Blockbusters and Birdwalks

1999 Best. Movie. Year. Ever., a conversation – Episode 3: “The Blair Witch Project”

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Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa disagree about the rewards of found footage horror craft while noting a landmark in viral marketing.

This is part of a series that overlaps with, and extends, Brian Raftery’s 2020 book “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen”. Screenings include: “Following” (Christopher Nolan, 1998), “Varsity Blues” (Brian Robbins, 1999), “The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), “The Matrix” (The Wachowskis, 1999), “Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace” (George Lucas, 1999), “South Park - Bigger, Longer and Uncut” (Trey Parker, 1999), “Free Enterprise” (Robert Meyer Burnett, 1999), “Eyes Wide Shut” (Stanely Kubrick, 1999), “Twin Falls Idaho” (Michael Polish, 1999), “American Beauty” (Sam Mendes, 1999), “Three Kings” (David O. Russell, 1999), “Boys Don't Cry” (Kimberly Peirce, 1999), “Topsy-Turvy” (Mike Leigh, 1999), “Magnolia” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), and “Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes” (Cass Paley, 1998).

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Referenced media:

  • “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” (2020) by Brian Raftery
  • “Psycho” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
  • “Teenage Mother” (Jerry Gross, 1967)
  • “Stunt Rock” (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1978)
  • “Star Wars: The Special Edition” (George Lucas, 1977)
  • “The Empire Strikes Back: The Special Edition” (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
  • “Return of the Jedi: The Special Edition” (Richard Marquand, 1983)
  • “The Witch” (Robert Eggers, 2015)
  • “Gilligan’s Island” (Sherwood Schwartz, 1964-1967)
  • “Cloverfield” (Matt Reeves, 2008)
  • “The Sixth Sense” (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
  • “The Babadook” (Jennifer Kent, 2014)
  • “Summer of Sam” (Spike Lee, 1999)
  • “Jaws” (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
  • “Lake Placid” (Steve Miner, 1999)
  • “The Descent” (Neil Marshall, 2005)
  • “Dog Soldiers” (Neil Marshall, 2002)
  • “Scary Movie” (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000)

Audio quotation:

 

Cold Open And Introductions

SPEAKER_02

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but a runny nose will always hurt me. Welcome to the Blockbusters and Birdwalks podcast. I am the curator, Garrett Chafenkirai. Today we have a conversation with a friend, Ed Rosa.

SPEAKER_03

That's me. Hi. My filmmaking partner and I have a YouTube channel, Toothless Richard Productions, where you can see a number of our short films.

SPEAKER_02

The Blair Witch Project was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival. Brian Raftery covers this extensively in his book, Best Movie Year Ever, and I'll leave it to his discussion to go into the great depth of what that meant and means to the Y2K experience. But it is also to say that the long reputation of that Sundance Film Festival took six months of brewing time before the movie was finally released to General Theaters in July.

Hype Builds Then Disappointment Hits

SPEAKER_02

I went to go see it in September after I'd spent the summer listening to virtually everybody around me in the workplace, waiting in line for coffee, and at the time I was in New York, strap hanging in the subways, everybody was chattering Blair Witch, Blair Witch, Blair Witch. I went to the Kew Garden Cinema, I think was its name. Made the Mistmas crawl out, which was not a difficult thing. In September, it's quite hot. We had no air conditioning. So this was a chance to get that air conditioning break.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

We go to the show, and barely 90 minutes later, when it's done, we've watched our trailers and all the rest, we leave, bleary-eyed in the afternoon sun, and I think to myself, I've got to be crazy because this is not good. It's so not good that I'm kind of embarrassed that I've brought my new wife to see this movie.

SPEAKER_03

But you were interested because the word of mouth you had heard on it, that people were saying it was good, and so you were like, had you seen the trailer?

SPEAKER_02

I don't recall spending a lot of time hitting the web on that.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Because I didn't have broadband. Yeah, it's pretty early on. I don't remember there being a giant TV campaign. I just remember people saying, it's good, it's good, it's good. And well, I get swept along in that like anybody will, seasonally when important things happen, and this was important. I think it had already become this hugely unexpected blockbuster. I just mean to say that my basic remark then was it's totally disappointing. Not worth this cultural

That Teaser And Is It Real

SPEAKER_02

effort.

