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