The Films of 1999: The Blair Witch Project

A student documentarian, Heather Donohue (herself), organizes a project to study the legend of the Blair Witch, a supernatural figure reputed to live in the Black Hills of Maryland.

Along with photographer Joshua Leonard (himself) and sound-man Michael Williams (himself) she heads to the former town of Blair, known as Burkittsville, and begins conducting interviews with the locals.

The locals tell of the history of the witch, Elly Kedward, as well as that of Rustin Parr, a child murderer who is believed to have been influenced by the witch.

The crew heads out into the Black Hills to film Coffin Rock, a site where the witch is believed to have committed brutal, murderous acts against town locals.

Afterwards, the crew becomes lost in the woods, and, day-by-day, night-by-night, comes to believe that the witch is nearby.

After a terrifying visit to a house in the woods, Heather, Michael and Joshua’s odyssey comes to an end.

Later, their footage is found…

I must confess, there are few things that irritate me more than listening to the complaints of horror enthusiasts who vehemently dislike The Blair Witch Project (1999).  I guess that's a failing on my part, but it's true.

Some folks feel they were taken in by the movie's (very successful) hype and marketing. Others feel The Blair Witch Project is a shaggy dog story that never reveals the titular "monster" and ultimately goes nowhere.  There is also that group which, when you name the film, complains about how they got motion sickness from watching it.

So it's a controversial genre film, to say the least. I’ve been thinking about it all week, in light of the sequels, and keep coming back to The Blair Witch Project as a remarkable film, hype or no hype.  

I’ll be writing here about why I enjoy and appreciate the film so much, but the late Roger Ebert also had an elegant and crisp take on the film:

“At a time when digital techniques can show us almost anything, "The Blair Witch Project" is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can't see. The noise in the dark is almost always scarier than what makes the noise in the dark.

I firmly believe The Blair Witch Project holds up as both great horror movie and also as a great, immediate movie-going experience more-than-a-decade-and-a-half after its theatrical release.  

The film is a neo-classic of the 1990s self-reflexive age; a decidedly ambiguous film that either concerns three film students bedeviled by an evil witch in the woods, or three film students be-deviled by their own inability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

I will never argue that The Blair Witch Project isn't chaotic and even a bit messy.

I only argue that it is chaotic and messy in a manner of tremendous significance and artistry; in a manner that very craftily supports the movie's thesis: the idea of chasing your own tail, alone, when your technology can't be of assistance and -- in fact -- hinders you. 

Out in the woods, a movie camera can record your shrieking terror or tape your final confessional, but it can't telephone the police for you, or point in you in the right direction to find your way home.  It can’t even tell you that your home is still out there, somewhere beyond the seemingly endless woods, for that matter.

The manner of the film's first-person presentation reflects this content strongly, this idea that multiple interpretations of reality are possible. 

So The Blair Witch Project sometimes has the audience watching video tape, sometimes watching film stock.  

Sometimes the action is a live event unfolding before our eyes, apparently un-staged. And sometimes, we're watching staged bits of a student's documentary project...deliberately staged (for example: Heather's monologue at Coffin Rock).

All these visualizations successfully fragment the film's sense of reality, making said reality that much harder to pinpoint.  Hoax or horror?  Is the movie about arrogant kids who can't cope with nature; or about kids attacked by a force of the supernatural?

What's the point of the movie's meditation?  

The point is that this was life in America at the turn of the Millennium, and even more so today, in 2016. 

I like to use President Bill Clinton -- impeached in 1999 -- as a perfect example of this facet of our public discourse.  Was he a great commander-in-chief who, through his steady stewardship saved the American economy and brought prosperity and boom times to a nation formerly in recession?  Or was he the cheating "Big Creep" as Monica Lewinsky called him, and worthy of the impeachment the Republicans so gleefully prosecuted?

Or -- and here's the tricky part -- is he simultaneously both things at the same time? 

Meet the moral relativity of the 1990s. 

Again.

By the end of that decade, we had 24-hour news cable stations, the Internet, and even the nascent blogosphere, yet we were no closer to understanding the truth in the important case of this one man, the most famous man in the nation. 

In other words, technology wasn't helping us in the quest for important answers.  We had at the end of the 1990s (and now as well...) more science and technology at our disposal than ever before in the history of our species and yet we couldn't agree even on the most basic facts, let alone the interpretation of those facts.  As a nation, we devoted more hours and more words to the Monica Lewinsky affair than any event in modern history up to that point, yet we remained divided about what it was all about, why it mattered, and what it represented.

