The Old Fear of Emerging(Into the Woods)
Yet there’s something massive-feeling about a world grown inaccessible since lockdown, best encapsulated by washed-out black and white shots of tree branches and the sky. The world has gone on, and how do we step back into it?
Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard, and Mike Williams went missing in the woods around Burkittsville, Maryland in 1994. Incidentally, they were shooting a documentary on a local folk legend, so in 1999, footage from their film hit theaters, and audiences across the country became impassioned about their disappearance.
Of course, this story might sound recognizable to any fan of horror as The Blair Witch Project, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s film that pioneered found footage as a medium for horror, paving the way for Cloverfield, Creep, and the Paranormal Activity franchise, among many, many others. In the film, Heather, Mike, and Josh enter the woods to uncover the secret history of the Blair Witch, and capture their findings on film. The movie is stitched together by footage from competing cameras. Though we’re always aware of the manufacturing of the medium, found footage draws us deeper into the illusion because the manufacture is of their, and our, world. The cinematography, the jarring edits, seek verisimilitude.
For audiences in 1999, the release might have been something akin to the mythic 1896 release of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in Paris, when a shot of an approaching train is said to have sent audiences fleeing from the theater, fearful of a crash. Haxan Films brought their marketing savvy to amplify the anxiety stirred by the film, transcribing the horrors from the world of the film into our own. They developed an accompanying documentary about the Blair Witch and started a web forum to find the missing filmmakers, publishing new artifacts from the hunt. The actors even shared names with their characters. Thus, when a moviegoer saw the film and went to learn more after, the fear engendered by the film’s ambiguous ending became that much more immediate: Where were these young filmmakers?
⦿
Twitter seems to agree that there are two kinds of post-pandemic people: those ready for a massive party and those afraid to leave the house again.
I’m an extrovert and a rule-follower. As everyone, I struggled with the time in isolation for the first several months. More recently, though, I’ve felt this stir of fear about my new limits as the world begins to lurch out of the pandemic. A friend teased me for being the last person to keep sanitizing every time I get back in my car; the CDC says the risk of contracting COVID from a contaminated surface is very low. I’m almost two weeks out from my second dose of the vaccine, but I’m struggling to imagine the moment when I might be inside, maskless, with somebody from beyond the pod. Going into isolation, the world suddenly switched off. I could commit to those rules. Now coming out, there is no switch back on. We have to slowly watch our boundaries evolve.
Through all of this, Blair Witch comes back to me. When I envision settling into a yoga studio or seeing old friends indoors, I recall the anxieties portrayed in the Burkittsville woods. But why should fresh air and nature be so terrifying? Maybe the better analogy for this agoraphobia is The Shining. Or perhaps more representative of the pandemic is Cloverfield, a found footage movie set in New York City, a space monster to wreak havoc on our populated world—Apocalypse movies start in New York, right? We all remember what last March looked like—my sister and brother-in-law packed clothes for four days at my parents’ house in Rhode Island and left two months later.
Yet there’s something massive-feeling about a world grown inaccessible since lockdown, best encapsulated by washed-out black and white shots of tree branches and the sky. The world has gone on, and how do we step back into it?
Found footage asks us to locate ourselves immediately alongside the characters’ experience. In the case of The Blair Witch Project, the actors and characters were meant to blur. Just as an urban legend, our fear is predicated on this ambiguity. This isn’t real, right? Is this really happening right now?
Part of the film’s artistry is that we’re never really sure what we’re seeing. Though the fictional filmmaking team interviews locals before their fateful journey into the woods, their investigative work can’t prepare them for the nocturnal rustlings outside their tent. What are those stick figures hanging from trees, captured on their Hi8? In real time, we’re asked to interpret the nonsensical horrors of the (super)natural world as Heather, Mike, and Josh struggle to do so.
We’ve become well-versed in PPE and sanitizing, pods and social distancing. We have guidance from the CDC for several post-vaccine situations, but how do we navigate the blurry areas? What if we need a compass for these new anxieties about this world that’s grown so massive outside of our homes?
⦿
The film’s ending is earned and unclear. Perhaps the imagery echoes back to the lore we heard at the film’s beginning, or maybe it’s just something else, a new brand of terror, a new horror story that the characters have no way to prepare for. In their search for Josh, Heather and Mike find a house in the woods. They split up, and we watch through Heather’s camera as she tumbles to the ground, screaming. We cannot be sure what’s happening.
What if we don’t know what’s happening to us before it’s too late? Is this a story of the paranormal, or a story about a group of young people that turns on itself, succumbing to the pressures of the open woods?
When the movie was test-screened, Myrick and Sanchez received some pressure to create an alternate, more direct ending. Their original ending remained. In an interview, Myrick said, “What makes us fearful is something that’s out of the ordinary, unexplained. The…ending kept the audience off balance; it challenged our real-world conventions.”
Did anybody really know what was happening? No. But when asked if they were scared, almost everybody raised their hand.
