Myrick would try to frighten the actors with sounds and mysterious props, and the film records the response of the actors/filmmakers to this chicanery, while each morning they would leave the actors clues, guiding the day’s plot development. Sanchez and Myrick begin to resemble writers more than directors, since they made little or no effort to monitor the collection of cinematic images, or perhaps they signify the cliché meddling of the studio executives in the creative process: the men who conceived The Blair Witch Project seek to manipulate indirectly the action and the content of the shoot from behind the scenes.

Still another way to conceptualize the position of Sanchez and Myrick in the filmmaking process is to examine the breach of the artist/subject binary. Since the principal content of the film is the search for the Blair Witch, and Sanchez and Myrick are essentially in the role of the witch, creating the frightening events that are supposed to signify her presence in the woods, then one might say that the creators of the project are actually the object of the search. Even in the fictive world of the film, there is no evidence that any Blair Witch does or ever did exist, only that there is someone harassing and abusing the student filmmakers, which is a role identical to that played by Sanchez and Myrick in the filming process. So in effect, the creators of the film are characters in a narrative of their own making. In this context, the film becomes the search of the production crew for a director, for the "magic" behind the camera, the person who selects the aim and angle of the camera and who brings the events of the narrative to a coherent conclusion in a reasonable period of time. In effect, this thrusts them back in the recognizable role of director. However, it is a problematic, deconstructed role. These directors do not coax and cajole the performance out of the players or offer their considered advice on character motivation, but instead, absent themselves from the rational process, creating the film by terrorizing the players and disrupting the shoot. The destructiveness of this effort is another subject of the film which captures the failure of the cinematic process. The student filmmakers find nothing and then disappear themselves. The film, therefore, has no subject save the search for its own directors; it is a process an a signifying system that has no object, but only to itself.

Even the nature of authorship is rendered problematic within the Blair Witch productions. Like the director who is commonly regarded as the predictable presence behind the camera, manipulating the narrative, the author is traditionally the shaping consciousness behind the written text. However, authors are difficult to identify in the Blair Witch media—the script, book, and website. Deconstruction has dislocated the authority and meaning in the process of communication by problematizing the role of the author. In his summary of Derrida’s post-structuralism, Art Berman reveals that language has, in effect, a life of its own, since meaning is generated entirely in the mind of the perceiver, and the word itself is burdened with historical baggage of former and even occulted significations (217). The Blair Witch Project erases its author with its unscripted dialogue and its contention that the footage is indeed the work of the three student filmmakers (the original fabrication). Not only is there no single consciousness shaping the language of the film, even the direction of the narrative is a product of the free association between the three lost players and Sanchez and Myrick hiding in the woods. Who is actually the creator or the author of the narrative? The task is dispersed among a group of people, guided by individual whim. The authorship of A Dossier is just as difficult to determine despite the name "D.A. Stern" printed on the cover of the text. While the text begins with a "Note from the Author" that is subsequently signed "D.A. Stern, Las Vegas, May 1999," much of the material included is spurious just like the remainder of the book. The author tells of his early fascination with horror films and folk legends and then mentions his first encounters with the Blair Witch mythology in the studies for his senior thesis. He then perpetuates the fraudulent account of the discovery of the lost footage and the screening of the material at the Sundance Film Festival, finally offering his services to Haxan Films in their effort to compile a collection of materials "related to the disappearance of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams" (viii). Within the "Note," fiction and truth become virtually indistinguishable. Stern’s own existence is rendered problematic by the account. The copyright is attributed to Artisan Pictures Inc. although stern indicates that he negotiated with Haxan Films, and nowhere is the "Stern" mentioned on the publication page. Moreover, the "Introduction" immediately following the note seems to give credit to the same people one would automatically associate with the project: Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, as well as Robin Cowie, Gregg Hale, and Michael Monello, the group labeled as the Haxan team. The Reader is left with the impression that the Haxan team are actually the compilers of the text and that Stern is yet another fabrication. The potentially specious existence of Stern even problematizes the ability to refer coherently to A Dossier. If Stern is indeed fictional, even the notes of this essay participate in the gigantic fraud that is the Blair Witch enterprise. Each time I place a note in the text acknowledging my appropriations from A Dossier, I may be perpetuating the Blair Witch’s false pageant paraded across the America media.

The futile search for coherence that is the subject of the film, the effort to identify a figuration of the metaphysical presence, the stable sense and essence behind the word and the process, is shared by the movie-going audience who emulate the student filmmakers’ search for the Blair Witch, but find only Sanchez and Myrick’s artifice and subterfuge. Each audience member inquires into the existence of a Blair Witch legend and embarks upon a witch hunt that, as in precedent cases, produces nothing but lies and parlor tricks. Hype over The Blair Witch Project that preoccupied the country for several months is a postmodern witch craze, a hysterical inquiry that has no object in fiction or reality, not even a fully developed film. Language, not divination, is responsible for the confusion; signification cannot by tracked to any orginary metaphysical essence. Upon discovering that the Blair Witch legend is a hoax at every level, the audience arrives at the same paradoxical conclusion as Western Culture over the preceding two centuries: real witches exist only in myth. Like Macbeth’s tormenters, they "melt as breath into wind."

James R. Keller
Honors Program
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus, Mississippi 39701

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. S. Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

The Blair Witch Project. Dir. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick. Artisan, 1999.

Curse of the Blair Witch. Dir. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick. SciFi Channel. 12 July 1999.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1976.

——. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1970. 247-64.

Stern, D.A. The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier. New York: Onyx, 1999.

www.blairwitch.com