I'm only 9 years behind: Blair Witch Project (OPEN SPOILERS)

GingerOfTheNorth writes:

> 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.

Furthermore, Burkittsville is part of the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. If you walked for five days (as the three people in the movie did), you’d either cross the Potomac or be on the Mall. Maybe they could use that to orient themselves - the Washington Monument is to the west and the Capitol is to the east. (And despite the fact that I knew all that, I still found the movie scary.)

Incidentally, the forest scenes weren’t actually shot in Burkittsville but in Seneca Creek State Park near Gaithersburg.

Except for the part with the house, which I mistakenly discovered while on a ROTC training exercise in Patapsco State Park. We were in the van, headed back to campus and one of the Captains said, “So, did that house that you guys were in seem familiar at all? Well it should, it’s the one they used for Blair Witch.” Upon reviewing the film and other information online, we discovered he was right. That had me a little freaked out for a while.

The ending scared the hell out of me, I’m not ashamed to admit it. The shaky cam didn’t bother me at all, but it probably made a difference since the only times I’ve seen the movie is on a TV screen (but, for what it’s worth, Cloverfield’s shakiness didn’t bother me).

I think one thing that makes a difference as to whether a person is scared by the movie is the setting. What I mean is that all my life, I’ve lived on the outskirts of a thick forest. I have lots of memories of exploring the woods with friends, telling ghost stories, hearing shit in the woods that I couldn’t explain at the time. So, to see these people get lost and freak out struck a nerve with me. Hell, man…the woods are freaky.

Now I’m waiting for someone to mention how they were born in woods, raised by a family of sasquatch and that I’m just a sissy. But I’m telling you, growing up where I did made a difference for me watching this movie.

If there were any question about that, “Deliverance” answered it once and for all. :eek:

I’m shorter than the rest of the family, and I would never call anyone a sissy.

:wink:

The movie worked for me as well.

I think it is one of the best horror movies ever made.

:slight_smile:

I do think this movie would have been better to see in a theater.

The Last Broadcast is WAY too clever for its own good. I still can’t even think about the ending without wanting to scream over how stupid it was.

Whiteknight, please be careful in your quoting. GingerOfTheNorth didn’t write:

> Incidentally, the forest scenes weren’t actually shot in Burkittsville but in
> Seneca Creek State Park near Gaithersburg.

I wrote that.

There is something that bugs me (and you wouldn’t have seen in a theater).

I have it on VHS. One of the scariest part of the movie, for me, is at a point when the three are in the tent sleeping and hear something. At one point, the closed-captioning says “Child laughing” or something like that.

No! NO! If this succeeds as a film, it does so because you might wonder, ‘Was that a child laughing?’ Or you might miss it. Or whatever. But don’t show me what you wanted me to notice or hear or anything. Don’t take me out of the ‘wtf was that?’ alone-ness and give me a map.

It breaks the willing suspension of disbelief for me. Tell me it was “strange voices” or something.

“Curse of the Blair Witch” is also very good, if you don’t have it. And in case you cybernauts haven’t found it already: http://www.blairwitch.com/

I will say that BW2 disappointed. I was way behind the curve on the phenomenon so it had come and gone before I knew it was even in theaters. But I had to buy it, with no indication of whether it was good or bad beforehand; that’s just how I felt, after BW.

I can’t find it now but there was a cool website that redeemed BW2 some. In the film, for instance, there was a part where a character goes into a river (to bathe IIRC). OK, necessary transition or whatever. Movie moves on, yadda. But if you went to the website it showed that scene but dimmed the rest of the image while highlighting, in the river, how the BW stick figure (the ones they found all over, in the trees, in the original) was right there in the water as a shadow. Kinda spooky/subliminal, the stuff you’d miss. And it made me wonder what I might have missed in the original.

I’m only 9 years behind…

So Bill Clinton is still Prez, the Dow is booming, and Iraq is a faded memory not a living nitemare? Can I join you?

It definitely worked for me. The ending still freaks me out just to think about, even though it’s been 8 years or so since I last watched it. Plus, it really added to the whole experience since I had an ex-boyfriend who looked EXACTLY like Mike.

The bloody bundle tied up in Josh’s shirt still puzzles me. What was that? A tongue? Some teeth? And then they hear Josh screaming in what sounds like extreme pain. :eek: That part was almost as scary as the ending to me.

What made the movie more interesting to me was all the internet buzz–back when the internet was relatively new. It was fun to read all the theories and speculation.

I went to see it in theatres, having no idea what it was about - I thought it had something to do with Linda Blair or something Exorcist related…
The little bit I gathered from it was that it actually WAS tapes found in the woods, and I had no real reason not to believe that, so I was terrified, especially at the end, when I was literally climbing my gf’s arm.
Good Lord, I was gullible…

S^G

It looked like teeth plus blood and maybe some tissue to me; the Wiki article said that they got teeth from a local dentist.

They promoted it at film festivals and such as if it was a real occurrence, so I wouldn’t be too embarrassed.

Unless you were under a spell. Like they were.

I think this is, hands down, the biggest strike against BW. The cursing annoys some; the shakycam annoys others. But what most people get hung up on is the idea that the students were too stupid to find their way out. It doesn’t matter how smart or dumb they were. They were never going to get out. The witch, or whatever the evil was, was playing with them and breaking their spirits before bringing them to the house.

I wonder if it would have been more effective if the characters had not been students of anything, but had been experienced hikers who’d heard of this mysterious stretch of forest that supposedly no one ever left alive, said “We can beat that!”, brought the camera with them to prove it, and found that their tracking skills counted for nothing. (Heh…combine that with “Into the Wild” and I think you’ve got something!) As it was, the audience started with the assumption that these three slackers couldn’t find their way out of an empty room, so the something’s-REALLY-not-right-here effect was lost.

What aggravates me is people who think I didn’t like it because I didn’t get it. Yes, I did get it: the guy was standing in the corner the same way Rustin Parr’s victims had to. And…it wasn’t a worthwhile payoff. BFD.

There’s nothing wrong with the premise of the movie; all it needed was one of them “script” things. (And it’s possible to achieve that amazing “people talking at the same time” effect even when saddled with a script and an active director. I think it’s called “overlapping dialogue”. You can write it right into a screenplay.)

Or, if they’d had truly gifted improv actors, it might have worked. The best bit of improv in the movie came from a toddler – in the “interviews” in town at the beginning, when a woman is talking about the fictitious Blair Witch legend, the little girl she’s holding becomes upset and puts her hand over the woman’s mouth.

I like that idea. I also like the theme of starting with typical modern, smartass, privileged young people, and letting it gradually dawn on them that they’re in a situation where all their sarcasm and pop culture references mean exactly nothing; gradually descending into pure animal terror and desire to survive, the exact same emotions our caveman ancestors must have felt back in the 1950s.