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