10 år efter alle faldt på halen over The Blair Witch Project har jeg endelig fået set filmen – og jeg må indrømme, at jeg ikke synes, jeg er gået glip af ret meget. Det var muligvis meget overraskende og epokegørende at lave en hel film med håndholdt kamera, men jeg blev nu ikke fanget ind af den “autentiske” stemning her i 2009.
Heather, Joshua og Mike tager ud i Marylands skove for at lave en dokumentarfilm om “the Blair witch”. I starten går det fint, men så falder de over nogle mystiske stenhøje, og om natten forstyrres de af mærkelige lyde. Næste dag går det helt galt, da de mister deres kort, og snart er de faret fuldstændigt vild. Da Joshua forsvinder efter en nat fyldt med lyde og råb, mister både Heather og Mike overblikket, så da et forladt hus dukker op foran dem, er de overbeviste om, at Joshua er herinde. Men er han nu også det?
Jeg var sikkert forudindtaget, før jeg begyndte på The Blair Witch Project, og det kan være noget af forklaringen på, at jeg synes, den var mere kedelig end uhyggelig. Kaster man sig ud i at se den, vil jeg dog på det varmeste anbefale at se ekstra-materialerne bagefter. Her finder man nemlig interviews med Heather, Mike og Joshuas familie og venner og andre involverede i sagen. Og meget kan man sige om filmen, men gimmicken med at lade som om, det er en virkelig hændelse er gennemført.
Darryl Jones skriver om The Blair Witch Project i “Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film“:
“…What ‘Blair Witch’ really capitalized on was its audience’s collective desire to believe in the reality of what they saw… Rather, what the audience was responding to was a series of cinematic cues and devices which traditionally signify ‘reality’: shooting on video rather than film, blurry, jerky, ‘hand-held’ camera-work; the lack of a ‘classic’ three-act cinematic structure; the presence of amateur of semiprofessional actors.
The documentary style of ‘Blair Witch’ serves, indeed, to draw attention to its own fictionality and artfulness in ways in which the ‘neutral’ style of classic American Cinema, though ostensibly more formalized, does not. This it does both stylistically and by self-consciously foregrounding a number of generic conventions.
First, ‘Blair Witch’ is in essence an updating of one of the oldest of all Gothic devices – her the found manuscript of ‘The Castle of Otranto’ is technologically updated as the found videotape…
Second, ‘Blair Witch’ is generically a work of regional Gothic (another city slicker narrative of urban folks in trouble in the country), and thus it opens with a series of mock-interviews with locals, who tell of local legends and atrocities…
The ‘official’ documentary which Heather, Josh and Mike set out to mak, shot in black and white and on film, is inter-cut with the footage of the making of the movie, on video. In this, ‘Blair Witch’s unacknowledged source is a far more notorious quasi-snuff-movie, Deodato’s ‘Cannibal Holocaust’. Like the film-makers in ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, Josh, Heather and Mike perpetually film each other, and film each other filming, consistently foregrounding what the, and the film, are setting out to do.”
Om The Blair Witch Project:
Instruktør: Daniel Myrick og Eduardo Sánchez
Udgivelsesår: 1999
