Williams, Linda. “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography.” Representations. 27 (1989): 37-65.

Yet elsewhere in his writing Bazin has celebrated documentary realism in fictional contexts, and he is honest enough here to acknowledge “a critical contradiction,” which he notes “without resolving.” 38

Our complicity as viewers of the act is different from what it would be if we were actually in the room with the “object”; it is connected to the fact that we are watching (whether with fascination, pleasure, horror, or dread) an act that seems to be really taking place but with which we have no spatial or temporal connection ourselves. 38

-proximity / distance = greater distance because we know there’s a frame, greater proximity because it’s often presented in an unmediated way. Might want to look at Wood’s article on art vs. exploitation.

[about Snuff]: Nevertheless, added signals of documentary evidence—the director’s speech to and “look” at the camera, the indication of film “run out,” the shocking transition from sex scene to violence—all operated to convince some viewers that if what they had seen before was fake violence belonging to the genre of horror, what they were seeing now was real (hard-core) violence belonging to the genre of pornography. 41

. . . especially in the context of the hard-core genre’s perpetual quest for documentary evidence of involuntary pleasure in female bodies that do not give as ready evidence of this pleasure as male bodies. 41

. . . perverse pleasure of witnessing the involuntary spasm of death. 42

Snuff probably became the “case” that it did because it did not, like the horror film, simply displace the sexual desires of characters onto violent acts; rather, its mix of soft-core sex and sexual desires of characters onto violent acts; rather, its mix of soft-core sex and violence was more messy, interrupting expectations for pleasurable sex with violence and vice versa. Snuff, both the film and the idea, exists at the contradictory intersection of the spectacle of pleasure (generally assumed to be real in hardcore pornography) and pain (generally assumed to be faked in horror films). 42

Walker, Joseph S. “Mom and the Blair Witch: Narrative, Form, and the Feminine.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 163-180.

By the end of 1999, the Internet Movie Database had already recognized a dozen features directly spoofing Myrick and Sanchez’s film, and many more have appeared since. 163

In fact, like any number of earlier, similarly startling assaults on dominant Hollywood style, BWP is “superficially radical, [but] internally conservative” (Ray 296). Although the film continually disrupts the conventionalizing forces of linear storytelling and seamless technical presentation, it ultimately does so only in the service of a deeply / reactionary restoration and defense of the most conservative form of patriarchal power. 164

Despite its position in the clearly fantastic tradition of the horror genre, the film is convincing enough in its realistic guise (aided, as I discuss below, by various auxiliary texts) that, for several months after the film’s release, Burkittsville, the town in which its opening sequences are set, regularly received visitors and callers volunteering to join search parties looking for the missing students. 164

The one gap in this series of calculated revelations, the tool the film cannot entirely account for, is editing. The film is taken from two separate cameras, and there is a clear implication within the world of the narrative that there are many hours of footage. BWP itself, then, was stitched together by someone for some purpose, and it represents only one possible view of the embedded narrative. This alone stands as internal evidence of a narrative authority outside the scope of the film itself—as evidence, in other words, of the fic/tionality of the entire work. 164-165

It might reasonably be objected at this point that there is, in fact, nothing “historical” about The Blair Witch Project. The “legend” was created for the film, the people who appear on screen are actors, and the scenarios they act out are predetermined and without real consequence. To gain the perspective necessary for such an observation, however, we must remove ourselves from the immediate narrative frame of the film as an autonomous text and enter the more complicated and even contradictory web of multitextual frames that surround it. Most prominently, of course, there are the auxiliary texts which I discuss below, and which extend and deepen the story told within the film itself: the Web site, the television special, the book, and so on. Beyond these, however, are texts (primarily interviews and news stories) that immediately acknowledge that the film is fiction and then go on to discuss the mechanics of its production. These stories provide the widely disseminated details of how Donahue, Leonard, and Williams actually camped in the woods for several days, filmed their experiences themselves, endured isolation, cold, hunger, and exhaustion, knew only the broad outlines of the story, and were frequently surprised / as the unseen filmmakers brought some new element into the scenario. A story by Josh Wolk in Entertainment Weekly, for example, reveals that the actors did not know that they would encounter the stickmen, that Leonard would be “taken” from the group, or that they were being guided toward an abandoned house for the film’s climax. The purpose of subjecting the actors to these ordeals, of course , was to ensure the authenticity of the footage, to guarantee that “the actors were legitimately frightened by the filmmakers’ stunts” (Wolk). 166

Essentially, the experiences we witness on the screen are real, are historical. Whether we see them as Heather, Josh, and Mike being pursued by a witch or as Donahue, Leonard, and Williams responding to the calculated torments of the filmmakers becomes a matter of preference rather than necessity, and the more deeply the viewer is immersed in the multiple planes of narrative, the more individual moments seem to mark ambiguous points of intersection between them. The two narratives (or, more accurately, the two narrative frames) cannot be cleanly distinguished from each other or organized into a simple hierarchical model. In this, too, BWP echoes experiments in literary fiction. Brian Richardson points out that any number of “nonmimetic narratives regularly—even typically—point to, problematize, or violate the principles of framing that must be adhered to in all mimetic or nonfictional narratives,” and he laments the fact that narrative theory, with its nostalgic preference for linear, traditional texts, has developed no language to address such complications or contaminations (35). 166

This generates multiple obstacles for discussions of The Blair Witch Project. Not only do the contaminations and cross-pollinations of the various narrative structures make it difficult to address the film as a distinct entity, but we have no rigorous method for mapping and dissecting such intricate intertextual intersections. Thus we have what I am calling the Blair Witch metatext: a complex interweaving of at least three levels of narrative “reality” (the film itself, the auxiliary fictional texts, the production and reception history of the film), each further fragmented by multiple perspectives, none of which can claim ultimate authority or primacy. There is no center and no predetermined point of entry. It is a heteroglossic space, a multimedia version of collaborative hyptertext. It is fitting that the film has been very successful on DVD, a format that allows entry at any point of the text (unlike necessarily linear tape) and which equally showcases the film itself and wide variety of the supplementary material). 166

In postmodernism, “no narrative can be a natural ‘master’ narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we construct” (Hutcheon 13). Contemporary theory has generated any number of images for this tendency to erase—or at least render incomprehensible—centralized authority and organization. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for example, propose the spreading rhizome as a replacement for the rigidly ordered tree as the preferred model of knowledge: “the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (21). Similarly, Fredric Jameson identifies the decentered and disorienting Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles as an emblem of postmodern space, “transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself” in conjunction with the “breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms” (44). These metaphors foreshadow the dominant contemporary version of excessive, chaotic knowledge, the endless, formless Internet, and it is, again, only fitting that the Blair Witch has such a successful presence in that medium. In fact, there is no “underlying” narrative to The Blair Witch Project or to the Blair Witch metatext as a whole. Every answer only leads to more questions; every explanation is subject to contestation; “narrative continuity is threatened, is both used and abused, inscribed and subverted” (Hutcheon 59). Again, while there is nothing radical about this in terms of contemporary literature or theory, it is surprising for such an exploded / narrative to be so eagerly accepted by the mass American film industry and audience. 169-170.

Heather’s increasingly irrational dependence on her cameras, then, is ultimately the counterpoint to the persistently mysterious nature of the Blair Witch threat. Just as the witch resists explanation, Heather undercuts her own chances of comprehension in her need to believe that the world can be meaningfully reduced to a filmic image (or, for that matter, that the territory they wander can be meaningfully reduced to the map, a belief that reduces her to hysteria when the clearly useless map is lost). On both sides, the real stubbornly refuses to be collapsed into a stable formation. 170

In the end, if there must be an end, we can either embrace the ambiguity and multiplicity of the narrative (as postmodern theory would ask us to do) or simply accept that a supernatural power is at work, one that utterly controls both reality and our perception of it and which is beyond comprehension. 172

Indeed, it is my sense that the film is evidence of a generally widening acceptance in popular cinema of playfully nontraditional forms. Other recent examples of this trend might include Run, Lola, Run (1998), Sliding Doors (1998), The Limey(1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), Memento (2000), or, going back a bit further, The Usual Suspects (1995). While none of these films achieved quite the success of BWP, particularly in terms of cultural visibility, all exhibit a similarly playful attitude toward representation and framing, and all have been accepted by the mass audience. 172

It is worth asking, however, whether this willingness on the part of both producers and audience to experiment with form is matched by similarly daring content. On the evidence of BWP, there is little reason to think so. 172

Instead, it is my contention that the Blair Witch metatext as a whole cannot avoid replicating elements and patterns of repression and limitation, and that the apparently extreme openness of the film only masks these more reactionary aspects within it—aspects we have become accustomed to discovering in more conformist texts. It may well be that as the form of the Blair Witch metatext becomes more radical, it becomes more vital to detect the presence of conservative tendencies and moments within it. Specifically, I am troubled by traces of a deep misogyny in the narrative field, a distrust of the feminine and celebration of the patriarchal that is most visible in elements of the film’s auxiliary texts. 173