In a nutshell, that's what The Blair Witch Project is all about:  the unresolved anxieties of the new technological age (the age of the dot.com boom and bust). 

The movie asks us to pull the narrative pieces together -- pieces of media, literally found footage -- and to seek sense, reality and truth for ourselves.  But the tools aren't up to the task.

And, heck, why is no horrific special effects monster revealed at the end of this motion picture? Well, as I suggested in my review for 2016’s Blair Witch: when was the last time you were certain you saw the real Loch Ness Monster uploaded in a YouTube video? 

When was the last time you had a 100% clarity that you were watching a video of the real Sasquatch on Veoh or Vimeo or whatever? 

Never, you say? 

Exactly right.  

For every such claim of "authenticity" in the Web 2.0 Age, you must now bring your experience, skepticism and technological know-how to the game.  Was the video a special effect?  A green screen? A matte?  Photo-shopped?  Or just very cunningly staged with actors?

This is the bailiwick of The Blair Witch Project.  It dwells meaningfully in that haze of tech-savvy uncertainty; factoring in technology and your experience with the tools you use every day. 

Think you see something?  What did you see?  Are you certain? 

Again, the point of a good, transgressive horror movie is to disturb, to unsettle.  In The Blair Witch Project's deliberate ambiguity, we do feel uncomfortable.  Human life is ambiguous too: we don't always get the answers we want about why things happen to us; why fate can be cruel. 

And conventional movies -- through their familiar and predictable three act structure and process of "learning" -- cheat about that simple fact.  

Movies give us answers.  They show us monsters.  They resolve mysteries.  We are content with this, because our disordered lives feel very structured and orderly when we watch movies.  We get ninety minutes of predictable, ordered existence.

But horror movies, especially decorum shattering ones, have no such responsibility to preserve our peace of mind. 

Quite the contrary.

So The Blair Witch Project is really about those things in our existence that, even with the best technology available, remain disturbingly opaque.  We can put a boom mic on things, and point a camera at them, and still, we can't understand them.

Information doesn't always provide clarity. Sometimes it merely confounds and obfuscates.  Thus the Blair Witch Project also concerns the way that mass media often shields viewers from reality; for better or for worse distancing us from unpleasant facts. 

Late in the film, this theme is given voice.  Joshua picks up Heather's video camera and notes that the image it captures "is not quite reality." 

 Rather, "it's totally like, filtered reality.  You can pretend everything isn't quite the way it is."

He's right. The modern audience is accustomed (nay, conditioned) to the longstanding rules of filmmaking and television production, where the rectangular (or square) frame itself is structured rigorously, and compositions of film grammar symbolize certain accessible and concrete concepts. 

But life isn't like that.  Life is -- at its best -- disordered.  It doesn't exist within a frame; you can't capture life's complexities within a frame or a traditional narrative.  And The Blair Witch Project, with its oft-imitated first person point-of-view and semi-improvised screenplay, reminds us of that.

Like life itself, the movie is gloriously messy, and I love it for that reason.

As I've written before, The Blair Witch Project takes a very simple Hansel and Gretel story and then re-casts it in a technological, modern culture, and suggests that these three filmmakers are lost -- metaphorically and literally -- because technology has failed them.  They are abandoned by a culture that believes science and technology can solve any mystery and explain everything.  The film juxtaposes two ideas brilliantly.  One: science and technology give us the answers to everything. Two: a monster exists in the woods who can’t be detected, let alone understood, by our science and technology.

And the intense images in the film are really but the bread crumbs for the audience to follow in vain; in a circle.  Reality is elusive in those flickering pictures, and finally the only end is silence. Our last act in a technological world is turn away; to face the corner. 

But the camera still rolls.

The Blair Witch Project is a work of art because it reflects the age and questions in which it was made, and because it understands that ambiguity is always scarier than certainty will be. People can complain about the made-up dialogue (and cussing…), or the circular, nonsensical nature of the narrative at points, and yet their complaints are really about one thing, I believe.

It’s about them.

They were taken in. 

They were immersed by the film’s replication of disordered reality. And they resent, on some level; that they were so taken in by experience of the film. They are angry, in fact, that the film went so far as to deny them closure and order, the very thing we seek in films.

The Blair Witch Project terrified them, and didn’t even have the good grace to end with a close-up of the witch, so we could all look at her costume/make-up and realize that what we were seeing, all along, was simple Hollywood fakery.

