📹 Horrors of Virtual Ignorance - How the Blair Witch Project and House of Leaves Forego Medium Assumptions to Create Unfamiliar Terror

Horrors of Virtual Ignorance - How the Blair Witch Project and House of Leaves Forego Medium Assumptions to Create Unfamiliar Terror

As a horror enthusiast, who has embarrassingly seen little of the greatest horror films going, I’ve been aware of the The Blair Witch Project for some time now. Even disregarding the horror genre, it’s one of the most iconic films of its time. I remember the early days of the internet when my feeble, limited broadband-exposed mind first saw clips from the film and I was truly jarred. There is something irrefutably terrifying about our early exposure to the likes of internet hoaxes, found footage phenomenon, creepypastas, etc. when we are too young to know better or rather now live in an age where it can all be AI-generated anyways. What I’m getting at here, is that when we lack the need for suspension of disbelief, we can truly be exposed to visceral, heart-stopping terror. This very same sensation is captured in the 1999 film, The Blair Witch Project, which as I’m writing this I’ve only just laid down to watch after having fallen ill from post-Dublin Comicon flu.

The film immediately submerges you into a grounded reality, shot entirely from the perspective of the cameras of film students who wish to make a documentary on a folklore story based around the Blair Witch. There is a jovial excitement that surrounds the crew as they interview locals about the hoax and the film builds excitement as they learn more of the nightmare they are soon to submerge themselves into. This is the first crucial building block that sediments the horror of the rest of the film, as the crew of Heather, Josh, and Mike fully embrace the falsity of the Blair Witch with naivety that is later stripped from them. In basic horror theory, people have the primal need to ground things in their own structure or understanding, and by categorizing the Blair Witch as a folklore ghost story, the crew apply their own structure to it, fundamentally backed by the documentary they are filming. As we see later in the film, the attempt to ground the Blair Witch in their own context for the documentary is gradually stripped away from them, and the frenzied insanity exhibited by the characters works entirely in tandem with this.

Many people have often complained about the constant bickering and fighting undergone by the characters throughout The Blair Witch Project however I find the dynamics between the characters to be entirely intrinsic to how the terror unfolds within the narrative. As mentioned before, the crux of the terror in the film is the contradiction between the crew attempting to ground the Blair Witch story within their own understanding; by gathering accounts of stories and then filming their own story. This project is led by Heather, who is by far the most enthusiastic out of the crew about the entire ordeal. As the situation slowly begins to spiral out of control, due to Heather getting the crew lost, Mike and Josh get increasingly frustrated and irritable with Heather. As their foregrounding application of structure to the Blair Witch story begins to tear apart at the seams, they at first redirect this terror through frustration at Heather, whom they falsely blame as the sole benefactor of this narrative - that they must make the documentary about the Blair Witch. However, as we see throughout the film, this feigned frustration is peeled away to reveal true terror as they get further into the woods, and their ignorant attempt at filmmaking is halted.

There is a constant, direct connection made between the filming of events and their place within them. At first, the characters each have no problem filming as they proceed with the intention of foregrounding the Blair Witch narrative in their own documentary. However as the situation spirals out of control, the characters of Mike and Josh show increased animosity towards Heather for wanting to film. They argue with her about this multiple times and even try wrestle the camera off her on occasion. When considering the context they each received, alongside the viewer in the first act of the film, it becomes increasingly clear what is causing this direct frustration with the camera. Interestingly, the camera initially acts as a shield between them and the Blair Witch as they feign ignorance of its existence but as they slowly become more concerned about the actuality of their situation, it is as if they understand that their filming of the documentary implies the existence of the Blair Witch - and therefore confirms them as victims in their own documentary. As the viewer, we get to watch in real-time as the characters realize that their documentary is slowly becoming a found footage horror, and this is where the true terror of The Blair Witch Project resides.