While it is certainly commonplace for contemporary Hollywood productions to be accompanied by a raft of promotional and marketing tools, BWP is virtually unprecedented in its organization and coordination of this material. 173

None of these materials simply reproduces the narrative events of the film itself, or even of each other, Instead, they duplicate its speculative and purportedly documentary tone, offering fragmentary evidence from multiple, frequently conflicting perspectives of either the search for the filmmakers or the origins and manifestations of the legend itself. 173

The marketing and merchandising of the film thus becomes indistinguishable from the narrative of the film itself, and while this may open up creative possibilities for the playful (de)construction of narrative, we should not forget that the profit motive is never far from the surface. 174

It has been a decade and a half since Robin Wood identified the restoration of the father as “the dominant project, ad infinitum and post nauseam, of the contemporary Hollywood cinema” (172). / It is disheartening, if not surprising, to discover such a conservative cliché concealed beneath such a novel surface, but the discovery is nonetheless valuable for its reminder that subversive form does not necessarily indicate similarly subversive content. 179

Telotte, J.P. “The ‘Blair Witch Project’ Project: Film and the Internet.” Film Quarterly. 54.3 (2001): 32-39.

The official Web site especially not only offers potential viewers the sort of information or lures that would, after the fashion of traditional film advertising, make them want to rush out and see the film. It can also effectively tell the “story” of the film, that is, as the film’s makers and/or distributors see it and want it to be understood. For it can frame the film narrative within a context designed to condition our viewing or “reading” of it, even to determine the sort of pleasures we might derive from it. 32

. . . and widely distributed posters for the “missing” principals of the film. 33

Indeed, Amorette Jones, head of the Artisan marketing campaign for The Blair Witch Project and a veteran of marketing at such major studios as Universal, Columbia/Tri-Star, and MGM/UA, acknowledges a hardly modest $20 million marketing campaign for the film that included a series of ever-more-elaborate trailers, some of which were pointedly tied to playdates for Star Wars: Episode One in hopes of drawing in that same audience. As Jones admits, Artisan “did commercial things; we just did them in a non-commercial way.” 33

Marc Graser and Dade Hayes offer a partial explanation, nothing that “calmer heads are realizing that the ‘Blair Witch’ site was not an added-on marketing tool, but was designed as part of the film experience—one that tapped into fans of the horror genre.” I would go a bit further and suggest that the selling of The Blair Witch Project and the telling of that film, its narrative construction, were from the start a careful match or “project,” one that better explains both the film’s success and why that success was so quickly and easily laid at the door of the now almost equally famous Web site. 34

Artisan’s own ambitious marketing campaign, and especially its Internet strategy, seems to have been designed to employ an element of this contextualizing, while also moving visitors in a direction different from the advertising sites just described. In fact, it seems to / have been fashioned precisely to avoid the sort of situating at which these similar sites aim (including the hierarchical entertainment value of the movie itself that the established film industry would prefer to affirm), seeking instead to capitalize on the particular characteristics of this film. That campaign, which ended up as a television project as well, pitches the fictional movie as a documentary about three real student filmmakers who vanished while working on a documentary about a legendary witch near the town of Burkittsville, Maryland. The story unfolds through their own footage, accidentally discovered by student anthropologists a year after their disappearance and then pieced together by Artisan. The Web site that became the hub, although hardly the sole focus, of the campaign offered much additional material about the case of the missing filmmakers: information on the “Mythology” surrounding the Blair Witch legend, background on “The Filmmakers” who disappeared, a summary of “The Aftermath” of the disappearance, and a tour of “The Legacy” of these mysterious events—that is, of the various materials recovered in the search for the student filmmakers. All of these elements, the film’s backstory, if you will, elaborately propagate the notion of authenticity, attesting to the film as, quite literally, a “found-footage” type of documentary rather than a fictional work, and more particularly, as a different sort of attraction than the movies usually offer, a reality far stranger than that found in any “classic old-style horror film.” Rather, they suggest we see the film not as film, but as one more artifact, along with the materials gathered together at the Web site, which we might view in order to better understand a kind of repressed or hidden reality. 34-35

Thus The Blair Witch site, in contrast to those noted above, points in various ways away from the film’s privileged status as a product of the entertainment industry. Or more precisely, its “project” is to blur such common discrimination, to suggest, in effect, that this particular film is as much a part of everyday life as the Internet, that it extends the sort of unfettered knowledge access that the Internet seems to offer, and that is pleasures, in fact, closely resemble those of the electronic medium with which its core audience is so familiar. 35

While employing the same sort of dark and suggestive color scheme as other sites, the Blair Witch page especially distinguishes itself by its power of immersion. Rather than pointing to the entertainment industry, it lures visitors into a world that is, on the surface, deceptively like our own, and even anchors us in that realm of normalcy with maps, police reports, found objects, and characters who evoke the film’s target audience of teenagers or young adults (the missing student filmmakers and the University of Maryland anthropology class that, we learn, later discovered their film and various other artifacts). After establishing this real-world context and giving it authority, the site shifts from that anchorage into a completely “other” world, one of witchcraft, one connected to the repressed history of the mysteriously abandoned town of Blair, and one with a mythology all its own, attested to by a collection of woodcuts depicting witchcraft in the region and selections from the supposed book The Blair Witch Cult, which we are told “is on display at the Maryland Historical Society Museum.” 36

Here cannot morph into another figure or become one of the tree central characters; the best we can do is become the anonymous surfer of cyberspace or settle into the role of an investigator and adopt that posture as a satisfactory shift out of the self. The various interviews offered here—with, for example, Bill Barnes, Executive Director of the Burkittsville Historical Society; Charles Moorehouse, a professor of folklore; or private investigator Buck Buchanon, among others—all place us in the typical position of the documentary audience, as recipients of the direct address of these speakers. 36

For making the experience immediate rather than mediated could reassert a kind of cinematic context, reminding us of the extent to which subject position is always constructed by point of view in film, and would thus show the film not as another artifact, co-terminous with the site, but as a kind of game played with—or on—us by the film industry. Simply put, it would work against the film’s reality context. More to the point, the site mainly hints at the power of transformation because that closely allied pleasure the payoff at the core of the film itself. 36

As Marc Graser and Dade Hayes explain, an initial industry frenzy to mimic the Blair Witch Internet campaign has given way to a recognition “that the ‘Blair Witch’ site was not an added-on marketing tool but was designed as part of the film experience—one that tapped into fans of the horror genre” in a special way. 36

In his review of The Blair Witch Project, Richard Corliss notes two “rigorous rules” that, he believes, account for its effectiveness as a horror film: “It will show only what the team could plausibly have filmed, at it will not reveal any sources of outside terror—no monsters or maniacs.” 36

The film offers us “no monsters or maniacs,” no horror-movie fare of mad slashers, incarnate devils, or outsized monsters, because it is trying to immerse us in a world that, to all appearances, is coextensive with our own. In fact, the young filmmaker Heather worries specifically about making her film look too much like traditional horror movies. “I don’t want to go too cheesy,” she says, in a way that echoes the site’s constant insistence on the real. 37

Yet here, after a fashion long familiar from other horror films and their limited use of subjective camera, agency is evoked only to be frustrated, creating a sense of helplessness that is fertile psychic ground for horror. 37

What may be just as significant as these simple alterations of extended subjective shots, though, is the film’s self-consciousness, which constantly pulls us back from the typical film experience as if it were trying to reach for a more realistic context, one beyond the camera and its limited field of vision, one perhaps more in keeping with the Internet and its seemingly trans/parent access to the world. For while the camera is a device that appears to let us capture the real, to chronicle in “as straightforward a way as possible,” it also constrains our experience by restricting what we can see, as is literally the case when Josh, Heather, and Mike run out into the night and we can see only as far as the limited light on their camera. Thus Josh tells Heather that he knows why she likes the video camera: “It’s like a totally filtered reality.” 37-38

In fact, the film ultimately challenges, even attacks our relationship to the cinema, the technological in general, and their usual filtering effect. For its three filmmaker-protagonists eventually prove ill-equipped for dealing with a natural and transformative world: their car can only take them so far; their map and compass prove useless; their cameras and sound equipment, designed to record the real, offer no insulation against a mysterious, perhaps even supernatural realm. 38

And by funneling our relation to the natural world, even to one another, through the technological, the narrative evokes our own sense of being lost in the mediated contemporary world. 38

Her reply, “No, I’m not turning the camera off. I want to mark this occasion,” seems the response of someone who is already fully lost to and within the cinematic. 38