SPEAKER_03

Uh all right, so I had seen the trail, the original trailer, like the original teaser, where you just see the just it just like the text comes up and says, like, in you know, blah, blah, these three students went out to do this documentary and never came back, and like a year later their footage was found. And then it's just a black screen, and then uh Heather is beginning her monologue about apologizing to parents, and then we get that, you know, pretty infamous shot of her eyes filming herself sitting in the tent.

SPEAKER_00

I just want to apologize. I'm sorry to everyone. I was very naive.

SPEAKER_03

After watching that trailer, I was like, there's no other movie I am more curious about or want to see more than this. Foolishly, I was like, wait, is this true? Now, because I I sort of lamented like my inability to see Psycho in a world where what happens in the conclusion of the film is not like so part of like the pop cultural like lexicon. I already know that Norman Bates is his mom. You know what I mean? Like, but that reveal in the movie is amazing. So I've always been bummed that I could never have seen Psycho without prior knowledge of that, right? When this happened, because the internet was, you know, not necessarily its infancy, but I mean it's still pretty young. I'm still using like webcrawler.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

You know what I mean? Or Netscape. Yeah. Basically, right? Or, you know, if I want porno, I'm on M IRC, right? And even though I had the internet, it wasn't like it is today. And so I was like, wow, is this real? Is this real? And and I had not been aware that already for like a year they had already kind of set up some stuff online. All this is to say, I I at this point am like, is this real or what? And then when the film opened, it opened small first, as I recall, because I had to go down to the landmark hill crest to see this.

Opening Night Fear In The Theater

SPEAKER_03

Um, but I was there opening night. Tons of people thought it was real. Right. There's been a handful of times I've been to a theater, I've had a theatrical experience with movies that just absolutely stick out in my mind. They're like absolutely the most amazing experiences I've ever had in a theater. Teenage Mother at the New Beverly at like four o'clock in the morning. Unforgettable. The first time I saw the Stunt Rock trailer at Bean at 7 and the place, oh, the Alamo Draft House, uh, the Star Wars Special Editions, going to see The Empire Strikes Back at the long-gone man Cinema 21 down in Hill or in a hotel circle, which seated over a thousand people and had that gigantic screen, right? This was one of those screenings. I've never heard like a theater more quiet in parts. I've never heard like more honest seeming emotional responses to a movie, like the sort of the gasps, and people some people like screamed at certain points because everyone thought what they were watching was was like a documentary. But at that time, I was actually a little disappointed with it because you know, some of the complaints about like The Witch, the Robert Eggers film, like you know, people who are not thoughtful will be like, oh, nothing happens. You know, oh that movie sucks, nothing happens. The entire film, everything is kind of just like hinted at. You see sort of very little. There isn't some giant like culmination where it's like, oh my god, the Blair Witch, or anything at the end, right? And it's a very abrupt conclusion, which works to its benefit. Right. So at first I was like a little disillusioned with it, but then I revisited it many years later, and my opinion of the film has improved.

Why The Craft Still Impresses

SPEAKER_02

I offend a lot of my friends with the following statement whenever I watch a movie. It's too long. Well, and sometimes it is. Well, this movie is only 81 minutes all the way through the bitterness of its trademark and its MPAA seal at the very end, but it should probably barely be an hour long.

SPEAKER_03

See, I actually found myself this time going like, no, no, I feel like this is the right length. Okay. And I guess uh according to the the trivia, uh the original cut was like two and a half hours. But I also kind of understand because this the this whole thing is so is so sort of unorthodox, like in the way it was made. I mean, in terms of like conventional filmmaking, right? Uh what they were having their actors do, the way they're shooting it, the way they kind of are writing it, like all the improvisation. It's borderline experimental.

