So I finally watched the film on TV. Some nice chills.
My questions are (and I don’t think we need to “spoiler” answers 
):
What happened in the end? Was Michael (Josh?) re-enacting the child murderer’s method of having one child stand in the corner while he killed the other child?
Also, was there a white figure standing in the woods in the “ohmigod we’re at the same log again” scene? My TV screen is small . . .
There was no reason I could see for Mike to be standing in that corner unless he and Josh had conspired together to do a number on Heather’s psyche.
I hadn’t heard about the figure before…Where in the woods was it?
I think I meant Josh? Who was the man was who was standing in the corner of the basement when Heather came down and (presumably) got whacked?
I thought I saw a white figure in the far background when the group came back to the same log they started at the day they were desperately “going south.” Could just be my small TV.
No film has ever gotten a response like this got when it played ay my local fleapit. The crowd HATED it. At one point, where the gang happen across a dead mouse, and Heather Muses “What killed this mouse?”, one guy screamed
“A BIGGER FUCKING MOUSE, YOU STUPID HOOR”
Come the end, there was going to be a RIOT. Me, I thought it was terrifying, I was practically paralysed with fear when I saw Mike standing in the corner. In fact, througout that whole last sequence in the house. Note for whoevers remaking this in ten years; less woods, more house.
I think the idea with the ending was to let people draw their own conclusions, and get as scared as they like; I don’t think theres a “definitive” explanation for whats going on. But yeah, my two cents- the evil spirit of the child killer is influencing mike, causing him to stand in the corner as heather is killed. Fuck, thats just giving me chills thinking about it.
The very last scene was the only really scary one for me; I agree, they really had something there.
As for the rest - this is why good improv is hard. They must have said the word “fuck” in nearly every sentence, at least once. I have nothing against swearing, honestly. It’s just that they were so repetitive. I think with better actors they might not have needed the “instructions at the beginning of the day to go to a certain place and check out the scene laid out for them, no real script” method of making it look more realistic, and they could have used a script then too.
A note to everyone who doesn’t live in Maryland: The woods near Burkittsville are about a mile wide. Anyone who gets lost there, probably is not smart enough to live.
Okay that quote really had me laughing.
When I saw the film I was lost at the whole “let’s follow the river, oh no, we’re back where we started” bit, given that it would defy the laws of geography and physics and all.
I saw it in the theatre back in the day. The things that worked for me was actually that the first half was as dull as dirt and really wore me down, and the shakey-cam made me feel ill.
I was tired, I was uncomfortable and starting to feel sick, and I was getting sick and tired of those whiney little turds on screen who were stupid, and lost walking in circles, and ditched their own map, the dumb assholes. Then I sort of tweaked that my crappy experience at the movies was paralleling their crappy experience in the woods. They were lost, tired, and hungry. They were bickering because each one of them was getting sick and tired of the other two whiney little turds, and then that stupid asshole ditched their map! I hated the whiney movie and wanted it to end. They were hating their whiney selves and wanting to just go home.
So by the time things got weird in the movie, I was physically starting to really sympathize with them (feeling sick and tired). And by then, as an outdoorsy person, I was also starting to sympathize with the fact that there is a certian point in which “Boo-hoo, we’re lost and it sucks!” becomes “Oh shit, we’re lost to the point where we may actually be in jeopardy”.
When Josh started crying because “there’s blue goo on all my stuff”, I remember all the times I was so over-tired that when the dollop of toothpaste fell off my toothbrush, it almost brought me to tears.
The movie did work on a psychological level for me, because if the one guy was “taken” then why didn’t he put up a fight? (it’s not cool when you’re lost in the wilderness to slplit up. And how could the other two not have heard him leave? Did he leave willingly? Then why? Why didn’t he take any of his gear? Is that him in the woods? If he’s lost why isn’t he calling for help? Why not call Heather’s name too, he’s just calling Mike?
I though the end as effective even though I also thought “Good grief, this is like one of those bad stories you tell around a campfire with a flashlight under your chin: ‘And when they got home… there was a hook stuck in the car door!..’”
I’ve never rented it because it would suck on a small screen, and I really don’t care to sit through the long, exhausting trek through the woods again. And the pay off now, would totally read ike a campfire tale.