It shows her, and perhaps by extension us as well, as a frail contemporary human, immersed beyond all insulation by her technology, involved to such an extent that she can no longer find a safe distance, transformed from skeptical reporter to helpless victim of this quaint bit of local folklore. 38

Libby Gelman-Waxner has also linked the film’s technological bent and its successful computer-based promotion. As she comments, its success must be “partially attributed to the heavy promotion of the movie on the Internet, and that makes sense: It’s a movie for men and women . . . who prefer to see the world entirely through technology—it’s nature downloaded.” 38

Paul Virilio has recently described the postmodern experience as like living in “the shadow of the Tower of Babel,” not simply as a result of the many and different voices with which the multimedia environment bombards us but because of a certain dislocation that accompanies those various voices. For the electronic experience, he believes, with its tendency to bring together many and different places, to bind us within what he terms “glocalization,” also leaves us without a real place—decentered and lost. The Blair Witch Project, along with its Internet shadow, seems to have effectively captured, and capitalized on, this sensibility. For it recalls the nature of the typical electronic document, the hypertext, which consists of a series of documents connected to one another by links; that is, it is a text of many fragments but no whole, no master text. And by virtue of its very lack of center, its absence of what Murray terms “the clear-cut trail,” the hypertext invites us to find our own way, even to find some pleasure or profit in its very decenteredness. That absence of a center—or the lostness which the / hypertext user shares in part with the three protagonists of Blair Witch—is simply part of the great capital of the Internet experience, something it typically barters with, plays upon by alternately denying and opening onto it. 39

The well-made, small-budget, independently produced, and star-less movie does have a chance to be seen, picked up by a national distributor or cable outlet, and then offered to a wide audience. 39

Schopp, Andrew. “Transgressing the Safe Space: Generation X Horror in The Blair Witch Project and Scream.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 125-143.

. . . he asserts that he now knows why she keeps filming: “I see why you like this video camera so much. . . . . It’s not quite reality. It’s totally like filtered reality. It’s like you can pretend everything is not quite the way it is.” Josh’s statement suggests that when one views his experience through the camera’s mediation, as any viewer must, this mediation provides a sense of control, even safety, rendering the experience somehow less real, an ironic notion given the relentless cinema verité experience the film provides its audience. Still, Josh’s statement foregrounds one of the most persistent assumptions held by those who study horror, an assumption that I call the “safe space” fallacy. According to this traditional model, horror texts merely provide safe spaces to experience and then defuse individual or collective fears. For years, critics have perpetuated this reductive assessment of horror and of how fear works within horror texts, but films like BWP and Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) challenge this notion of narrative safety. In fact, in the Scream trilogy the very formulaic conventions that allow the viewer to experience a sense of safety become the subject of the film and the means by which the killers claim victims. 125

The latter film’s [Blair Witch] formal techniques disrupt the filmic conventions that provide narrative safety, and they do so as a means of reinforcing structurally what the film’s content examines: anxieties that our nation and culture are predicated upon a set of constructs that themselves provide merely an illusion of safety. BWP reflects contemporary fears that the presumably “safe” world we inhabit is rendered so only through cultural narratives that mediate our experience and, much like Heather’s camera, filter reality, pro/viding a false sense of safety that loses its potency when one loses control over the mediating device. 126-127

And even at a structural or perhaps metaphorical level, these products are safe. In other words, because such texts rely on conventions that the popular audience recognizes, these conventions and the knowledge of such conventions provide a certain level of comfort or safety. In fact, as I shall argue, it is precisely this level of safety that films like Scream and BWP strive to disrupt. Nonetheless, the insistence on the safety of the text often suggests that all thoughts, ideas, and emotions a text evokes become contained within the reading/viewing experience, for once the book is closed or the lights come up, the fears the text has produces have either been defused through the narrative or are subsequently dismissed as fictions. Such fears cannot carry over into the world beyond the text or interact with the consumer’s or the culture’s ideologies and belief systems. One implication of the safe space argument, then, would be that it posits a divorce between narrative and social practice. One might expect to find some analysis of this “safety” as an instrument of social control, but most critical assessments of horror stop short of extending their analyses this far. Instead, the text becomes a space for play (a term frequently used in these discussions). While I don’t want to reject the idea that fear narratives provide a pleasurable space to engage with fear, I do want to challenge the overriding notion that the purported “safety” of this space means that the engagement that occurs necessarily defuses fears. 128

If this is the case, films like Scream and BWP become that much more significant because they are texts that openly disrupt conventional notions of safety and the structural, narrative conventions that might provide safety, yet crowds flock to them. 129

Still, from bungee jumping to mountain climbing to paragliding, Gen X thrill-seekers subject themselves to harrowing and frightening experiences for the sake of pleasure, and it is hard to discern / whether Gen Xers are somehow more invested in this game of pleasure and fear of if their investment has simply been more encoded into popular culture than that of previous generations. 130

Thrill rides have to have more turns, higher hills, and new twists for the same reason scary novles and films have to: they stop being scary—and therefore stop being pleasurable—if changes are not made. 130

In fact, Peter Stearns has argued that twentieth-century American culture did not devise such entertainments to provide a space to defuse fears but rather to provide a space to indulge in an intensity of emotion not culturally allowable in day-to-day / life. 131

I find it especially compelling that BWP does away with home altogether until the very end, when the appropriately abandoned house signifies a space of prior, present, and likely future death. Still, the majority of Scream’s murders take place in a house, and the message seems relatively clear: the ease with which we bring these narratives into our home via cable and VCR parallels the ease with which the home’s safety can be rendered null and void, since it can be so easily penetrated by those who seek to play games with life. 131

. . . within the film’s frame. 132

Though I have had one student insist that Craven “raped” horror fans by carving up classic films and restructuring them into Scream. 132

. . . and the killers’ eventual discussions of the game they are creating/playing debunk Randy’s theories about the rules and the way they are supposed to work. 132

They date their victims, throw parties for them, sleep with them, and have no motive for killing them other than a desire to create a horror narrative that ultimately thwarts the conventions of safety by stripping away any mediation, whether camera or text. Their narrative is real life and text at the same time. Although we collectively want to believe that we can identify psycho-killers, this film insists that such a belief is little more than a necessary fiction in contemporary culture. Of course, the Gen X audience still has its mediation—the camera—even if the generic narrative conventions that take place within the world of the camera collapse. 133

I mention Scream largely because reviewers of The Blair Witch Project often claim that BWP revitalized the genre. However, Scream also revitalized the genre by making the very conventions of the genre the subject of the film, and we should not understate the significance of this fact. 133

. . . once the horror film’s form and structure have been “raped” or even “dismembered” by a film like Scream, a film like BWP is almost inevitable, as it both re-imagines the horror text and relies on classic conventions that merely fit together in new ways. 133

As I shall explain in what follows, BWP is self-reflexive about both horror and America, and in that respect it owes a lot to its predecessor Scream. 134

More disturbingly, the first film suggests that this very desire for radical revision might function as the missing motive for Billy and Stu’s murder spree. They can do what others cannot: they control a revision of convention and thus cross from consumer to producer, but they do so by producing death and destruction. While advertisers and marketing strategists would consider the primary audience for Scream as Generation X and the audience for BWP as Generation Y (due largely to birth dates and not to attitudes), I would suggest that the evolution from the earlier film to the later reflects an evolution of Gen X culture. I am most interested in the way this evolution signals a further debunking of narrative safety coupled with an even more expansive commentary on the physical limits of contemporary American cul/ture and on the limited endurance of necessary fictions about safety and opportunity that are manifest within this culture. 135

. . . the viewer must still wonder why these characters insist on filming even when their lives are in danger. 135

Significantly, however, the film’s formal structure constantly reminds us that what we watch is not immediate and unmediated. Though Michael Atkinson insists that “what we’re watching is what occurred,” how it occurred is another matter. The film contains footage from two cameras, one color and one black and white; therefore, someone has clearly edited the footage together. This may seem like a minor point, and I would hardly suggest that the average viewer consciously considers this fact. Nonetheless, the absent Other associated with the camera, the presence whose absence is required for the pleasure of the filmic experience to manifest, makes itself very known in this film, a fact that seriously compromises the fictional safety. And given the fact that no bodies are found—only footage—the film conflates the absent Other with the individual or force that control not only the viewing experience but the lives of these characters. In other words, the film’s formal process implicitly conflates the camera, editor, director, and “monster.” 136

Those who complain of never seeing what takes place or of not seeing the killer express their desire for the safety of sight. Jason and Freddy horrify, but their ability to frighten diminishes once they have been identified. 136

The hyperrealism of the handheld camera mocks the film’s audience, gives that audience excessive immediacy but obscured vision, and thereby suggests a disturbing relationship between immediacy and obscurity. By manipulating our desire for visual mediation while exposing that mediation’s limits, the film thus confirms its larger message that we cling to forms and conventions. 137

While the film succeeds by disrupting the comfort of narrative structure, its marketing succeeds by cultivating the comfortable belief that the Web generation has a new and lucrative frontier before it, an idea that may be just as specious as the comforting illusions about America to which these characters eventually cling. 138

They do cling to the camera as a way of making the experience less real and more safe. 139

Her confession also melds the formal conceits with the narrative ideas. She is both object before the camera and subject behind the camera, wanting to control what we see but subject to the control of the narrative device. 139

In a wonderful manipulation of visual form and narrative, and to a degree far more disturbing than its predecessor Scream, BWP reveals a world and culture in which safe spaces simply no longer exist. 140

Moss, Stephanie. “Dracula and The Blair Witch Project: The Problem with Scientific Empiricism.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 197-215.