This very same phenomenon can be seen in House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (which is an absolutely phenomenal book that I cannot recommend enough, I don’t want to bloat this essay with praise but just know I wrote my college thesis on this book it’s that good, read it). Throughout House of Leaves, we see the bizarre otherworldly phenomenon of a shifting, living house that exists on Ash Tree Lane. It begins simply with the dimensions of the house altering inexplicably, but then exponentially spirals out of control as additional doors and rooms spawn in the house until a passageway into a dark, unexplainable labyrinth spawns beneath the house. The events of the book follow Will Navidson, a photojournalist, who attempts to document the phenomenon in a documentary titled The Navidson Project - yes, the comparisons are not that nuanced. Within House of Leaves, the reader is lulled into the suspended belief that The Navidson Project exists as an actual film, as characters within the narrative who grant us additional perspectives such as Johnny and Zampanò actively discuss. However, the validity of this is also questioned by Johnny who claims to not find any evidence of the film's existence, while Zampanò writes endless manuscripts about the film. Just like with the Blair Witch, the characters of the text, alongside the audience, are exposed to the uncertainty of the existence of the given paranormal phenomenon of the text. This way, as they are gradually exposed to the truth of the narrative, we are helplessly plunged, alongside the characters, into the engulfing terror now no longer kept at a distance behind a camera lens.

What results from this is an entirely cathartic horror experience, where the process of consuming the text’s narrative forces us to align perspectives with the protagonists and as such experience their descent into turmoil as they face the undeterminable logic of their situation. When shots linger in darkness with nothing but distant sounds in The Blair Witch Project, we feel the helplessness that the characters feel, when Heather screams at something off screen we can only imagine alongside Josh or Mike what it is she sees. Ultimately, like the protagonists, we are left with the chilling feeling like we are seeing something unfold that we weren’t intended to see. This, again, is reinforced through camera work such as the final shot of the film where the camera plummets and leaves us questioning what happening in that house in the woods. In House of Leaves, the medium too is utilized to instill a cathartic horror experience. Throughout the text, the words on the page shift with the subject matter of the narrative. As the labyrinth shifts for the characters, so do the words. Elongated hallways become words narrowly stretched across pages, tight vent-like passageways force the words into minute cubes of text claustrophobically packed into the center of the page. This mirrors the hopelessness felt by the characters as our reading experience entirely mimics their traversal of the house. As such, when passages describe long desperate segments of characters losing their minds in the dark abyss, like The Blair Witch Project, it feels as if we are there with them, exposed to the dark, grimy terror of the situation.

As I touched upon at the beginning of this essay, there is something truly terrifying about the unfamiliar, that which we do not understand. In the early days of being on the internet, my exposure to certain horror indies like Slender: The Eight Pages or Imscared truly struck chilling fear into me because I had never seen the likes of it before, and with these examples in particular they really break the conventions to instill a sense of seeing something you aren’t meant to. Imscared in particular does something truly interesting in forcing the player into the position of protagonist, forcing them to edit the game files to influence the game. This sense of fourth wall breaking for the time was ingenious and like I’ve been mentioning, strips us of our initial foregrounding structure of the experience. When Imscared does this, it forces you to play by its rules, and suddenly you're stripped of your own logic. House of Leaves does this by manipulating the text in unconventional ways, mimicking the shifting nature of the house itself, and The Blair Witch Project does this through feigning the found footage as a documentary which only later shifts into a spiraling horror narrative.

I didn’t want to spend time divulging into the theories that surround The Blair Witch Project, as there are multiple different exaggerations and interpretations, and rather just wanted to take a straightforward approach to dissect the narrative on display. However, it’s worth mentioning that the ambiguity of the narrative allowing for so much theorizing is almost a meta-narrative within itself, as we see similar theorizing and assumptions made about the Blair Witch at the beginning of the film. Whether you think Josh and Mike did it (Thanks to MatPat for that one, happy retirement, your theories will be missed), that the Blair Witch is actually real or that it’s all a big time travel phenomenon (yes, that’s an actual theory) there is no denying that the mere existence of The Blair Witch Project as a film, both within our world and the narratives world, spurs a sense of dreading curiosity that in itself is the core driving motif of the film itself. This is one of the reasons I find the film to be one of the best of its niche, as the phenomenon of found footage not only adds to the dynamics of the viewing experience, but to the dissection of the narrative itself. While I understand many find the film overrated, or the characters annoying, I personally found that for the time and context of its release it perfectly set a precedent for the horror it invokes, as if you were to find the film not knowing of its cult following, that it would merely seem like disturbing, actual found footage. With that, I hope you have a damn good one.

Good night and good luck.