I would argue too that the film’s success is boosted almost immeasurably by Heather Donohue’s performance.  People have mocked it, imitated it, and derided it, and yet when you watch the film, her terror seems absolutely palpable. It feels genuine. Unforced. True.  

And again, I suspect that those who find horror films simply “fun” don’t want to be confronted with the depth of terror that her performance creates.  Her screams for Josh are blood-curling. We are conditioned for our final girls to be resourceful librarian-in-glasses types, who, finally, overcome their monstrous enemies.  Heather is a smart leader, a resourceful person, and she never, ever, gets close to even understanding exactly what she is up against.  

She doesn’t “win,” and, well, our culture hates those who don’t win. We view them as weak, as failures.  Some of the hostility that Heather has endured in real life is no doubt a result of this viewpoint.

At this juncture, I have probably watched The Blair Witch Project at least a dozen times. And yet when the film gets to that dark house in the woods, my throat still tightens, my pulse still quickens.  I feel this way only about a small handful of horror films that I have watched so many times. 

There are three, actually, I never watch when I am alone in the house: The Exorcist (1973), Halloween (1978), and The Blair Witch Project (1999).

In the case of The BWP, it’s because the film seems relentlessly targeted at the irrational part of the psyche. It strikes at the part of us that fears the dark and knows instinctively --- deep, deep down -- that there are monsters out there in the woods.

Worse, The Blair Witch Project knows that our rational way of seeing the world -- with cameras and the like -- will do us no good when the witch comes to take us.

Movie Trailer: The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The Films of 2000: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

“The following is a fictionalized re-enactment of events that occurred after the release of The Blair Witch Project. It is based on public records, local Maryland TV broadcasts, and hundreds of hours of taped interviews. To protect the privacy of certain individuals, some names have been changed.”

-Opening Card for Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000) followed hot on the heels of The Blair Witch Project’s (1999) record-breaking box office engagement, no doubt hoping to strike again while the iron was still hot.

The result is a horror film with moments of fleeting intelligence and promise, but one that feels, overall, half-baked. Perhaps this is a case in which a little more development time would have benefited the creative team, and allowed for a re-consideration of some of the dodgier moments and ideas.

This horror sequel was directed by Joe Berlinger, a thoughtful documentary filmmaker who has helmed such worthwhile efforts as Brother’s Keeper (1992), Paradise Lost (1996) and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004). 

Berlinger is not a hack, and the fact that Book of Shadows often looks very much like the product of a hack is likely the (unfortunate) result of heavy creative interference.

Still, the second Blair Witch picture suffers from a terrible and unenviable burden: the desperate need to successfully follow-up a surprise and innovative hit movie, and yet somehow not seem like a rerun or cash-grab.

Accordingly, the decision was made not to repeat the found footage formula of the Myrick and Sanchez original.  Frankly, the film’s many deficits may all stem from that single creative decision, because going from BWP’s hyper-reality to Book of Shadow’s traditional “movie” reality is a jarring, and often distasteful experience.  

One cannot escape the sense that reality, or verisimilitude, has been lost, even sacrificed, in the transition from the first film to the second.

Because of its notable stylistic differences from The Blair Witch Project, the sequel feels like it takes place in another universe all-together. It is shot in lush, vivid color, features conventional horror special effects, and casts nubile young women as “eye candy.”  Even the familiar 1980s “vice precedes slice-and-dice” paradigm is reinstated for this film as the young attractive characters smoke weed, booze it up, and get frisky by moonlight…just in time to be manipulated by the Blair Witch.

Frankly, the film looks and feels very much like a 1997-1999 Wishmaster or Hellraiser sequel, and one that might have gone direct-to-video, skipping theaters all-together.  There is nothing visually distinct about the film; nothing to mark it as the next chapter in the Blair Witch mythos.

To describe this another way, Book of Shadows plays out like a very conventional, very generic turn-of-the-century horror film, even though one can pinpoint moments that attempt to ascend to the brilliant “meta”-reality of the source material.

But for every one of those moments Book of Shadows offers up poorly calibrated performances, non-persuasive quick-cuts of gore (meant to up the film’s “visual violence” quotient) and confusion about how this installment interacts with its famous (infamous?) predecessor.

Again, one can argue that Berlinger and the other filmmakers made the only choice possible under the circumstances, deciding not to recreate the unique alchemy of The Blair Witch Project. 

But just look at the results. This is a sequel that feels like a fakey Hollywood movie, and doesn’t really offer anything coherent in terms of philosophy, or even in terms of “in-franchise” universe development.

Book of Shadows is a total misfire, even considering the no-doubt sincere efforts of Berlinger, and the decision to move the franchise in a new and original direction.