Both texts present themselves as faux documentaries, wherein the representation of technology are meant to suggest “faithful” records of actual events. 198

On the other hand, the uncertain and open-ended conclusion of BWP proceeds from a mind-set that has discarded scientific empiricism—even as it seems to endorse it—as an “objective” record of the occult. 198

Einstein grounded his yet-to-be-proven general theory of relativity in mental exercises that use mathematics as an abstract tool in a kind of twentieth-century platonic intellectual exploration. In this manner, Einstein broke the ideological hold of established science, and quantum physics inherited the thought experiment, using it to reason in a world of protons and mesons that is unavailable to the human eye. The famous quantum thought experiment known as “Schrödinger’s Cat” explains the epistemological shift from Newtonian to quantum thinking. A cat is put in a box in which a device can be triggered that will release a gas that will instantly kill the cat. The trigger is a random event. / The box is sealed. How does the scientist know whether the cat is dead or alive without opening the box? IN quantum physics, the cat is at once both dead and alive, suspended in uncertainty in the closed box. The question of whether the lethal gas has been triggered is indeterminate, and the cat’s two fates lie in the mind of the scientist. This is a paradigm of the uncertainty of the quantum world. When the box is opened and observation reveals that the cat is either alive or dead, the scientist is returned to a Newtonian world of empirical observation. 203-204

Citing Erwin Schrödinger, Jahn asserts that / science is indeed phenomenological: “The world is given to me only once, not one existing and once perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. . . . Mind has erected the objective outside world of the natural philosopher out of its own stuff” (Jahn, “Anomalies” 20, citing Schrödinger 137, 131). 205

The video and 16 mm cameras used in BWP, unlike Jonathan’s Kodak, display rather than merely inscribe eyewitness proof; the film qua film proposes itself as its own evidence. The dual cameras in fact capture visual images that reproduce a dynamic empirical “reality” that is culturally validated; cameras are used in surgery and courts of law. In disciplines such as surgical medicine, evidence captured on film not only replaces “reality” but also allows evaluation after the fact, augmenting subjective information with a visual representation that re-creates the experience for others and can then be adjudicated “objectively.” Acceptance of film as evidence makes the camera a tool of facticity that collects data considered legitimate. 205

The characters in BWP, however, have an ambiguous relationship to their cameras, one that is dynamic and specular and evokes the problems inherent in subject/object binaries. Indeed, the empiricism of the cameras depends on a not-yet-understood interface between human, machine, and environment. During the majority of BWP, the cameras are spliced to the filmmakers; human interiority cannot be separated from machine context. Heather depends on the camera for self-representation; it becomes a psychological object of desire, luring her, promising stabilized meaning in a woody environment that is beyond her conscious articulation. Heather and her camera are mother and infant, emotionally and biologically bonded, and she compulsively safeguards her child’s health, checking and rechecking its life functions, overfeeding it with so much electricity it could “fuel a small country for a month.” 206

In BWP, a digital audio recorder (DAT) supplants the nondigital video and 16 mm cameras used as empirical tools in the beginning of the film. 207

Like the seeing eye of the quantum scientist, which uses subatomic particles to measure subatomic particles, human intervention in machine function must logically affect the record of machine output. By extension, the fictive evidence the characters in BWP accumulate on film and DAT is tainted by their operation of those machines. The film, therefore, articulates the quantum paradox of using “sophisticated information processing technology” to investigate “subjective, intuitive, impressionistic, or aesthetic aspects of a scientific situation” (Jahn, “Anomalies” 18). In the end, Heather’s equipment has not only not capture evidence of the Blair Witch; it has not captured any objective data, or shed any light on the deaths of the filmmakers. 209

Like the non-Newtonian elements of Dracula, The Blair Witch Project undermines the assumptions of empiricism. Its machines seem self-willed, suggesting a metaphor for self-reflexivity that functions as another fictive representation of PEAR’s peculiar findings about quantum boundaries between machines and humans. The film opens with a blank screen. Abruptly, the screen comes to life with aimless and unguided images, random pictures of nothing. Heather remarks, “It’s already recording.” Throughout the film, the cameras inscribe themselves in lingering self-portraiture. While the cameras record cleanly delineated visuals in the town, they seemingly refuse to do so in a forested environment where images becomes profuse, enshrouded, and densely overcrowded. 211

These anomalous events, however, are encoded differently in novel and film, and the disparity between the two art forms marks the epistemological disparity between Dracula and BWP. At the end of the novel, the empirical certainty of the collated information on the vampire is subverted and nineteenth-century scientific norms reaffirmed. At the end of the film, the information gathered by the cameras and sound equipment stands on its own merit—an / ambiguous record that highlights the uncertainty of a quantum universe. Dracula leaves its readers safely ensconced in the age of reason. At the end of the novel, Schrödinger’s box stands open and the cat is dead. When the willing suspension of disbelief engages audiences of BWP, they, like Seward witnessing Lucy arisen from her grave, participate in the observation of unexplainable events. In this fashion, BWP performs the acquisition of phenomenological evidence. The film displays the limits of understanding grounded in a priori principles that bind the universe to delimited Newtonian laws. At the end of The Blair Witch Project, Schrödinger’s box remains closed, and the fate of the cat, like the fate of the filmmakers, is stranded in uncertainty. In the film, as in the quantum laboratory, Newtonian empiricism no longer solves our most profound puzzles. 212

Kleinhans, Chuck. “Pornography and Documentary: Narrating the Alibi.” In Sconce, Jeffrey (Ed.). Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 96-120.

The defense of this forbidden content is the documentary form itself: documentary’s “gravity,” the “discourse of sobriety,” provides the excuse that allows the naughty content to appear in the public sphere with little controversy. 97

My interest here is to move beyond these well-marked points and extend recent work. What happens when documentaries move beyond their usual sober realism directed at significant social matters to more bizarre, eccentric, and “low” subject matter? 97

In the case of the work considered here, there is also a strong sense that the “sleazy” work is crass, that it is not sincere but is adopting whatever ethical and moral stance it has simply to exploit its subject. A classical example can be found in the scenes of slave trading in Mondo Freudo (1966) and Mondo Bizarro (1966). These fake documentaries purport to show the auctioning of (mostly) women in Mexico and Lebanon. The scenes are patently staged (“Lebanon” is a well-known Los Angeles—area location, Bronson Canyon). The “slaves” are disrobed, to display female breasts, but genitals are obscured with scratch-on censor bars, thus implying that the female pubic area (viewed in a distant telephoto image) is more shocking than trading in humans. 99

Mondo Freudo and Mondo Bizzaro follow after Mondo Cane, an internationally successful sensationalist documentary phenomenon from 1962. Cheaply made rip-offs, they belong economically and industrially to the exploitation film market. The exploitation film has roots in the fairground show, the circus sideshow, and the traveling carnival. The carnival pitchman’s basic plan is this: (1) gather / a crowd; (2) promise them something sensational; (3) get their money; and (4) fool them and get away. At its worst-intentioned, in the classic con job, the “mark” is left at the end so confused, embarrassed, humiliated, or compromised that he does not go to the police or authorities to complain (and this is relatively easy when the content is sexual). But there is also a much milder version of exploitation, closer to P.T. Barnum’s celebrated “humbug” effect. Barnum observed and exploited the fact that if the deception was done in a fairly jovial, over-the-top manner, marks would gladly pay to observe the fraudulent and leave amused rather than outraged. 99-100

The classic off-screen narrator is often called the Voice of God, since the audience hears his pronouncements without seeing the embodied speaker. Usually this is a male voice with deep tones, sure phrasing, and an “educated” accent, which in the United States often means a hint of British intonation or a voice that seems trained for stage delivery. 103

