A Film Canon

If ever a film needed to be considered in the light of its advertising campaign, it was The Blair Witch Project - especially given the unprecedented and unrivaled efficacy of that campaign, as well a general critical suggestion that the film was somehow anticlimactic; or, alternatively, that the campaign itself constituted a more satisfactory, or at least more conventionally recognizable, horror film than the film proper. In particular, the campaign suggested that the film proper - the contents of a video cassette found in the base of a tree, detailing the events that led to the disappearance of a group of students creating a documentary about the 'Blair Witch' - would be liberally intercut with b-rolls, including interviews with the locals who found the cassette, discursive police footage of the students' abandoned car and other paraphernalia, and feedback from friends and family. Without this rhythm, the film would take on the anticlimactic pregnancy of a found object - and this is certainly part of its originality, its reinvention of indirection - but Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez don't neglect this rhythm so much as internalise it. Although the film we're presented with is described as a single cassette, it actually involves an alternation between the three students' (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, Michael C. Williams) two cameras - one digital, one 16mm - which they use as part of their decision to include b-rolls in their own documentary. Not only does this condense the Blair Witch's manipulative proximity to the camera - its most concrete manifestation - to the role of documentary editor, but it complicates the typical designation of the film as a new horizon in digital horror. For all the characters' suggestion that "it's very hard to get lost in America these days" without a digital camera, Myrick and Sanchez ultimately seem interested in presenting their digital vision of the woods as a continuation - or consummation - of the blurry, low-budget, b-horror of the 70s, anticipating the more general 00s reinvention of that horror decade. In particular, digital cinematography is required to translate their vortical, kaleidoscopic vision of the American woods into night vision, producing an exquisitely disorienting, tactile architecture of darkness whose objective correlative is the extraordinary, concluding depiction of an abandoned cottage, as if to reiterate the genesis of The Last House On The Left or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - both of which are invoked - in Hawthorne and Poe, and a whole world prior to comforting, electrical light; eighteenth-century cinematography.