We can say now, with sixteen years of retrospect, that the new path offered by the Blair Witch sequel was also the wrong one.

“Perception is reality.”

Less than a year after the release of the hit horror film, The Blair Witch Project (1999),  the town of Burkittsville is under siege by tourists and fortune-seekers.

One such fortune seeker is former mental patient, Jeffrey Patterson (Jeffery Donovan), who has started a tour company dedicated to exploring the Black Hills, called Blair Witch Hunt.

On his latest excursion, Jeffrey takes two writers -- Stephen (Stephen Ryan Parker) and his girlfriend Tristen (Tristine Skyler) -- who are doing research on the Blair Witch and mass hysteria to the foundation of Rustin Parr’s house, which burned down years earlier. It is there, however, that Heather Donohue’s footage was found, setting off the Blair Witch Craze.

Along with a Wiccan, Erica (Erica Leerhsen), and a Goth, Kim (Kim Director), the trio stays the night in the Black Hills. 

The next morning, however, no one can account for hours of missing time, the destruction of Stephen and Tristen’s research, or the destruction of Jeffrey’s video cameras. 

Worse, a group of tourists are discovered dead -- murdered -- at Coffin Rock, and the local Sheriff, Cravens (Lanny Flaherty), suspects Jeffrey and his group.

Jeffrey brings his clients back to his house, an abandoned factory in the Black Hills, and, after finding his footage, attempts to recreate the mystery of their missing time.

Meanwhile, the spirit of a little girl comes to them, and warns the cursed souls they have brought something back from the woods with them; possibly the Blair Witch herself.

“We’re all virgins on this bus.”

The film quote above -- “we are all virgins on this bus” -- is a good shorthand, actually, for78 summing up the deficits and challenges of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. 

After The Blair Witch Project, none of us are virgins on this particular bus ride.  

We’ve all been to the woods, and encountered young people cursed by a reality-bending supernatural entity. We’ve seen the Burkittsville town sign (now ensconced on a wall in Jeffrey’s house), and we’ve been to the Burkittsville-Union Cemetery too.  We’ve been lost in the woods, and we’ve contended with altered states of reality.

So, with the knowledge that there are no virgins on this bus, how does a filmmaker make this story seem fresh and new again, especially after some moments in the original -- including Heather’s close-up confession -- ascended immediately to the level of pop culture touchstones?

Book of Shadows doesn’t really offer a coherent solution for that challenge, so it provides several different alleyways which become, finally, dead ends.   

For instance, the film opens with a title card, which establishes that this is movie a “fictionalized” re-enactment of real events. That means that the film acknowledges, up front, that the individuals in the story, like Jeffrey, are being played by actors. That’s what the term re-enactment means.

Yet when the film purports in its opening scenes to show the audience “real” footage of Burkittsville locals, who shows up there but Jeffrey, played by the same actor (Jeffrey Donovan)?

The two moments, taken in tandem, generate creative dissonance.  Either Jeffrey is an actor playing a role in a fictionalized “re-enactment” or a real individual caught on tape in Burkittsville as the newscast footage indicates.

So which is it?  Because he can't be both.

Secondly, if this is a re-enactment, one wonders why some moments are presented in a highly-stylized, two-dimensional, horror-comic-book nature, and others are not. The youngsters, for example, all seem generally “real,” not exaggerating their reactions or roles. 

But just look at the (godawful) scenes showcasing Jeffrey's stay in a mental hospital. 

They are rife with cockeyed angles, strangely made-up nurses, and doctors, and so forth, all suggesting not any concept of reality, but rather heightened, comic-book reality.  Again, would a re-enactment attempting to recreate a real event adopt this particular visual approach?  More to the point, would it tread, at all, into Jeffrey’s incarceration and treatment by doctors? 

And then consider the performance of Lanny Flaherty as Sheriff Cravens, who plays a stereotypical “hick” law enforcement official.  He is such a walking, talking cliché, it is impossible to consider him “real,” and so again we face a crisis suspending disbelief.  No re-enactment would portray a sheriff in such a fashion. A re-enactment wants to seem real; only a horror movie tries up the ante with such stylized performances.

The Blair Witch Project ran on parallel realities, in a sense. In one interpretation of reality, something supernatural chased down Heather and her friends in the woods.  In another, three kids out in the wild got lost, scared themselves silly, and eventually died, leaving behind a testament not to the supernatural, but to their own hysteria. 

 all, the cameras saw nothing, really, or at least nothing that pointed, definitively, to a witch.