Having grown up with this convention, it is easy to see why a younger generation of documentary filmmakers, especially in the 1960s, were eager to move away from this kind of authoritative (even authoritarian) voice. They chose to work instead in classic Direct Cinema style, employing a narrational style that seemed to eschew such external authority. This often involved placing the narrator on screen, either on location as an on-the-spot investigator or as a relay for eyewitness accounts. In this respect, the narrator becomes a more embodied character, a teller of the tale who, though perhaps unreliable, allowed the audience to better gauge his veracity. 103

What exactly does this comic voice of God add to this cinematic parade of (near) nudity? Echoing Barnum’s “humbug effect,” the narrator’s voice and persona is that of a carnival pitchman with a touch of (usually jovial) condescension. I will call this narrative device “reverse disavowal”: I know this is fake, but I still want to see it. The audience knows it is seeing not some actuality but an event staged for the camera—which is the basic technique of most U.S. newsreels in celebrity and staged-publicity events. But the audience doesn’t necessarily resent this kind of deception, since the film and its narrator are also giving it something else: a pretext for indulging its voyeurism while also leaving room for an ironic response. 106

We agree and accept the contract because it gives us the gratification of naughty transgression in the mocking guise of epistephilic discovery. 106

The pleasure, then, is not in knowing or learning, but in sincerely appreciating the spectacle even as we ironically revel in the lowbrow tackiness / of the presentation—imagining an absent viewer who would actually fall prey to the narrator’s absurd claims. Much like current fascination with supermarket tabloids that promise new and lurid exposés, Mondo viewers, both then and now, enjoy a “smarty-pants” pleasure that presumes a naïve viewer who probably never existed. 107-108

As these examples of 1960s documentary exploitation demonstrate, the putative authority and discernable earnestness of a narrator (on- or off-screen) is often unable to withstand the crisis presented b y the trashy, suspect, and incongruous images of exploitation cinema. While it would be easy to dismiss these films (and their narrators) as examples of pure, naïve camp, the strategies deployed by these stylistically diverse films suggest a more complex relationship between filmmaker, subject, and audience. I argued earlier that sleaze is marked in a way that reveals the maker’s cynical nature; therefore it is a matter of nuance and interpretation, most often cued by form. In its documentary form, perceiving sleaze depends on both the narrator’s relationship to the material and the audience’s perception of the filmmaker’s relationship to the narrator. It contrasts with naïve camp, which is often inept but sincere (with the gap between intention and ability providing the irony and humor). 114

Keller, James. “‘Nothing That Is Not There and the Nothing That Is’: Language and the Blair Witch Phenomenon.” Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 53-63.

When The Blair Witch Project aired in 1999, the only consistent topic for public discussion generated by the hype over the film was the hype itself. The films was a success because of its success…53

Traditionally, one could count on a movie’s remaining a self-contained whole. The audience is not generally required to supplement its experience in order to attain a satisfactory viewing. 54

The film’s intertextuality (the quality that undermines the audience’s ability to identify the primary text) was a clever effort on the part of the directors and marketing experts to create a cultural phenomenon reminiscent of the structure of the Internet. 55

The individual Web sites are organized according to categories of information that can be sampled at random. Similarly, BWP constitutes a montage of related media forms, each adding to the widening cultural experience, which so far includes the film, two “mockumentaries,” the Web site, the book, the CD (the music from the missing students’ car stereo), and the legion of reviews produced by the circulating social energy. 55

Only through the mediation of these latter productions was the environment provided for a satisfactory and meaningful viewing of the original film, and that meaning was only achieved by displacing the original film from the primary place within the process of signification. 55

This contrast is accomplished through the use of unsteady and ill-aimed camera shots as well as complete blackouts, all of which draw attention to the camera as a limited and limiting artistic medium as opposed to a window on reality. The audience becomes hyperconscious of the camera’s presence, not because of the artful, well-designed images, but because there are so few of them. 56

. . . as in BWP, where the cast is actually the crew: director, Heather Donahue; cameraman, Joshua Leonard; and sound man, Michael Williams. 57

Thus Myrick and Sanchez have achieved a sense of actuality by systematically repudiating virtually every feature of the film industry’s formula for realistic drama. They have achieved realism by rejecting realism, and by rejecting art they have created one of the most successful art films in cinematic history. 57

The idea that a text refers exclusively to other texts is consistent with the aphorism, postulated by Jacques Derrida in his seminal essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” that signifiers only ever refer to other signifiers, never to any materiality; the link between word and world is erased (249). Similarly, BWP is preoccupied with its own inability to signify; one might even say that the film’s inability to generate meaning is its principal meaning. 58

While Ferdinand Saussure taught modern linguistics that meaning is generated by the interplay of concepts in binary opposition, Derrida’s Of Grammatology demonstrates that the barrier between those oppositions collapses, dispersing priority and meaning altogether (27-74). For him, the meaningful distinctions between the physical/metaphysical, past/present, here/there, in/out, and even subject/object (me/you) are erased, and it is within the context of this suspension of meaning and frustration of expectations that the searchers and filmmakers try to find answers to their questions but learn nothing. 59

The most prohibitive deconstructions take place at the metadramatic and metacinematic levels of the film. The Blair Witch phenomenon defeats every expectation surround the creation and appreciation of film. 59

The premise of BWP—a documentary gone terribly awry—ruptures the common divide between the performer and the / production staff. While the presence of the crew is more likely to be obviated in a documentary than in a fictional narrative, seldom do the camera and sound people become the subject of the work itself, and even in news broadcasts where the speaker looks directly into the camera and occasionally refers to the process of attaining the images and information, the crew are not actually seen in the picture or identified by name, nor does the production schedule become a recurring subject of the dialogue as in BWP. In fact, in many ways the subject of BWP is the progressive loss of control of the cinema process: the cameraman disappears altogether, and consequently the shots become increasingly unsteady and ill-aimed; the audio track is pervaded by unsolicited and inexplicable sounds at night; the director becomes so frightened and irrational that she is unable to guide and execute the shoot; and the shooting schedule itself goes overtime and over budget and finally results in the complete disappearance of the production staff and their product. The actor/crew paradox is captured cinematically by the periodic shots of the two cameras filming each other filming. 60

However, authors are difficult to identify in the Blair Witch media—script, book, Web site. Deconstruction has dislocated the authority and meaning in the process of communication by problematizing the role of the author. 61

BWP erases its author with its unscripted dialogue and its contention that the footage is indeed the work of three student filmmakers (the original fabrication). Not only is there no single consciousness shaping the language of the film, but even the direction of the narrative is a product of the free association among the three lost players and Myrick and Sanchez hiding in the woods. 62

Each time I place a note in the text acknowledging my appropriations from A Dossier, I may be perpetuating the Blair Witch’s false pageant paraded across the American media. 62

Higley, Sarah L. “‘People Just Want to See Something’: Art, Death, and Document in Blair Witch, The Last Broadcast, and Paradise Lost.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 87-110.

Bill Nichols addresses this blurred distinction by declaring that what matters is ultimately “what we make of the documentary’s representation of the evidence it presents” (125—Winston’s emphasis, 253). Winston approves, stating that the formal difference between fiction and documentary “is to be found in the mind of the audience” (253). 92

Plantinga returns to the role of the viewer in identifying the intent of a film. We know a film to be fiction or parody “because it is socially marked or indexed, because through it the filmmakers make direct assertions about the actual world, and because when audiences recognize a film as nonfiction, they mobilize different viewing strategies than they do in the case of fiction” (“Gender” 331 n. 2). 93

paratexts 94

The real myth is that the camera cannot lie. 94

This film [The Last Broadcast] was made early in 1998, a good year and a half, claim its producers, before BWP aired, but it was overlooked. Instead, it came out on video in November 1999, riding the success of the other. 98

[The Last Broadcast]: A damaged section of the tape comes into focus to reveal Leigh’s own face at the murder site, proving how effectively digital imaging can find the “murder weapon” through the devices that Leigh associates with the devil. 100

. . . whereas David Leigh puts down his camera and grabs a plastic curtain with which he slowly suffocates the restorer of film in a scene that discomfitingly reminds one of “snuff.” 100

The Last Broadcast is a terrific mockumentary, and a more sophisticated, if less impactful, film than The Blair Witch Project or even Curse of the Blair Witch. 101

Ironically, that aesthetic was attributed to the other film that labored for over a year at keeping us interested in the “witch.” What that industry had going for it was a ready-made method to produce extensions of its fiction in video and print. It gave the average viewer what it thought he or she wanted: constant stroking of that elusive, external event—not a cerebral comment on the artifices of narrative and self-referentiality. 101

Jeff vindicates his foray into the woods with the aforementioned remark that “video never lies; . . . but film does.” 102

Ironically, BWP succeeded because so many of its viewers trusted the Griersonian bond between image and reality, camera and “truth.” 105

