The story itself is very compelling, and I love the whole creation of a myth to the extent that I can't believe now that the Blair Witch never existed. If I'd seen this mockumentary - and I generally avoid UNSOLVED MYSTERIES-type TV - I don't think I'd have been as moved as I was at the film. The only false note is the 1940s footage of the killer, which clearly looks like it was filmed recently. I'm not surprised people were taken in - it's brilliantly made and acted, a spot-on recreation of a certain kind of programme-making, right down to the amusingly portentous music, used like double spacing after a paragraph. While I find this hard to believe, I've been asking myself how I'd have dealt with it in those conditions. It is alleged that this mockumentary was shown for real on a factual US television station. It is so rational and comforting, filled with family, friends, and experts, that it makes the disappearance all the more bewildering and shocking. The mockumentary strengthens the film by showing us the outside world of the events, the context and apparatus from which the students disappeared, making their trauma less abstract, more real. However, it is also chilling in that the students therefore move from one set of bearings (map, compass), to another (the forest's enchanted circle, the signifiers of the Blair Witch myth). Not knowing too profoundly about the legend helps the film.
I'd have known too much, many things would have been explained (or at least graspable), overarching theories would have been more easily explicable. If I'd seen this mockumentary, I don't think I'd have been as scared. Being not quite sure what to expect only increases the tension and the terror. Without having seen it, the film is extraordinarily rich and suggestive, playing havoc with the viewer who carries no preconceptions (like myself). I think this mockumentary both weakens and strengthens the film. Watching CURSE was of great therepeutic value - shorn of the big screen and the mechanics of the horror film, I was able to dominate the material, to emasculate its very real hold on me. As I mentioned in my review, I was scared witless by BLAIR, and felt great anguish for some time after it. Sometimes cynicism can be so tiring, and I'm really jealous of Americans who were genuinely scared watching BLAIR.Īpparently this mockumentary played a large part in the film's mythology - I don't know how true this is. Hee hee! we titter as reports come of spectators needing psychiatrists after THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Ho ho! we chortle when we read about audiences feeling sick at such a tame film as THE EXORCIST. It is a favourite sport among 'sophisticated' Europeans to laugh at gullible Americans, and it is a pastime, I'm ashamed to admit, I've indulged in myself.
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