To its credit, Book of Shadows attempts to recreate this meta-reality formula or dynamic through the characters of Stephen and Tristen. 

Stephen believes that the Blair Witch story is indeed one “created by hysteria,” and he even likens Burkittsville to the Bermuda Triangle. By contrast, Tristen thinks the story of the Blair Witch exists in a “place of truth.”

They keep arguing, and that’s the point.  As the film’s dialogue points out, “perception is reality," and each of us possesses different perceptual sets. We select those things that seem to conform to our previous life experience, after all.  Therefore, we each experience life a little differently.  This idea was clearly intended to be the through line of the film, and yet it doesn’t really come through successfully.

At the beginning of the film, for instance, we see “real” life people Kurt Loder, Roger Ebert, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien talking (on their respective TV programs) about The Blair Witch Project.  Then we meet the locals of Burkittsville and the tourists there. All of these individuals perceive a different reality.  For the townspeople, there is a sense of annoyance and bemusement with the tourists.  For the tourists there is a promise of encountering something truly new, something truly different. For the TV personalities, it's all an abstract exercise in either criticism, news reporting, or humor.

The idea, again, is that those on the Blair Witch Hunt are the product of these roiling differences in perception and conflicted psychologies. They go out into the woods, and commit murder.  But they commit murder because either they are hysterical -- worked up into a froth by the movie’s popularity -- or because a witch now controls them.

Overall, Book of Shadows vets its dual reality in a scattershot, incoherent fashion. The skeptic, Stephen, for instance, actually sees a backwards-walking child ghost on the bridge to Jeffrey’s house, and she tells him, literally, that he has brought something back from the woods.

Stephen never tells anyone about this encounter, and stubbornly clings to his belief that the Blair Witch is just hysteria.

Because who is he going to believe: his masters’ dissertation, or his lying eyes?

The film boasts other problems as well. A key plot point is the murder of tourists at Coffin Rock.  We meet these doomed characters just once (and quite briefly at that), so their deaths mean virtually nothing in terms of the story or in terms of audience identification.  There is no drama surrounding their deaths, no feeling of loss.  Nothing at all.

We also never see, recreated in much meaningful detail, the protagonists murdering them. Instead, all we get are these violent quick cuts of gore close-ups. 

These same shots could have been used to establish anybody killing the tourists, so they are not exactly persuasive, or memorable. We see these cuts from the very beginning of the film (even during the opening credits), in intrusive insert shots, and they don’t really connect in a way that carries emotional resonance.  

We don’t know the victims, and since we have seen a ghost literally warn the characters about the existence of something evil, we never interpret the crimes, as the filmmakers hope, as an act of mass hysteria or madness.

Another “track” going in Book of Shadows is surely one of social critique. We meet Jeffrey, who runs a Blair Witch store on-line that sells hats, T-shirts, stick figures, key chains and so on.  He talks about E-Bay, etc.  The point seems to be that there is a sucker born every minute, and that The Blair Witch Project isn’t so much as a movie but rather a 75 minute advertisement for licensed merchandise.

Perhaps this commentary is supposed to be amusing, but I’m not convinced that an official sequel to The Blair Witch Project is the right place for it as a major theme.  Ostensibly, people seeing this film want to see the property treated in a respectful fashion, and learn more about its universe (and central, if unseen, figure: the witch).  

Instead, this movie has the bad taste and temerity to suggest that The Blair Witch Project is responsible for inspiring the (fictional) murders at Coffin Rock. But we all know from Scream (1996), of course, that horror movies don’t make people killers. They make killers more inventive. 

Even in terms of pure plausibility, Book of Shadows comes up a bit short. Every character begins to get a red rash on their torso that just happens to look exactly like the letters of the Pagan Alphabet, and nobody seems really bothered by it.

I would surely be more concerned.

Love it or hate it, The Blair Witch Project was an immersive experience. You were dropped into the woods with those characters, and your hopes and fears rose and fell with each new discovery.  Book of Shadows never casts an aura like that. It never creates a coherent reality.  And without that structure underlying it, the film is never frightening.

The film is smart enough to know that “people just want to see something,” but this sequel never decides, really, what it should show, or what it shouldn’t show.  It doesn’t even really, decide, I fear, what actually happens in the film.  

It’s either a re-enactment or not.  It’s either mass hysteria or not. 

Unfortunately, there are two things we can decide Book of Shadows never is: scary or good.