Had it not been demoted in the eye of the public by the hype, the print books, Heather’s diary (see Joseph Walker’s essay in this volume), its sequel, and other manifestations of Artisan’s industrial greed, The Blair Witch Project might have retained some of its initial prestige as an independent art film and Internet phenomenon—an honor that belongs as well to The Last Broadcast. 105

Taken together, then, all four films, strangely attracted into orbit around this issue of death and photography, express a profound distrust that reality can be known or seen without some kind of demise—a diminishment, an absence, a disappearance, a tampering. 106

Castonguay, James. “The Political Economy of the Indie Blockbuster: Fandom, Intermediality, and The Blair Witch Project.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 65-85

[N.1]: Intermediality refers to the convergence, interaction, and connection—economically, culturally, aesthetically, and so forth—among various media. 80

I conclude this section by arguing that the popular reception of the film and discourse among fan communities reflect standard Hollywood models of cinematic consumption rather than resistant practices. 66

. . . before concluding with an examination of its mythic status as an independent film that threatened to undermine Hollywood’s blockbuster paradigm. Building an argument presented in the first half of the essay, I conclude that the political economy of BWP creates a false impression of the film as counter-hegemonic. 66

Whereas “reality TV” programs like The Real World and Survivor introduce the codes of fictional narrative realism into their primarily documentary form, BWP incorporates conventions associated with the genre of documentary into its primarily fictional form, including a long tradition of cinema (and video) verité techniques, the “objective” interactive interview, and a home camcorder aesthetic. 66

These critical reactions thus comprise an integral part of the film’s political economy, pointing to the ways in which BWP became a site of critical and cultural contestation concerning, among other things, the aesthetic hierarchies, generic boundaries, and dominant methods of film production and distribution in the 1990s. 68

BWP parodies became a subgenre in their own right, from videos on the Web, VHS releases, and film shorts to promotional parodies for programming on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and ESPN. MTV’s Video Music Awards offered a parody of BWP parodies in which Chris Rock and Janeane Garofalo are unable to shoot their own Blair Witch parody because they keep stumbling upon other crews in the woods trying to do the same. 69

Although some viewers were duped into believing that the film was an actual documentary, these posts and thousands like them provide evidence for the existence of active and creative spectators rather than passive, uncritical consumers. 70

Instead of viewing these uses of the Web by Blair Witch fans as examples of progressive interactivity, I see them instead as forms of inter-passivity in which Internet users actively embrace the pleasures of consumerism and celebrate the profit-driven practices of Hollywood film production and distribution. And while the intertextuality and popular reception of BWP are important to the film’s meanings, these fan discourses provide evidence that Blair Witch spectators are subservient to Hollywood’s practices rather than resistant to its logic of market capitalism. 72

In order to better understand BWP’s political economy, however, I would argue that it becomes necessary to shift our concern from intertextuality to intermediality. I prefer the term and method of intermediality to intertextuality because text-based studies tend to ignore the structure and role of the media industry in the meaning-making process. A focus on intermediality is also better suited to an analysis of the political economy of film because it lends itself to a consideration of patterns of media concentration and ownership. At the same time, the concept also allows us to historicize the production and reception of BWP within the context of what is different about or specific to newer media. 73

Finally, because early film technology and the conditions of production limited the length of most early films and thus precluded the possibility of lengthy narratives, filmmakers and exhibitors often relied on newspapers to provide the narrative contexts and subjects for their films, making the print medium in many ways the “primary text” and transforming cinema into a visual newspaper. Like the print media in the 1890s, the Web provided an elaborate narrative context for BWP spectators that became an integral component of the film’s reception. 73

Of course, Hollywood has long produced “the low-cost independent feature targeted for a specific market and with little chance of anything more than cult-film status” (Hollywood 30) alongside its blockbuster films. These low-cost films are useful to Hollywood because they allow the industry to experiment with new forms and genres and to explore options for future projects. In the 1990s, large film studios acquired smaller formerly independent studios (e.g., Disney acquired Miramax in 1992, and Ted Turner bought New Line Cinema in 1993 [now part of AOL Time-Warner]), thus creating different divisions or studios for developing, acquiring, and marketing blockbuster and lower-budget “independent” films. 76

Indeed, even the words that greeted the visitor on the original official Blair Witch Web site (and used in promotional material) read like a “high concept,” “twenty-five words or less” Hollywood pitch satirized by Robert Altman in The Player (1992): “In October of 1994, the student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.” 77

It is telling in this regard that Sanchez and Myrick told the Austin Chronicle that they were more concerned with the film’s being “cheesed out” rather than “sold out” by the distributor, Artisan Entertainment (Savlov). 77

The current unprecedented level of concentration of media ownership means that fewer and fewer voices are being represented through the mainstream media, making it extremely difficult for newcomers or “independents” to have access to the established media outlets to express their viewers and distribute their artifacts. And although Telotte presents the Internet as “a medium that . . . threatens, much as television did, to supplant the film industry,” the history of media institutions outlined in this essay is one of conglomeration and convergence rather than the supplanting of one medium by another. 80

My analysis of The Blair Witch Project suggests that in the end the political economy of BWP may ultimately function to propagate a myth of independent cinema by falsely suggesting that this film disproved the rule of New Hollywood’s hegemony in an age of unprecedented media conglomeration. 80

Bentin, Doug. “Mondo Barnum” in Rhodes, Gary Don; and Springer, John Parris (Eds). Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co, 2006. 144-153.

Mondo Cane (A Dog’s World), is a “documentary” by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, with a directorial assist from Paolo Cavara, who soon left the team. It was released in 1962 and went on quickly to achieve notoriety in Europe and in the US. Marketed as a documentary chronicling odd moments in human behavior and Third World cultures, it played like Ripley’s Believe It or Not! With the inclusion of animal cruelty and an emphasis on the anatomy of women. It was soon being described as a “shockumentary” for the inclusion of scenes of pigs being clubbed to death as prologue to a primate feast, a piglet being suckled at a woman’s breast, and other examples of barbarism, i.e., most behavior that did not adhere to the Western European cultural norm. 145

While watching documentaries, one is indeed occasionally taken aback by the camera operator’s luck in being set up in exactly the right spot. But this perfect camera placement occurs so often in the Mondo films, the viewer quickly realizes that these set-ups, like the ones in the Rossano Brazzi sequence, are highly unlikely when attributed purely to chance alone. 147

Even the moments that appear most spontaneous quickly reveal that they have been patted into shape. Men in the Italian Army seen marching along in long or medium shot look genuine enough, but then we get a quick cut to an attractive young woman watching them on parade, her bosom captured by her bodice but struggling for release, followed immediately by a close-up of a marching soldier’s face as he slides his eyes hard to the side to take in the view. The long shot is real; the close-up is staged. 147

The Monde Cane 2 footage was faked. “We were making cinema,” Prosperi explained. “We didn’t just do documentary: if something was missing to make a scene work well, we would fix it.” Prosperi admitted that the monk’s suicide was a total fabrication shot in Bangkok using a mannequin. 148

But on the other hand the term “Mondo” eventually became a signal for a cinematic brew of fact and fiction to be taken with little seriousness; it became an appropriate term to denote the viewing position we’ve analyzed. 152

All of what we could say of the earlier Mondo films could be said of their Faces offspring. Well, almost all, anyhow. One crucial element had changed, affecting forever our Mondo-inspired viewing position and perhaps all viewing positions. The proliferation of home video allowed for not only repeat viewing of entire films with ease, but also of specific scenes, specific edits, and specific shots. Our ability to stop and start a film, spreading out our viewing over hours, days, or weeks changed what it means to be a filmgoer (whose “going” leads him or her to a video rental store perhaps, instead of a theater). And it has definitely changed and increased our ability to keep images from washing over us too quickly, allowing us to perform the kinds of investigations our Mondo viewing position requires. 152

Of course, the legacy of Mondo Cane and its illegitimate brethren has become all too obvious with the proliferation of alien autopsies, Blair witches, Project Greenlights, and a slew of television “reality” programs that are, in fact, about as real as the Piltdown Man. Jeffrey Sconce, from Northwestern University, has observed that “The whole documentary wing at [the Fox Channel] uses the Mondo films as their playbook.” 152

It’s also though a viewing position where the pleasures we gain occur due to our initiative, through our own investigations of what is real or not, through our own game. It’s a viewing position that allows us to engage with film in a manner unlike almost any other relationship of spectator to cinema. It’s a Mondo-viewing position. 152

Banash, David. “The Blair Witch Project: Technology, Repression, and the Evisceration of Mimesis.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 111-124.

