The
Haunting
Rated PG-13
Now showing
The Blair Witch Project
www.blairwitch.com
Rated R
Opens Friday, July 30
Scaring the shit out of someone may be the toughest art left
in moviemaking. When is the last time you were truly afraid
inside a movie theater? Can't filmmakers show anything new
to make us experience fear?
Stephen King, in his collection of essays on the horror
genre, Danse Macabre, says that one approach is not
to show anything. He writes: "What's behind the door or
lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening
as the door or the staircase itself. And because of this
comes the paradox: The artistic work of horror is almost
always a disappointment, a no-win situation. You can scare
people with the unknown for a long, long time, but you have
to open the door and show what's behind it." One solution,
King offers, is "never open the door at all." The primary
example he uses to support this approach is Robert Wise's
exquisitely shot, sophisticated and extremely creepy 1963
adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel, The Haunting of
Hill House, simply shortened to The Haunting.
In the film, a group of paranormal experts spend the night
in a haunted mansion, where ghosts may or may not lurk.
What follows--the usual number of disturbing occurrences,
the escalation of the group's fear--may or may not be the
result of mousy protagonist Claire Bloom's sexual repression.
King notes that it's not really what happens in The Haunting
that makes it scary but how it's depicted. Thunderous,
guttural echoes shake the walls; something holds Bloom's
hand; doors bulge, but Wise chooses not to open them. Something
terrible is happening, but we never see the cause.
The film still feels eerie today, but Hollywood can never
leave well enough alone, so now director Jan de Bont has
remade The Haunting. It doesn't take long to realize
that de Bont, the superficial, emotional manipulator behind
such action blockbusters as Speed and Twister,
has no idea of how to scare anyone. Essentially, he's taken
the same premise and the same characters and thrown them
into a bloated carnival fun house from hell. The bigger
and louder something appears, the more threatening de Bont
thinks it is. His Hill House is like an overwrought castle,
packed with CGI-animated gimmicks (ghosts swim in bed sheets,
statues attack, mirrors talk, etc.), heavy-handed sound
effects and absolutely no suspense. Every thrill is cheap
and predictable and every genre cliché exploited;
the entire experience feels as scary as the Haunted Mansion
at Disneyland. The director never bothers fleshing out characters
(dialogue and development are mere filler between action
sequences), and the fine foursome of Lili Taylor, Owen Wilson,
Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones is dwarfed by the production
design and eventually brushed aside as de Bont slobberingly
fetishizes his FX-laden creation with crane and tracking
shots. Even worse, de Bont is so unwilling to leave anything
to the imagination that he tries--embarrassingly--to explain
this absurdity. Poor Taylor is left uttering some of the
worst lines of her career and battling a giant, cheesy reject
from Ghostbusters in the name of family values. Artificial
excesses castrate a horror film, and de Bont never gives
us a chance to use our imagination.
In terms of methodology, the closer model to Wise's The
Haunting is Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's disturbing
debut, The Blair Witch Project. The film arrives
with a ton of baggage: It was the surprise hit at Sundance
this year, and many have called it the scariest film ever
made. While it fails to live up to that hyperbole (despite
its relentless tone, it's more of a spooky and exhausting
mood piece than a terrifying, white-knuckle experience),
it's an unmistakably impressive and inventive genre experiment.
Essentially, Blair Witch Project tries to do to
camping what Jaws did to swimming. At the outset
we are told that, in October 1994, three film students,
Heather, Mike and Josh, hiked through Maryland's Black Hills
Forest in order to shoot a documentary on a local legend,
the "Blair Witch." They never came back, and the film we
see comprises the found footage that documents their disappearance.
Though it's a pseudo-documentary, Myrick and Sanchez never
wink at the audience, and the feeling of authenticity (the
film alternates between video and 16mm) adds to the discomfort.
Many have lauded the film for its originality, but it actually
works like a classic horror film. The film's fright is only
implied. There's no violence, we hear more than we see,
and instead of building up to a concrete payoff, the movie
just continues suggesting, finally leaving all possible
explanations and answers to the imagination.
The film takes its time setting up character dynamics--it
starts out like an annoying Real World episode--before
swiftly moving to general unease and dislocation as the
trio gets lost and, finally, to full-blown terror as they
become hunted. These tone shifts are important, as the film
strips away the protagonists' adult façade of hipness,
cynicism and arrogance, finally reducing them to whimpering
children (an appropriate transformation, since the seven
original Blair Witch victims were all kids). Their collective
terror is rooted in childhood fears: They're lost and keep
repeating that they want to go home; they're scared of the
dark and of things that go bump in the night. This basic,
primal terror is ultimately what makes The Blair Witch
Project so unsettling: We may not believe in witches
or ghosts, but the isolation and helplessness of being stranded
in the woods is both palpable and disarming. Childish blame
is also tossed back and forth during numerous arguments,
raising the question of individual responsibility for this
nightmare. During a painful confession sequence toward the
end of the film, Heather admits that her selfishness, ambition
and pride are the primary causes for a situation in which
they've become "cold, hungry and hunted." This insight,
an acknowledgement of responsibility, is startling within
a genre that often portrays its characters as ignorant and
foolish (think teen slasher films). The last quarter of
the movie shows their chances for survival to be utterly
hopeless, a desperate fact that both the characters and
we, as viewers, recognize as cruel fate. What starts as
a documentary about myth and the unknown eventually becomes
a movie in which characters document their own demise. From
what or by whom, however, Blair Witch Project stubbornly,
ambiguously, refreshingly refuses to reveal.
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Willamette Week | originally
published July 28, 1999
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