The Blair Witch Project, Tourneur's Dream Film

In modern cinema produces, directors, and story writers are given increasing freedom, through less censorship and more technology, to realize their ideas on the silver screen. It would be interesting to find out how a classic horror artist such as Jacques Tourner would approach filmmaking today. A good example of what I believe would be his ideal film is the one I watched for my independent film assignment, The Blair Witch Project. The Blair Witch Project was written by and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez and was released in July of 1999. The film is presented as a documentary made by three student filmmakers about a legend in the town of Burkittsville, Maryland known as the Blair Witch.

The claim at the beginning of the film is that the students disappeared in 1994 during the filming of their documentary in the woods the movie's producers discovered their film in the woods a year later and are now presenting it to the world. The three students, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams, equip themselves with camping supplies and two cameras and head off into the woods near Burkittsville in search of signs of the Blair Witch. They eventually find themselves inexplicably lost and begin to find evidence of a presence in the woods like piled rocks and sticks bound into strange symbols hanging from the trees. They also begin to hear strange sounds at night like twigs breaking all around them, children laughing, and a baby crying their tent also shakes violently and they run away. When they return to the tent their stuff is thrown about and some has been stolen. Their emotions at this point are running wild and they are very fearful that they will never get out of the woods so they vow to stick together. However, Joshua becomes separated from the group and disappears. The next night they hear his screams of pain but are unable to determine where they are coming from. The following day Heather and Mike attempt to find their way out of the woods so they travel constantly in one direction all day but to their dismay they travel in a complete circle and have to make camp in the same place they started from. That night they hear Joshua's tortured screaming again and this time they vow to go save him. The venture out into the night and follow the screams. They are led to a on old broken down house and the screaming draws them into the basement of the house. The last scene has Heather rushing into the basement where she sees Mike leaning against the wall the camera then falls to the ground and remains there revealing nothing of the events that occurred.

Throughout the course of the film we bear witness to many strange happenings but we never actually see a monster or find an explanation for the events the students experienced. This leaves the story's events subject to the skepticism of the audience and places the film in the genre of the fantastic. The characters in the film eventually become convinced that there is a witch however we are never given any definitive evidence that it isn't a case similar to Deliverance. Even if we assume that there is a witch, Nöel Carroll would probably not classify the film as horror because we have no idea as to the nature of the witch. We do not know what the witch looks like, aside from a dodgy description by a crazy woman in town who claims to have see it, we do not know what the witch's capabilities are, or what categories it fits let alone if it violates them. The witch may just be a crazy person who practices some odd ritualistic religion and therefore would not be a monster. All of these unknowns allow for a large amount of Art-Dread, Cynthia Freeland's alternate for Art-Horror, the emotion that strongly pushes the movie into the horror genre despite the lack of a confirmed monster. The dread increases as the witch further plagues the filmmakers and we increasingly fear what is beyond the campfire and suspense builds as the likeliness that they make it out of the woods decreases and the likelihood of meeting their doom at the hands of a malicious entity increases.

Interestingly enough the "documentary" follows a standard onset/discovery/confrontation variant of the complex discovery plot. The onset occurs as the students begin to get the feeling that they are lost on the first day out. It continues up through the second night when they hear the twigs breaking all around them from this point the plot moves into discovery as the students realize something is out there and it is after them. The plot sums up in confrontation the second night after Joshua disappears when Heather and Mike try to save him from the witch, they fail but the plot component still exists.

If Jacques Tourneur had his way his films probably would be very much like The Blair Witch Project. Tourner did not want to make something that Carroll would call a horror film but would prefer to allow the viewer to envision the monster for themselves or even question whether or not there really was a monster. He probably would also use as few special effects as possible even to the point of not using them at all, like The Blair Witch Project. If the studios had let him have his way they probably could have made even more money on his releases. The Blair Witch Project holds the record for having the highest revenue-to-cost ratio of any film ever released, costing only $22,000 to make and generating a whopping $248,639,099 in revenue for a ratio of 11,301:1. Perhaps the intriguing fantastical style of Jacques Tourneur and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez will rise as a trend in horror films and audiences around the world can be frightened by what they conceive in their own heads.