The marketing and reception of the film are centered upon its supposed ludic repression of technology and return to authenticity. 112

Yet at every turn in the narrative, and encoded into the documentary format which relies on both grainy black-and-white and shaky video, the technological apparatus and its inability to represent the witch are underscored. The real horror of the film is built out of the return of this knowledge—that we remember our powerlessness in a world saturated with, but immune to, a technological mimesis we can neither trust nor escape. 112

The old argument here is that films which push technology toward a total mimesis no longer frighten audiences so desensitized that they can watch any evisceration disinterestedly. However, the reason for that jaded passivity is that real horror must be the evocation of our own fears—in short, a return to and paradoxical affirmation of the self. The success of BWP, so the argument continues in the New York Times, is that everything “is left to the imagination. And the imagination works overtime watching the acuity of these talented filmmakers” (Maslin). The formula for successful horror is, then, accord/ing to Kristen Baldwin, “asking the question ‘Hey, do you want to see something really scary?’ and letting your mind provide the example.” 112-113

Here, reaction against studio slick is coupled with a defense of what such obviously constructed, special—effected films threaten: the very concept of self. Where the studio monster is always constructed for us, given to us in the most graphic detail, it simultaneously calls attention to the very way it is attempting to manipulate audience reactions, constantly reminding the audience that it has little control over the way in which it is being mediated. BWP is such a powerful film, so the critics conclude, because it returns the audience (think trust as empowerment) to unmediated selfhood and agency (your fears, your mind, your self). 113

But with all this emphasis on imagination, we might wonder if critics and audiences aren’t protesting just a bit too much. BWP is now famous for what it does not show. We do not see Josh’s abduction. We do not see the presumably gruesome ends of Heather and Mike. We do not see the witch. All these, it is said, are left to the imagination. But what if this is about something more than empowering the imagination? For all these moments in the narrative are coordinated by the film’s central plot: the failure / of a documentary project. It is this failure that is shown in agonizing detail as the mimetic technologies (maps, compass, DAT, video, film) break down along with the collective cohesiveness of the filmmakers. Thus, what our reception itself represses is the very failure of technology as an armature and expression of a will to knowledge and, by extension, the possibility of self. 113-114

As the filmmakers enter the woods (a stark premodernism), they rely on a map and compass. 114

We witness Josh and Mike becoming more fearful as Heather miscalculates their distance from shooting locations. This theme is developed over the course of two days in which the very validity and usefulness of the map is called into question. What is at stake is representation itself. 114

Taking her video camera, he says, “I see why you like this thing. It’s like filtered reality.” While Heather does not object to this statement, and critics and audiences have all but made a rallying cry out of it (what you can’t see on the screen is scarier), the narrative suggests something a bit darker. It is not as if Heather, or we, could simply remove our gaze from the lens. Technologies of representation are, as we know, omnipresent. Worse, they are the only possibility we have to engage the world. Yet they are always flawed, always inadequate, always shifting and deceptive. The fact that the witch cannot be captured on the film is the horror of the film, but not because it empowers unmediated imagination. It is horrifying because it dramatizes (shows!) our total reliance on technologies that, if pushed, break, rupture, and give over to chaos. 115

Even the film itself has the look of truth that has come to dominate, from the emergence of MTV’s The Real World to Fox’s Cops or even America’s Funniest Home Videos. In fact, in both reviews and postings to chat groups, viewers associate much of the fright with this realism. 121

Consistently employing the discursive and filmic conventions of journalism and history, BWP performs the fact that all representations are incomplete constructions incapable of laying bare a god’s-eye view. And it does this with an effortless elegance, for not only has the documentary failed, but it asks its audience to adopt a critical stance toward all documentary (mimetic) claims. Thus the film contains its own self-reflexive critique, dramatizing the literal end/impossibility of mimesis. To obsess over imagining the witch is to elide the horror that is onscreen throughout the film; it is a reactive desire to escape the critique of mimesis, for in the supposed freedom of imagination we forget that our very psyche is as constructed, incomplete, and mediated as the film itself. 121

But such fears are repressed and turned into a utopian affirmation of our contemporary moment through the valorization of our imagination (self) coupled with the indie myth of good-old American economic self-reliance. 122

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” 1991. Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 140-158.

This essay explores the notion that there may be some value in thinking about the form, function, and system of seemingly gratuitous excesses in these three genres [Porn, Horror, and Tear-Jerkers]. For if, as it seems, sex, violence, and emotion are fundamental elements of the sensational effects of these three types of films, the designation “gratuitous” is itself gratuitous. 141

Altman argues that Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, who locate the Classical Hollywood style in the linear, progressive form of the Hollywood narrative, cannot accommodate “melodramatic” attributes like spectacle, episodic presentation, or dependence on coincidence except as limited exceptions, or “play,” within the dominant linear causality of the classical. 141

…thus makes a strong case for the need to recognize the possibility that excess may itself be organized as a system. 141

Pornography is the lowest in cultural esteem, gross-out horror is next to lowest. Melodrama, however, refers to a much broader category of films and a much larger system of excess. It would not be unreasonable, in fact, to consider all three of these genres under the extended rubric of melodrama. 142

I shall limit my focus here, however, to a narrower sense of melodrama, leaving the broader category of the sensational to encompass the three genres I wish to consider. Thus, partly for purposes of contrast with pornography, the melodrama I will consider here will consist of the form that has most interested feminist critics—that of “the woman’s film,” or “weepie.” 142

I am expanding Clover’s notion of low body genres to include the sensation of overwhelming pathos in the “weepie.” The body spectacle is featured most sensationally in pornography’s portrayal of orgasm, in horror’s portrayal of violence and terror, and in melodrama’s portrayal of weeping. 142

Visually, each of these ecstatic excesses could be said to share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm—of the body “beside itself” in the grips of sexual pleasure, fear and terror, and overpowering sadness. Aurally, excess is marked by recourse not to the coded articulations of language but to inarticulate cries—of pleasure in porn, screams of fear in horror, sobs of anguish in melodrama. 143

Looking, and listening, to these bodily ecstasies, we can also notice something else that these genres seem to share: though quite differently gendered with respect to their targeted audiences—with pornography aimed, presumably, at active men and melodramatic weepies aimed, presumably, at passive women, and with contemporary gross-out horror aimed at adolescents careening wildly between the two masculine and feminine poles—in each of these genres the bodies of women figured on the screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain. 143

There are, of course, other film genres that both portray and affect the sensational body—e.g., thrillers, musicals, comedies. I suggest, however, that the film genres with especially low cultural status—which have seemed to exist as excesses to the system of even the popular genres—are not simply those that sensationally display bodies on the screen and register effects in the bodies of spectators. Rather, what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen, along with the fact that the body displayed is female. 143

Whether this mimicry is exact—e.g., whether the spectator at the porn film actually experiences orgasm, whether the spectator at the horror film actually shudders in fear, whether the spectator of the melodrama actually dissolves in tears—the success of these genres seems a self-evident matter of measuring bodily response. 144

We feel manipulated by these texts, an impression that the very colloquialisms “tearjerker” and “fearjerker” express—and to which we could add pornography’s even cruder sense as texts to which some people might be inclined to “jerk off.” 144

Mary Ann Doane, for example, writing about the most genteel of these jerkers—the maternal melodrama—equates the violence of this emotion to a kind of “textual rape” of the targeted female viewer, who is “feminized through pathos.” 144

Robin Morgan’s famous slogan “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice” is well known. 144

The aptly named Twitchell thus describes a kind of erection of the hair founded in the conflicting desires of “fight and flight.” 144

“Torture the women!” was the famous advice given by Alfred Hitchcock. 144

Many feminists have pointed to the victimization of the woman performers of pornography who must actually do the acts depicted in the film as well as to the victimization of characters within the films. Pornography, in this view, is fundamentally sadistic. In weepies, one the other hand, feminists have pointed to the spectacles of intense suffering and loss as masochistic. 148

While feminists have often pointed to the women victims in horror films who suffer simulated torture and mutilation as victims of sadism, more recent feminist work has suggested that the horror film may present an interesting, and perhaps instructive, case of oscillation between masochistic and sadistic poles. This argument, advanced by Clover, has suggested that pleasure, for a masculine-identified viewer, oscillates between identifying with the initial passive powerlessness of the abject and terrorized girl-victim of horror and her later, active empowerment. 148

Pornography’s appeal to its presumed male viewers would be characterized as sadistic, horror films’ appeal to the emerging sexual identities of its (frequently adolescent) spectators would be sado-masochistic, and women’s films’ appeal to presumed female viewers would be masochistic. 149

The subgenre of sadomasochistic pornography, with its suspension of pleasure over the course of prolonged sessions of dramatic suffering, offers a particularly intense, almost parodic, enactment of the classical melodramatic scenario of the passive and innocent female victim suffering at the hands of a leering villain. 149

It worth noting as well that nonsadomasochistic pornography has historically been one of the few types of popular film that has not punished women for actively pursuing their sexual pleasure. 150