Movie Trailer: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

Late Night Blogging: Blair Witch Project Parodies

Movie Trailer: The Blair Witch (2016)

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Paranormal Activity (2009)

I am very much aware that many mainstream critics and horror bloggers whom I respect did not care much for The Blair Witch Project (1999). I've listened to their careful arguments and I do understand and appreciate them. But for me, the film remains an absolute masterpiece, even ten years later.

Yes, The Blair Witch Project is a messy and chaotic film, I readily acknowledge that fact. But it is gloriously messy and chaotic; in a fashion that is extremely frightening to me; in a manner that reflects some cogent truths about our human existence (and the American cultural experience...) circa the mid-to-late 1990s.

The film either concerns three students who are bedeviled by their own arrogance and incompetence; or it is a film that concerns three students who are bedeviled by something infinitely worse. It is either a shaggy dog, chasing-your-tail story about three kids who get lost in the woods and come to a bad end, or a story about three kids cursed by a witch and led to their inevitable doom, Hansel & Gretel-style.

Whichever answer is the "right" one, The Blair Witch Project is a living, breathing paean to ambiguity. It is open to multiple interpretations, and the visuals of the film artistically reflect that.

Sometimes we're watching events unfold on film stock; sometimes we're watching them on videotape. Sometimes, the players in the drama "stage" their surroundings (for a mock documentary...), and sometimes they are overcome by the reality of nature (or is it the witch?) surrounding them. In short, the film splinters the narrative both visually and thematically, and then asks us -- as the primary percipients -- to find facts. Because of the tabloid nature of television in the late 1990s, and the increasingly "he said/she said" political-spin of the new 24-hour news cable shows (commenting endlessly on such matters as the Clinton Impeachment), The Blair Witch Project said something about us. It reflected our sudden inability -- even with abundant and easy technology -- to easily see "truth."

Many, many good friends and colleagues of mine complain because The Blair Witch Project concludes without explanation and ultimately reveals nothing. For me, that's not a problem. On the contrary, that's part of the movie's incredible charm and enduring power. Like The Birds (1962) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) the answer to many a riddle is left to the viewer here. The mission is to grab the dangling threads of an ambiguous narrative and somehow tie together strands in hopes of finding meaning or order. This is an activity I cherish as a viewer and as a critic.

This is also, as I've noted, an activity that reflects our human life and explains one reason our existence can be so scary. We don't get answers all the time for why things happen. Often, events that most dramatically affect us happen outside our vision; outside our control. Why do planes crash? Why do some unlucky souls board planes that crash? Why is a person we love afflicted with a brain tumor, or some other disease, when we would prefer it happen to a stranger? In an aggressive, post-modern, technologically-savvy way, that's what The Blair Witch Project is all about: the struggle to assemble a sense of order out of pixelized images that don't make sense in a traditional or conventional way. In the hyper, information-overload era of the Internet and 24 hour news cycles, The Blair Witch Project asked us to fill in the blanks, to imagine the horrors that our eyes didn't actually witness.

Now, a full ten years later, along comes Paranormal Activity, a horror film that utilizes the some m.o. as The Blair Witch Project (found footage and a cinema verite approach to what seems a spontaneous, "real" story). Unfortunately, however, Paranormal Activity goes to absurd lengths to satisfy the still-vocal anti-Blair Witch Project crowd by positioning every demonic "event," -- every horrifying moment in the film -- literally front and center. This way, no one can complain the film doesn't deliver the "goods" that were expected, I suppose.

In truth a sort of anti-Blair Witch Project Project, there is precisely nothing left to our imaginations (or speculation) in Paranormal Activity, a fact which -- for me (and for my wife, who watched alongside me) -- rendered the film intriguing but ultimately powerless to scare us. The film did not rattle either of us in the slightest. I slept soundly last night after viewing the film, my psyche entirely untroubled by what it had witnessed. By contrast, I have watched The Blair Witch Project probably a dozen times over the years and every time I do so, it haunts me. It perplexes me. If The Blair Witch Project comparison doesn't work for you, I also felt the same way after seeing the brilliant [REC] (2007). Hell, I was was even suitably rattled by Cloverfield (2008).

All those films looked like real life unfurling before your eyes, in all its messiness and half-glimpsed madness. But again, not so Paranormal Activity (2009), which spoon-feeds you a traditional, predictable narrative, and satisfies the urgent audience need for "closure" with a sad aesthetic capitulation: A CGI close-up of a demonic visage.

I want it clearly understood: I am not part of some Paranormal Activity backlash. I have no horse in that particular race. I'm simply responding to a film I just watched.