SPEAKER_02

There are things that do impress me, especially now that I'm involved in education. I'm much more excited about creative endeavors among the young. The gist is we're watching three people Heather Donahue playing a version of herself, Joshua Leonard playing a version of himself, and Michael Williams playing a vision of himself. They are three young filmmakers. This is Heather's project. She wants to do a documentary of this weird mythology and this folkloric account of various bad things that have happened, which are grouped under the header of The Blair Witch. She wants to go off in the woods and discover these places that were referred to in various of the accounts she's read about or been told. And it's there, it's very earnest, these filmmakers. Right. They believe they're in for not even a long weekend. I think it kicks off on a Saturday morning. They intend to be home by Sunday night because they got to return the equipment they've borrowed from one of their employers. It all blows up, they get terribly lost, and they seem to be preyed upon by some dark forces which we never see. We only hear ideas of what might be out there. And along the way, they have markers that suggest that there are supernatural forces afoot, ghosts might be around them, maybe cannibals, funny animals. We're not sure, and the movie never clarifies any of this. It just adds up to the horror that they've parked themselves into the middle of the Blair Witch experience, thus the Blair Witch project. Now, technically, the whole movie's defined by two points of view. One of the three principles holding a color camcorder or a black and white non-sync sound 16 millimeter camera. There is a third track of sound, the DAT system, the data, the digital audio tape.

SPEAKER_03

That's right.

SPEAKER_02

Which was pretty high in technology. It's required that's the thing they're worried about, getting back on time, probably to avoid overreach charges and not get fired. So that's how this all works. The meat and potatoes of the movie never ever get away from those two restricted points of view. I found the movie bracingly fun for about 30, 35 minutes.

Woods Panic And The Brutal Ending

SPEAKER_02

Let's get this project started, everybody. Right. Heather has a huge amount of cheerleading energy. She's clearly the bulldozer, she's totally in control. These dudes are like, ah, I'm gonna hitch myself to this star because it's going places. I'm gonna get a credit. It'll be a chance to make myself shine, and I'm gonna go get drunk and stoned in the woods. What could go wrong?

SPEAKER_03

Well, and I felt she was a very sort of authentic sort of archetype. I've met her before. Totally. Especially of this time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And because they restrict the point of view to those two different camera vantages, it means the three principals are constantly handing back and forth the cameras. As bad things befall them, as the confusion weighs in, as their weekend getaway turns into more than that, those two devices and the dat become really important to measuring all of these confessional things they start to offer as they break down, as they loose all of their food, as their things are rifled through by some spiritual thing out in the woods, until finally they find what is literally a haunted house. And we presume, by the way, the movie concludes that they're all dispatched by whatever the Blair Witch really is. It looks pretty blunt. And because there's a lot of out-of-focus stuff, there's a lot of material shot at night with the light attached to the camera, which blasts everything in too much light, and then suddenly three feet out, you can't see it. So there's a way that's really truthy because, well, if you're our age, you've made home movies thinking, oh, this will be a great showpiece of that birthday party, and it's all doggeral. Right. You can't see anything. You can hardly hear anything. The movie showcases all of that stuff. Now, being in my 50s, thinking about my young self in my twenties when I first saw it, I have a lot more slack I'll cut for the way the movie's intelligence works against the fact it had absolutely no money behind it. Right. Reports are that this movie could have cost as little as $35,000, which was probably all dat and 16 millimeters.

SPEAKER_03

Right. Oh, and maybe a hotel room. Actually, uh, according to the IMDB trivia, the most expensive portion of the film is where they're talking about Gilligan's Island because they had to pay for the rights because they sing the Gilligan's Island theme song. That was the most expensive. They even returned the camcorder to Circuit City, according to the trivia, at the conclusion of filming to save money.

SPEAKER_02

And I knew people even earlier who did that trick. They would go to Circuit City, that was the target.

SPEAKER_03

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Because you could open the line of credit with no real definable income, could still get it to two or three grand credit line, which was enough if two or three of you went together. Right. Somebody could get the dat, somebody could get the camera, somebody could get all the stuff you'd use. You wouldn't return the tapes because you need those, but you get your money back on all the rest, and you would cobble together your reel to try to go make it in the world. The idea that you're going to go make a movie that would eventually earn close to $250 million due to a careful marketing campaign that touched the likes of you, Ed Rosa. Off in your distant life, whatever you were involved with in 1998, 1999, you and the millions like you to go to the show and be taken away by. Am I watching a snuff film involving supernatural stuff?

