I thought Blair Witch was good, but I didn’t know it was fake when I saw it. In fact I saw it long before all the hype started and I didn’t know ANYTHING about it (I snuck into a test screening).
Even though knowing it it fake does not lessen my oppinion of the film, it is in fact totally fake. This summer I was working at the Angelika Film Center in NY, one of two theatres in the country that began running the film three weeks before it was released nationwide, creating a kind of perpetual premiere atmosphere. Mike and Josh and Heather would come by all the time, as well as the directors. I have talked to Mike, and I’m fairly certain he’s not dead. Dead people have more of a dead fish handshake. In closing:
Mike = not dead
Heather= not dead
Josh = haircut, but not dead
Blairwitch = not true
How freaking stupid are people? How could anyone actually think… man! These filmmakers are truely brilliant. The movie was great, believable, imaginative. But how could intelligent people actually think this happened? IT’S A FREAKIN’ WITCH! (nothing against witches, but this is a fantasy witch, not an actual Wiccan) They don’t exist. This is the kind of mentality that thought the Roswell Alien Autopsy was real.
The article said: ‘“Star Wars” was supposed to be the big hit of the summer season. For some upstart little indie film to knock it out of the ballpark was unheard of.’
The Phantom Menace has so far made $462.8 million dollars and is the third highest-grossing film ever. It’s still in theaters.
The Blair Witch Project has made $139.5 million dollars and is coming out on video in the next couple weeks.
While the Blair Witch Project was more profitable, Star Wars was clearly the bigger hit. And by no means did the Blair Witch Project “knock Star Wars out of the park”. For one thing, the Blair Witch Project spent no weeks at number one.
Of course, adjusted for inflation, Phantom Menace isn’t even in the top 10, and by all accounts its box and its merchandise sales were disappointing. Not that Lucas has to go on welfare or anything, but the latest film was the least of the bunch so far, both critically and financially.
And of course, there are more ways of gauging a movie than financially. The point I was trying to make was that “Phantom Menace” was supposed to be THE movie of the summer; probably the most widely anticipated movie of all time. It was all movie-goers were supposed to be talking about this year. But it’s thunder got largely stolen because all people could seem to talk about was TBWP. Even though “Phantom Menace” may have won the box office wars, TBWP,in my opinion, won the marketing and public exposure wars. There were, I believe, more water-cooler discussions about whether TBWP was true and what actually happened in the movie than about wondering if little blondie really grows up to be Darth Vader. I think a lot of people went to see Star Wars because they felt they HAD to see it because it was, well, Star Wars. And whether people said they loved TBWP or hated it … as someone once said, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Only in the Hollywood version. There were really four: the Wicked Witch of the East (DOA), the Wicked Witch of the West, the (unnamed) Good Witch of the North (who greeted Dorothy on her arrival), and Glinda, the Sorceress of the South (whom Dorothy &co met only after a long southern journey following the Wizard’s departure, which the movie completely omitted).
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Yes, the movie combined Glinda (good witch of the south) with (unnamed) good witch of the north. I always enjoyed the scene where Dorothy asks the GW of N for advice, and she puts a little slate on her nose and spins around, and writing appears on the slate: “Dorothy should go to the City of Emeralds to see the Wizard.” The image of the witch spinning around with a slate balanced on her nose has stuck with me.
On the other hand, after the first book, the good witch of the north sort of disappeared from sight, and Glinda was the only good witch in Oz.
The way you can tell the diff between a fantasy witch and a wiccan is whether she can balance a little blackboard on her nose.
I must thank the filmmakers and PR creators for inadvertantly providing me a useful tool. I was talking to a woman who came to my historical museum a couple weeks ago. She passed along a few historical bits and pieces of info, which I mentally stuck into my likely-but-unproven file. Then I overheard her talking to one of her friends about how the Blair Witch was only a movie but the actors were kept there against their wills and various bad things did happen to the participants. That saved me the trouble of checking out the local history facts she told me.
Futhark is an pre-European alphabet upon which Norse runes are based. To be honest, I don’t know too much about it, and a quick web search I did only came up with some modern wiccan and magickal sites. But if you look quickly at the walls of the house they came across at the end of the movie, you’ll see some lettering on the walls along with the bloody handprints. That lettering is in futhark.
Ah, thanks. I had seen the lettering on the walls and connected it to the runes supposedly found carved on the people found on Coffin Rock in the legend, but it never occured to me to ask what the runes were. Thanks.
“Drink your coffee! Remember, there are people sleeping in China.”
Only in the world where “The National Enquirer” regularly wins the Pulitzer prize.
“Futhark” is the names of the first few runes pressed together into a word. It’s Runish for “abc”.
And Futhark and runes (which, if I didn’t make the point clear before, are the same thing) are most certainly not “pre-European”, whatever that means. (It sounds like some of the fake anthropology the Nazis used to peddle.) They are based on one of the Mediterranean alphabets, perhaps the Etruscan (a daughter of the Greek alphabet and the mother of the Latin).
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Gee, John, your answer is right, sort of. Checking Comptons Interactive Encyclopedia under futhark, we find:
Runes (also called futhark), the earliest alphabet of the Germanic peoples; probably first used about 2nd or 3rd century AD; derived from Greek or Latin but modified for easy cutting on wood or stone; term used also for secret writing or charm;
And;
Some girls and most boys learned to read and cut runes, which were the letters of the ancient alphabet used by the Norsemen. Just as the English alphabet is often called the ABCs, that of the Norsemen was called futhork after the first letters
fu.hark ( Im not doin the phonetic stuff) the 1st six letters f u [ a “p” with an extended verticle stroke- the equivelent of th]o r c (=k): the runic alphabet.
From this is seems using the term to denote the runic alphabet is proper and correct, although you are correct in noting its origin.
The term pre-European seemed prety clear to me,refering to the time before Europe was organized into nation states as it exisits today. The Roman Empire split in 385, by 410 the Romans had abandoned Britain, and Germanic tribes pushed them back towards Rome. The roots of modern Europe can be traced to Charlemagne, who had founded his empire by the 9th century; the Treaty of Verdun (843), Dividing the Frankish Empire between Charlemagne’s grandsons, was the start of France and Germany, and what I would think of as the “start” of Europe as a seperate entity. Thus, IMHO, pre-European means before this time.
Much of the debate about The Blair Witch Project seems to revolve around whether it was scary or not. I wasn’t particularly scared, but I thought that (for most of its length) it was a terrific dark comedy about self-absorbed filmmaker types caught way out of their element (and as a sometime self-absorbed filmmaker type myself, I should know :)). The hype had pretty much turned me off, but it was a pleasant surprise to find humor in the film. Does this make me incredibly sick?
Nope. I made a replica of one of those stick figure things hanging from the trees for Halloween using some great damp pieces of bark and weeds from Yosemite. Hung it on the front porch underneath a black light.
It sure scared the heck out of those trick-or-treaters who were taller than me … I think I’ve found a way to keep them away.
Hey, heretic, let’s not be too hasty. I mean, I know, dancing hippos in a tutu, those are totally fictional. But the dancing ostriches, surely those were real?
Songbird: Sounds like the right kind of sick to me.
Coincidentally, we did the same thing for Halloween decorations at the youth center where I work. Kinda fun to see normally cool and blase teenagers come running up to you, seriously insisting that if you hang that stuff up, you’re going to summon something evil.