I suspect that a central problem here is that Paranormal Activity is very stagnant in visualization, an admittedly interesting opposite conceit to the shaky-cam aesthetic of Blair Witch, REC and Cloverfield.)

In other words, much of the film is static: photographed from a stationary camera planted firmly on a tripod. Therefore, much of the demonic activity in the film occurs right in front of that unmoving camera, even symmetrically-framed at points. Accordingly, the film's weakest moment finds a Ouija board planchette come to demonic life -- in the center of a frame.

But it doesn't just move imperceptibly. It hops, dances, turns around, and then even catches fire, going up in flames before the camera's unblinking eye. Because of the staging, the moment plays more like an amateur magic trick than an authentically scary moment. If the staging had been different, if we had been forced to seek a less egregious bit of paranormal activity in the corners or background of the frame, the moment would have proved frightening. What's missing is ambiguity...and subtlety.

Later, an invisible demon actually pulls one of the lead characters, Katie Featherston, out of her bed, and, in the same vein, we see it all happen without impediment: perfectly framed, perfectly lit and perfectly clear. Moments later, her boyfriend Micah goes after her, and the demonic entity obligingly tosses his body right into the camera. The camera falls over and still captures the action perfectly, as the demon -- now visible in a human body -- gets ready, literally, for her close-up.

I don't want to be unkind and call this approach Blair Witch For Dummies, but Paranormal Activity is certainly a Blair Witch-style film designed for -- shall we say -- more mainstream audiences. No one will walk out of this film with any questions, uncertainties about what happened or any disappointment that the monster wasn't revealed.

And that's to Paranormal Activity's deficit. The film also shoots itself in the foot by almost immediately attributing the pervasive demonic activity to a "connection" between the unseen monster and Katie. She tells us how a supernatural entity has followed her from house to house since she was eight. Then a paranormal expert interviews Katie and explicitly tells her that it is "basically connected" to her.

Some critical quality of the horror genre is our capacity to "universalize" the horror on screen and identify with it on personal terms. Jaws is so damn frightening because we all swim in the ocean...and can imagine ourselves in the position of a shark attack victim. Ditto Psycho...we all understand the vulnerability of a shower. On and on it goes. We must, eventually, sleep, so Invasion of the Body Snatchers gets under our skin too. Even The Blair Witch Project -- a movie about getting lost in the woods -- harks back to something primal and powerful in our human nature; a fear of what's out there in nature; a fear of being lost.

Almost from frame one, Paranormal Activity goes to great lengths to stress that this horror is happening to Katie and only Katie. We could all show up for afternoon tea or a nightly sleep-over and be treated to quite the show...safe and sound (since the demon doesn't want us.) This plot-point reduces Paranormal Activity to something akin to a freak show.

There's also a huge gap in verisimilitude inherent in the film's aesthetic choices. I'll put it this way: For the last quarter century, hand-held video cameras have been everywhere. They've been affordable...and ubiquitous. And not once -- NOT ONCE -- in a million-upon-a million-instances, has a video camera recorded anything as overtly supernatural as the most simple "paranormal" incident featured in this film (for argument's sake, let's say the bedroom door swinging open of its own volition.)

Yet here, Micah's always-filming camera records doors opening and closing, demonic footsteps appearing in powder on the floor, a shadowy mass moving across the bedroom wall, a Ouija board planchette spontaneously moving and then burning for several seconds. And, finally, the whopper: a human being tugged out of bed, down the hall, by an invisible force. Oh, and the smiley demon face in close-up.

I should stress, these events do not happen at all once. They happen over a period of something like twenty-one nights according to the film's time-line. After the spontaneous explosion of the Ouija board planchette, wouldn't any reasonable person start uploading this footage to YouTube? Or contact the local news? Nothing even approximating this scale of supernatural intervention has EVER been captured anywhere, and yet Micah and Katie remain sequestered and alone in their house, increasingly vulnerable to attacks.

I hasten to add, this decision doesn't seem to ring true with Micah's character: he's in this "game" for the fun and the excitement. "Do you know any tricks to make it happen?" he asks Katie early in the film, considering the whole thing a lark. Later, he insults the demon ("you're worthless!..."I'm calling you out!") after explicitly being warned not to do so. The underlying and implicit idea here is that Micah -- ever the confident day trader -- wants to capture on film that which has not been filmed before and make a name for himself in the process. He's the Balloon Boy Dad, only with demons instead of dirigibles.

