Word: witching
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...good or bad that as viewers come out of a horror movie, they can't decide exactly what happens in the final shot (hint: recall what the witch made the kids do) and who the villain is (one guess: the missing filmmaker)? We'll say good, that ambiguity can coexist with atrocity. The film also plays upon the horror genre's attraction-repulsion for the filmgoer: what-happens-next? vs. why-am-I-watching-this? It makes canny use of dramatic longueurs. It's scary even when nothing happens, because something awful might, and, eek!, right now! Anticipation...
...Blair Witch, like any movie, has many antecedents. It is, by our casual count, the 873rd horror movie about youths who go into the woods on a lark and come out on a slab; the 4,982nd in which people disappear in reverse order of star quality; and the zillionth in which kids are frightened into a state of suicidal stupidity. Horror's evil creatures don't have to be very cunning when the heroes keep wandering in circles or deeper into the old dark house...
...confess he'd jettisoned the map, the others wouldn't know until he said it. And at night, when the actors were in their tent, says Sanchez, "we'd go out on our raids and scare them--wake them up, leave things behind. We basically played the Blair Witch...
...something else attracted critics and the first knowing viewers to Blair Witch, and that is the film's bold sense of withholding. Horror, after all, is a genre that gravitates to the lurid edge. The jaded audience wants more--more teasing sex, more gross-out gore. So directors make their young minor characters play the sin-and-repent game: you have sex, then you die horribly. Makeup maestros like Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead) dream up (or nightmare up) grotesque faces and prostheses. Screeching violins italicize the killer's abrupt entrance as he raises his knife behind the fair...
Then there's Blair Witch. It has no sex or even sexual tension, no music of any kind, no demonic power tools. No prowling, voyeuristic camera from the killer's point of view; this movie is all about victims and the victims they make of each other. There are no shock cuts to the monster. In fact, no visible monster! Because the audience sees only what the camera does. At night it is sometimes pitch-black; for excruciating minutes, we are literally in the dark. The physical mayhem is limited to one conk on the head. There's no slashing...