They wound up where they started because evil, supernatural forces were at work.
I’ll agree with the crowd that as a highlight reel it’s creepy and scary but as a whole movie it just drags.
And when a movie is 78 minutes long, and people still say it drags, that ain’t good. The early parts in the town bore me the most.
And when a movie is 78 minutes long, and people still say it drags, that ain’t good. The early parts in the town bore me the most.
I bought into it. Oh, there was too much swearing but it didn’t really distract me from the movie (Knocked Up was another film that had way too much swearing in it, so much so that I walked out of the film after another profanity-laced tirade at the gynecologist). The acting was “bad”, but then, in the film the kids weren’t necessarily acting so I could pass that off.
And the ending was the first time I ever had nightmares (well, one nightmare) about a movie.
What’s your interpretation of the ending?
I hated the damn film. Not because it made me sick, but because it made me bored. Here’s a brief recap:
[ul]
[li]Morons get lost in the woods. “The woods”, in this case, consists of something between a highway median and a smallish city park.[/li][li]Morons alternately scream at each other, jiggle the camera, whine at each other, attempt to juggle the camera, and whine into the camera. Are these people supposed to be film school students, film school dropouts, or random morons picked up because they managed to get lost on the way to the laundromat?[/li][li]Morons find sticks tied together by a bored scout troop or, hell, roving packs of knitters from the state school.[/li][li]NONSENSICAL FREAKY ENDING YOU CAN’T SEE BECAUSE MORONS FORGET HOW A CAMERA WORKS! WOO! BOO! SCARY! There are ways to make the audience’s imagination work for you. There are ways to make a jumbled mass of underexposed film and muddy, incoherent sound that doesn’t advance the plot so much as sit its fat ass in the way and refuse to budge. This is so far in the second category you could reverse it end-for-end and lose absolutely nothing. John Lennon would be proud, but the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock has planned a horrible revenge for when the morons responsible join him in eternity.[/li][/ul]
I actually got roped into seeing this mess in a theater. I guess I’m still a bit bitter.
I watched Curse of the Blair Witch on the Sci-Fi Channel shortly before the movie came out. It gave me such horrible nightmares that I decided to skip the movie itself.
About a year later I finally saw The Blair Witch Project on TV. There were a few scenes that got to me, but overall I wasn’t impressed. IMHO, the TV mockumentary was much better than the actual movie.
Did the BW filmmakers go on to bigger an better things after that?
I don’t know. The green arrow marks Burkittsville. It looks like a fair bit of woods to me.
Trust me, I am from Frederick. Ginger is right. As always.
Actually, they got sunk in a pretty spectacular fashion.
The two directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, were rising stars after *The Blair Witch Project *came out–they were supposed to be headed for great things in the future. But the studio that produced Blair Witch wanted to rush out a sequel really fast, while Myrick and Sanchez were working on a smaller flick called Heart of Love.
So the studio hired another director, Joe Berlinger, who was new and ill-adapted to the genre–and then made drastic changes and cuts to the filmed scenes, pissing off Berlinger in the process. The resulting movie, Book of Shadows, bombed soundly with the critics (13% at Rotten Tomatoes).
And even though it wasn’t their fault, Myrick and Sanchez couldn’t get another movie produced for at least seven years.
I thought the movie was damn impressive, all the more so for its refusal to offer any definitive explanation or closure. Virtually all movies about the supernatural operate within clearly established boundaries, given the initial premise of ghosts or whatever. Generally there’s a clear agent driving the action, and a motive to the plot that is apparent by the end of the film.
But I think The Blair Witch Project paints a much more compelling portrait of what an actual “paranormal event” might actually feel like. There’s never any clear sense of what is happening or why. Is there even a witch? What the hell is the deal with the sticks? There are no attempts at flashy effects, merely the reactions of the characters when they encounter the impossible-- the stream they’ve been following has somehow led them in a circle.
I don’t know how true the stories were when the film first came out, that some people thought it depicted an actual occurrence; but I thought it was extremely evocative and I could see people falling for it, just as they supposedly fell for BBC’s “Ghostwatch” broadcast. I’m fond of the pseudo-documentary format, and up until Blair Witch there really weren’t any notable horror films that used the device aside from Cannibal Holocaust.