The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

10. The Blair Witch Project, Macbeth, and the Indeterminate End

10 The Blair Witch Project, Macbeth, and the Indeterminate End Eric S. Mallin Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings. —William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1.3.137–38) THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999), directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, exploits certain limitations of the film medium by setting them against our imagination’s resistance to limitations. As most everyone knows by now, this wildly successful faux documentary follows three student filmmakers—actors Heather Donahue, the “director ”; Joshua Leonard, the cameraman; and Michael Williams, the sound engineer—into the woods outside Burkittsville, formerly “Blair,” Maryland . They search there for the truth behind the legend of the Blair Witch, a figure (even in the movie’s terms) of uncertain provenance and debatable historicity. The Witch may or may not exist, haunt the woods, and terrorize the three youths as they become wretchedly and irretrievably lost in darkness. The “project” is the record of a spectacular failure, film footage that the crew could never complete, which paradoxically secures its success as a documentary: to grasp some definitive information about the Blair Witch, the filmmakers need to encounter this ineluctably hostile force. The movie pretends cleverly to be the last word in documentary realism because its reality is so great that the filmmakers could not survive it. Or could they? While unsteady camera work and inelegant, apparently unscripted conversation bolster the movie’s pretense of unmedi105 ated recorded truth, the fates of the filmmakers, and simply what happens on the level of plot, remain unclear. The conviction of “reality” grows and tracks with the movie’s refusal to show any agent of terror or even any unambiguous shape of terror’s material effects.1 Out of hanging stick figures, ominously placed clumps of stones, and a mounting sense of the characters’ helplessness the film forges its frights, and something more: it makes the fact of not seeing the proof of a malevolent otherworldly presence. The movie lures the viewer into “horrible imaginings” of the unseen, the occulted. And so it shares a noble representational lineage. I believe we can understand much of what happens in The Blair Witch Project through analogy with an older, evocative text of the uncanny : Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As a progenitor of the horror genre, Macbeth haunts high and mass cultural texts alike, providing an archetype for equivocal meanings in the context of supernatural events.2 While Shakespeare’s stage business is never as fuzzy as the events of The Blair Witch Project, the play almost obsessively thematizes the literal and moral miasma, the radical uncertainty, that envelops Scotland at the end of Duncan’s regime: “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” the witches famously intone, “Hover through fog and filthy air” (1.1.11–12); and Lady Macbeth, surprised by her own guilty conscience, says in her sleepwalking reverie near the end of her life, “Hell is murky” (5.1.36).3 The movie does not remake or consciously reformulate the primary semantic energies of Shakespeare’s play, and it contains no direct references to the Scottish tragedy.4 Yet through the confluence of witchcraft, interdicted knowledge, childhood, the equivocal, and other thematic clusters , Macbeth may be said to haunt, or at least echo in, the recent horror film. Both texts are about partial truths, paltering revelations. Witchcraft or occult stories are always familiars of the uncertain. Interviewing two fishermen about the Blair Witch legend early in the film, Heather receives confirmation and contradiction. The first man says, “Anybody worth their salt around here knows that this area has been haunted by that old woman.” The second responds testily, “Oh, that’s bullshit.” The indeterminate character of the myth thus receives play from the beginning of the movie, reinforced by the physical position of the men here: they are fishing standing back to back. Further interviews with witnesses of varying credibility similarly disrupt certitude. A woman holding a small child claims to have seen a 106 ERIC S. MALLIN documentary about the Blair Witch on the Discovery Channel;5 but then as she tells the story, the child reacts badly: The creepy [little girl puts her hand on her mother’s mouth, mother pulls the hand away], the creepy story that I heard was that two men were out hunting, they were camped near the cabin she’s supposed to haunt [child cries now: “No! No! No”], and they disappeared off the face of...