![]() ![]() Heather explicitly proclaims, ‘I gotta get it, I gotta get it all, I want it on sound, I want it on 16, if we can see anything I wanna see it on 16’. Repeatedly, the protagonists of the Blair Witch films state their desire to document everything on camera. Heather, the urban dweller, becomes obsessed with the isolated forest, seeing it as what Scovell calls ‘the dwelling place for demons and spirits’ (2017: 49). As her camera searches the trees for every hanging stick figure, it becomes clear that she wants to attempt to capture all of them. Cynthia Freeland argues that The Blair Witch Project’s Heather is ‘too insistent on filming every little thing, putting them in danger by lingering too long, trying to capture things she perhaps should not have’ (2004: 198). The issue of how much and what quality of footage is enough for proof thus features prominently in the films. The characters also strive to document the existence of the witch from local folklore who is ostensibly responsible for their deaths. While not referring to the characters in found footage films, Bazin calls this desire a ‘primitive need to have the last word in the argument with death by means of the form that endures’ (1945: 196). The characters in the Blair Witch films wish to offer whoever finds their footage a representation of the reality of what happened to them, documenting the last moments of their lives in order to preserve their own image. Andr é Bazin refers to this as the ‘mummy complex’, whereby the appearance of the human body can be snatched ‘from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life’ (1945: 195). The human desire to live on in some way beyond death or to prolong life is not new, and the recording technologies that have developed through the twentieth century can be seen as a way of preserving human life in some form beyond death. The characters do try very hard, however, to preserve a record of what happens to them in the woods, even keeping their cameras filming as they are in great danger. Both films evince this tendency toward subtlety (although Blair Witch is significantly less so than its predecessor) as well as a definite resistance to offering the viewer clear images or audio of the supernatural. ![]() The hunt for proof is often difficult, and Joseph Laycock argues that ‘to preserve verisimilitude, these films cannot rely on music or lavish special effects and must be extremely subtle in their portrayal of supernatural phenomena’ (2011: 14). The more extraordinary the events are, the less believable they may be to audiences, and therefore the aesthetic strategies attempt to combat the disbelief of the viewer. The Blair Witch films become evidence of what occurred to the characters, as recorded by those who were there. The films place the camera as a profilmic element at the centre of the characters’ searches for proof. After exploring how an impression of authenticity is created in both films through a modern digital camera aesthetics that has substantively changed in the seventeen years between the release of these two films, I then examine how the folklore established in The Blair Witch Project is developed in the distinctive aesthetics of the 2016 sequel.īoth Blair Witch films address amateur camera operators’ craving to preserve an experience of the world by recording what they see. While The Blair Witch Project and Blair Witch share many similarities in their representation of proof, there are notable differences regarding the diegetic technology that the characters have at their disposal. The characters in these films are at once sceptical of the existence of a historical witch haunting the area and yet also open-minded enough to take their modern camera technology and try to capture evidence of a supernatural phenomenon-one rooted in the local folklore of Maryland’s woods.ĭevelopments in camera technology in the years between the production of The Blair Witch Project and Blair Witch complicate the capturing of proof, and I argue that this leads to different responses from viewers of the two films. ![]() The film ‘basks in its rural/urban divide, where the naive students have completely underestimated both the landscape and the power of its folklore’ (2017: 117). ![]() Adam Scovell notes that the narrative of The Blair Witch Project ‘is quintessential Folk Horror through its use of rurality’. Both The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) and its second sequel Blair Witch (Adam Wingard, 2016) dramatise the search for proof of supernatural occurrences. These films frequently combine contemporary anxieties over digital technology (Blake and Aldana Reyes 2016) with more archaic fears such as witches, trolls and demons. Found footage horror films can be significant examples of folk horror, juxtaposing modern technology with its capture of ancient monsters of folklore. ![]()
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