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