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.

Jacques Tourneur, A Carroll Perspective

Fear, anguish, disgust, and suspense are all emotions that Jacques Tourneur wants you to feel when you watch Night of the Demon or Cat People. These are also the emotions that Nöel Carroll describes as part of art-horror which is the emotion all horror film directors strive to evoke from their audience. The emotions of art-horror are usually cued to us by the characters we see on screen. They are derived from our reaction to the appearance of the monsters that serve as antagonists and to our perception of the emotions shown by the protagonist characters when they are beset by the monster or are at least threatened with the prospect of its sudden arrival. A good director will use both of these areas to their full effect to art-horrify the audience as much as possible. Jacques Tourneur takes two slightly different approaches to this in the two films we have seen in class, Night of the Demon and Cat People.

First, let us examine the two different monsters in the films and the approaches he uses when portraying them. In Cat People the monster is the woman Irena. Irena is a typical fission monster, described by Carroll as two separate entities that exist together either spatially or temporally, in that at a given point she is a beautiful innocent-looking woman however at other times she physically changes into an actual black panther. What is interesting about Irena is that neither she nor any other main character is sure that she is a cat person, and the audience shares in this mystery for most of the movie. The characters and the audience are frightened by the prospect that the monster might exist rather than an actual monster that terrorizes the protagonists throughout the film. Another interesting facet of the monster in Cat People is that Irena, one half of the dualism that is a fission monster, is completely unaware that she has another side and is very afraid that it might come out. So much so that she will not even kiss her husband for fear of a curse. Additionally, she is not afraid of cats of any kind large or small, so she is not afraid of the monster she becomes but only afraid that she might become it. In Night of the Demon the monster is an unnamed demon that was summoned through a satanic ritual. It is a fusion of many different creatures, it is humanoid but is covered in fur, it has horns like a goat and fangs like a wolf it spews fire and is clearly unnatural and an abomination. It disgusts and frightens every character that sees it, even the one who summoned it. It is the quintessential example of what Carroll describes as a fusion monster possibly only surpassed by our giant tree example from class. The twist with this monster is that we know it exists from the start of the film and are given an exact time as to when it will appear again, the 28th at 10:00pm, in film time. Most of the characters we meet in the film are convinced that the monster is real, with the exception of Dr. Holden who remains skeptical until the very end. The movie studio may have forced Tourneur's hand in showing the monster but he was able to give the audience the same kind of mystified suspense that he achieved in Cat People by introducing a ticking clock concept and allowing some of the main characters to disbelieve the monster's existence for a good part of the movie. In both movies the imagination of what might happen if one were to encounter the monster is what drives the audience to fear it through the course of the film and only in the end do we find out what will happen when a character encounters the monster.

Jacques Tourneur introduces us to a standard set of characters in both films. There is the typical American Joe, Oliver Reed and John Holden; the damsel, Alice Moore and Joanna Harrington; the monster, Irena Reed and the demon; plus an auxiliary character which may have impure intent to die at the end to show the monster's power, Dr. Louis Judd and Julian Karswell. The roles he gives them determine the audience's reaction to their plight. We are happy when the American Joe escapes danger and is comforted by his respective damsel, we are art-horrified when he is under attack from the malevolent forces of evil and we are sad when he loses that which he loves. The damsel also evokes the same response, this is because she and the American Joe are seen as "the good guys" and as moral beings we want to see good triumph over evil. We can perceive their emotions and translate them into ones we can experience as a horror film audience. Some would call this character-identification, Carroll says no. He defines character identification as a duplication of the character's emotions which is impossible because as the audience we know more about the situation than the character knows and we also know that we are watching a film. We react to the monsters in the exact way Carroll says we should we are frightened by the thought of their existence and disgusted by what they are. However, the movie Cat People with its fission monster throws a twist on the standard monster response. The monster, Irena is a character that we have come to know and sympathize with over the course of the film. When she becomes the panther we are horrified by her and are only too happy when she is stabbed, but only a few moments later she has changed back to the sweet girl we knew but now she is mortally wounded. The audience feels fear and sadness at the same time. Finally we have the auxiliary character, a role that is not often explored but always used in horror films. This character is aligned on the scale of good and evil between the protagonist at the extreme good end and the monster antagonist at the extreme evil end but part of neither group. They are the character that is used to display the full brutality of the monster. In Cat People that character is Dr. Louis Judd. He continues to hold the belief that Irena is merely insane long after the other characters are convinced that she really is a cat person until he is ultimately killed by her while trying to take advantage of her. The audience's response to this is probably "ha ha serves you right" but they probably also feel a tiny bit of remorse in that he was an innocent character who was brought into help but got caught up in a situation that spiraled out of control. The opposite can be said of the character Julian Karswell in Night of the Demon, he is clearly evil though not as evil or repulsive to the audience as the demon. He may have summoned the demon but he is horrified by it and would do anything to avoid its wrath. He is responsible for placing the hex on Dr. Holden which drives the whole plot of the movie. His trickiness compels the audience to develop an intense hatred of him. This hatred is a different emotion than the fear of the demon for he is but a man and is not invulnerable, nor is he very threatening looking. Only his death would have delivered a successful climax and satisfying denouement.

Tourneur's movies put an interesting and refreshing spin on the horror genre that is worlds away from the horror films of today. We are left to our imagination for most of the film, there are few special effects to take the guesswork out of the nature of the monster and its goals. In Tourneur's movies the monsters can only be a scary as you make them.