The point is certainly not to admire the “sexual freedom” of this new fluidity and oscillation—the new femininity of men who hug and the new masculinity of women who leer—as if it represented any ultimate defeat of phallic power. Rather, the more useful lesson might be to see what this new fluidity and oscillation permits in the construction of feminine viewing pleasures once thought not to exist at all. (It is instructive, for example, that women characters in the new bisexual pornography are shown verbally articulating their visual pleasure as they watch men perform sex with men.) 152

For fantasies are not, as is sometimes thought, wish-fulfilling linear narratives of mastery and control leading to closure and the attainment of desire. They are marked, rather, by the prolongation of desire and by the lack of fixed position with respect to the objects and events fantasized. 153

Each of the three body genres I have been describing could be seen to correspond in important ways to one of these original fantasies. Pornography, for example, is the genre that has seemed to endlessly repeat the fantasies of primal seduction, of meeting the other, seducing or being seduced by the other in an ideal “pornotopia” where, as Steven Marcus has noted, it is always bedtime. Horror is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat the trauma of castration, as if to “explain,” by repetitious mastery, the original problem of sexual difference. And melodramatic weepie is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat our melancholic sense of the loss of origin, the impossible hope of returning to an earlier state that is perhaps most fundamentally represented by the body of the mother. 154

Italian critic Franco Moretti has argued, for example, that literature that makes us cry operates via a special manipulation of temporality: what triggers our crying is not just the sadness or suffering of the character in the story but a very precise moment when characters in the story catch up with and realize what the audience already knows. We cry, Moretti argues, not just because the characters do, but at the precise moment when desire is finally recognized as futile. The release of tension produces tears—which become a kind of homage to a happiness that is kissed goodbye. Pathos is thus a surrender to reality, but it is a surrender that pays homage to the ideal that tried to wage war on it. 155

However, one thing already seems clear: these “gross” body genres, which may seem so violent and inimical to women, cannot be dismissed as evidence of a monolithic and unchanging misogyny, as either pure sadism for male viewers or as masochism for females. 156

Genres thrive, after all, on the persistence of the problems they address; but genres thrive also in their ability to recast the nature of these problems. 156

Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” 1983. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 15-34.

Like the female spectator, the female protagonist often fails to look, to return the gaze of the male who desires her. In the classical narrative cinema, to see is to desire. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the “good girl” heroines of the silent screen were often figuratively, or even literally, blind. Blindness in this context signifies a perfect absence of desire, allowing the look of the male protagonist to regard the woman at the requisite safe distance necessary to the voyeur’s pleasure. 15

But even when the heroine is not literally blind, the failure and frustration of her vision can be the most important mark of her sexual purity. 16

The bold, smouldering dark eyes of the silent screen vamp offer an obvious example of a powerful female look. But the dubious moral status of such heroines, and the fact that they must be punished in the end, undermine the legitimacy and authentic subjectivity of this look, frequently turning it into a mere parody of the male look. More instructive are those moments when the “good girl” heroines are granted the power of the look, whether in the woman’s film, as discussed by Mary Ann Doane, or in the horror film as discussed below. In both cases, as Doane suggests, “the woman’s exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization.” The woman’s gaze is punished, in other words, by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy. 17

I hope to reveal not only the process of punishment but a surprising (and at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman, in the sense in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing. 18

First, Nina’s look at the vampire fails to maintain the distance between observer and observed so essential to the “pleasure” of the voyeur. For where the (male) voyeur’s properly distanced look safely masters the potential threat of the (female) body it views, the woman’s look of horror paralyzes her in such a way that distance is overcome; the monster or the freak’s own spectacular appearance holds her originally active, curious look in a trancelike passivity that allows him to master her through her look. 18

Thus her look [in The Phantom of the Opera, 1925] occurs after the film audience has had its own chance to see him—they are framed in a two-shot that has him standing slightly behind her; only when she turns does she see his masked face. 18

The audience’s belated adoption of the woman’s point of view undermines the usual audience identification and sympathy with the look of the cinematic character. But it may also permit a different form of identification and sympathy to take place, not between the audience and the character who looks, but / between the two objects of the cinematic spectacle who encounter one another in this look—the woman and the monster. 19-20

Clearly the monster’s power is one of sexual difference from the normal male. In this difference he is remarkably like the woman in the eyes of the traumatized male: a biological freak with impossible and threatening appetites that suggest a frightening potency precisely where the normal male would perceive a lack. 20

It may very well be, then, that the power and potency of the monster body in many classic horror films . . . should not be interpreted as an eruption of the normally repressed animal sexuality of the civilized male (the monster as double for the male viewer and characters in the film), but as the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality (the monster as double for the women). 20

The male look expresses conventional fear at that which differs from itself. The female look—/a look given preeminent position in the horror film—shares the male of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For she too has been constituted as an exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male. There is not that much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned. 20-21

The strange sympathy and affinity that often develops between the monster and the girl may thus be less an expression of sexual desire (as in King Kong, Beauty and the Beast) and more a flash of sympathetic identification. 21

Laura Mulvey has shown that the male look at the woman in the cinema involves two forms of mastery over the threat of castration posed by her “lack” of a penis: a sadistic voyeurism which punishes or endangers the woman through the agency of an active and powerful male character; and fetishistic overvaluation, which masters the threat of castration by investing the woman’s body with an excess of aesthetic perfection. 22

According to Lurie, the real trauma for the young boy is not that the mother is castrated but that she isn’t: she is obviously not mutilated the way he would be if his penis were taken from him. The notion of the woman as a castrated version of the male is, according to Lurie, a comforting, wishful fantasy intended to combat the child’s imagined dread of what his mother’s very real power could do to him. This protective fantasy is aimed at convincing himself that “women are what men would be if they had no penises—bereft of sexuality, helpless, incapable.” 23

For, looked at from the woman’s perspective, the monster is not so much lacking as he is powerful in a different way. The vampire film offers a clear example of the threat this different form of sexuality represents to the male. The vampiric act of sucking blood, sapping the life fluid of a victim so that the victim in turn becomes a vampire, is similar to the female role of milking the sperm of the male during intercourse. What the vampire seems to represent then is a sexual power whose threat lies in its difference from a phallic “norm.” 23

The vampire’s insatiable need for blood seems a particularly apt analogue for what must seem to the man to be an insatiable sexual appetite—yet another threat to his potency. So there is a sense in which the woman’s look at the monster is more than simply a punishment for looking or a narcissistic fascination with the distortion of her own image in the mirror that patriarchy holds up to her; it is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to a vulnerable male power. 23

Helen’s [in Peeping Tom, 1960] refusal of narcissism also turns out to be a refusal of the only way patriarchal cinema has of representing woman’s desire. If she has the power to recognize and refuse the mirror-trap, it is because she is portrayed as ignorant of sexual desire altogether. She is like the one virginal babysitter who survives the attacks of the monster in Halloween (1978), or like Lila, Marion Crane’s “good girl” sister in Psycho, who survives Norman Bates’s final attack, or even like Helen’s blind mother in Peeping Tom who immediately “sees”—in the tradition of the blind seer—the turbulence in Mark’s soul. In other words, in most horror films the tradition of the power of the woman “pure of heart” is still going strong: the woman’s power to resist the monster is directly proportional to her absence of sexual desire. Clarity of vision, it would seem, can exist only in absence. 27

Psycho has been the model for the new form of the “psycho at large” horror films that began to emerge in the early 1960s and which now dominate the market. There is no more convincing proof of the influence of this model / than de Palma’s flagrant imitation of it in Dressed to Kill. 27-28

We have seen that in the classic horror film the woman’s sexually charged look at the monster encounters a horror version of her own body. The monster is thus one of many mirrors held up to her by her patriarchy. But, as I have tried to suggest, she also encounters in this mirror at least the possibility of a power located in her very difference from the male. 31

Ebert points out that in these films we rarely see the psychopathic murderer whose point of view the audience nevertheless adopts. This “non-specific male killing force” thus displaces what was once the subjective point of view of the female victim onto an audience that is now asked to view the body of the woman victim as the only visible monster in the film. In other words, in these films the recognition and affinity between woman and monster of the classic horror film gives way to pure identity: she is the monster, her mutilated body is the only visible horror. 31

In this light, Bobbie’s vengeance on Kate [in Dressed to Kill, 1980] can be viewed not as the act of a jealous woman eliminating her rival, but as acting out the male fantasy that woman is castrated, mutilated, “what men would be if they had no penises—bereft of sexuality, helpless, incapable.” 32

The horror film may be a rare example of a genre that permits the expression of women’s sexual potency and desire and that associates this desire with the autonomous act of looking, but it does so / in these more recent examples only to punish her for this very act, only to demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be. 32-33