So why -- when such incontrovertible proof exists on camera -- would Micah not immediately produce it for the world? What good is all the fancy, expensive AV equipment if he's never going to actually show his footage to anybody? What's he waiting for? An Actors' Studio-style one-on-one interview with a Demon?

I often write here about how form and content should intertwine; how images and visual style should interact meaningfully with a narrative. This is the fatal disconnect of Paranormal Activity: it is mounted as a "realistic," experiential film like Blair Witch in visualization (the static camera and cinema verite-style), but the characters make unrealistic choices. Furthermore, especially during the demonic attack sequences, the camera work proves absolutely untrue to life as we experience it: providing us crystal-clear proof of that which has never, ever been proven conclusively with our technology: the existence of demons. Listen, I've been fisked up-and-down about this topic before from another blogger: I'm not saying that movies that reveal demons, vampires or monsters are bad; I'm saying only that Paranormal Activity suffers from two opposite impulses: it wants to be an experiential, cinema-verite film (like REC or Cloverfield) and yet it also tries to give us the clarity of vision in terms of the supernatural that we are afforded in a more traditional horror film, like The Exorcist, for instance.

Despite these concerns, I don't want to give the impression that Paranormal Activity is a terrible or awful film. I was intrigued throughout, and enjoyed elements of it. But ultimately, it simply didn't scare me.

In fact, the parts of the film I appreciated the most occurred outside the demonic attacks and horror elements. I was fascinated, for instance, by the constant push-pull-tug between Micah and Katie as they each sought to be the dominant partner in their relationship. Micah pushed and pushed, beyond reason, to get his way (again, he's a confident day trader...) and Katie -- who spent her whole life being terrorized by the unseen (a demonic man?) -- permits her boyfriend to terrorize her again with his perpetual disregard for her safety and her wishes. More than anything, Paranormal Activity is about the game of control in a romantic relationship. It's about a woman who has lived her life has a victim and the boyfriend who knows that; and who uses that quality against her to push the agenda that what he wants.

The performers playing these leading roles don't hit a single false note. They are uniformly good and utterly believable. I just wish that the screenplay had trusted them a little more, and not felt the need to rely on perfectly-captured supernatural parlor tricks during the horror moments.

The real crux of Paranormal Activity is revealed early. The ghost hunter asks Micah and Katie if there is any negativity in their relationship. They falsely answer no, and the ghost hunter is relieved. The demon feeds off negativity, he warns. The remainder of the film is actually about this conversation and about this lie: about how totally dysfunctional the Micah/Katie relationship really is. Micah constantly bull-dozes over Katie's wishes and betrays her trust again and again. He lies about the camera being off; he lies about acquiring a Ouija board, and on and on. These "little" lies add up to the very negativity that allows the demon into their house. At the same time, Katie is so passive that she permits Micah to run roughshod over her. He possesses control over her life. And so, accordingly, when her body stands to be possessed, literally, by a demon, it hardly looks like an effort. Once you lose control of your life, control of your spirit isn't far behind.

That is a great, human story. Yet Paranormal Activity is finally so unsubtle, so without nuance in its approach to the horror elements, that the character story is all-but sacrificed. A line is crossed. In this film, our eyes should be scanning every frame, every background and foreground, for signs of Katie's demon. The filmmakers should be making us hunt out evidence of the demon. We should be working hard; engaged.

Instead, the film doesn't trust us to pay attention. The paranormal activity is so obvious, so unreal, so-in-your-face, that the movie sacrifices the cinema-verite approach it covets. I'm delighted the film will spawn many new low-budget genre efforts. I'm thrilled it has launched the career of director Oren Peli, and that we can expect more from him in the future. But I still wish Paranormal Activity had been more....skillful.

Because Paranormal Activity comes across as a Cliff-Notes variation on The Blair Witch Project formula, one designed for those among us who prefer our ghosts served up front-and-center, our answers lined up neatly in-frame, and ambiguity forever banished to the nether-realms. I guess it comes down to this: do you want your horror movies to engage and deal with the questions we face in real life; or do you simply want them to serve as an "escape?" Ultimately, I judge The Blair Witch Project far superior to Paranormal Activity because it engages the questions of real life. Paranormal Activity passes the time well-enough, and has a nice jolt or two, but there's nothing about the demon (and the depiction of the demon) that I ever recognized as "real."

Now Micah? He's another story. I have a friend who's dating a guy just like that. And that's why Paranormal Activity works as well as it does. The characterizations and relationships are indeed very human. It's just the staging of the horror -- of the inhuman -- that totally undercuts the film's suspension of disbelief.