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_02

Or is this a big put on? The point is, I don't really care. I kind of enjoy myself. I like the ride. My problem then and now starts at about 45 minutes in when they're off in the woods and things start to go wrong. And they just start cursing at each other for minutes on end. You're an asshole. You're a bitch. Fuck you. Where'd my fucking smokes? Fuh, fuck, fuck, fuck. It's like I'm listening to a Marine platoon from Pimbleton at a bar when they've had too much to drink and they're angry with their gunnery sergeant. It's too much for my little ears. And it doesn't really go anywhere. They just keep literally dealing with a circle they're walking, which is one of the problems. They can't seem to negotiate orbital directions. There's no north, south, east, west in their world. They're just kind of trapped in Blair Witch Land. That hits me wrong, but I was captivated by the conclusion, the way that I wasn't back in the 90s. I do think it's decision to have them wander around this multi-story, goofed up old house where Josh, who's disappeared for the last 10 minutes of the movie, he's been kidnapped, or he's been killed, or he escaped, or he's died in the lichen, or whatever's out there in the forest. You hear him again. Oh, Josh! And they're clearly freaked out. We gotta find our friend. Yeah. Which leads them right into the abattoir where they're killed. And the camera takes the shock and falls to earth. I mean, that's very good.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And then it just goes to black and gives you credits with creepy, creepy music.

Microbudget Tricks And Viral Marketing

SPEAKER_02

The other standout important thing is there are twin filmmakers, buddies, who I think met in a Florida school where they were in classes together, Daniel Meyrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who here are the writer, director, and editor. I emphasize that because they have envisioned this project and then they deciphered it for the rest of us. It's a very coherent O'Tour statement. And there was really no budget oversight. They didn't have to spend other people's money. Right. Really, no matter how you slice this, until they began to market the thing, and then it was up-jumped to get it sent out on the world to find an Ed Rosa to go watch it some months later. This means we're looking at a very, very specific point of view from a creative personality, and it's a dual personality. That's unusual. Have buddies. So I still don't like the movie, but I like what it represents. I like that it puts on the page the value of people just trying something. You use the word experimental, and it's exactly right. And that experiment yielded the world of reality television, but also the knockoff sort of uh Blair Ridge Project-based movies.

SPEAKER_03

The the lamentable found footage subgenre, which this I can't think of uh there might be some examples. I can't think of any other found footage films that existed prior to this one, but the originator is still great.

SPEAKER_02

There was a term that that I encountered in my arts training, permission. But when you see a landmark sort of creative achievement, whatever your discipline might be, it gives you permission to behave like that. And maybe you didn't even know that was possible. And this movie gave a lot of up-and-coming artists in movies and business people permission to do something they hadn't imagined was possible. It makes this media, you can tell when you're looking at 16 and it looks good. Yeah, it's just that it's a black and white.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_02

You can see that you're looking at video because it's in color, but it's crummy because video is time to suck. Yeah. And generally, we don't do that kind of mashup. It's irritating. But when the conception of the entire narrative requires it, you're going to accept an awful lot.

Summer 1999 Horror Comparisons

SPEAKER_02

I place that in front of you also to say that there were a couple of other horror-esque movies in the same season that I was drawn to. Well, most people were drawn to. The Sixth Sense was released the next month.

SPEAKER_03

Man, that the Sixth Senses Real Estate has absolutely cratered for me. Has it? I walked out of that movie going, ooh, that was really good. That was my reaction. Now it's terrible. In my mind, when I watch it, the gimmick that blows your mind the first time you see it is the worst thing about the film. There's a scene in that movie where Haley Joe Losman and Tony Collette are like sitting in a car and he's talking about seeing dead people and she's losing her shit because her son is going crazy. Right.

SPEAKER_02

That's way more interesting. There's an even more recent movie called The Baba Duke.

SPEAKER_03

Which I have not seen yet.

SPEAKER_02

It's I strongly recommend it. I've been meaning to, I know it's been on like people's like top horror, modern horror, like it takes that exact dynamic of a mother who's watching her unhinged child behave in an unhinged way, which is making her unhinged, but they're walking separate paths with the same problem between them, the Baba Duke. Right. Or in the case of Sixth Sense, the dead people. The dead people, right. She's intensely believing he's true or he's completely crazy. Either way, she can't cope.

SPEAKER_03

I just felt like we had we had just passed over the most interesting thing about the Sixth Sense because it's just, oh no, no, he's really seeing dead people.

SPEAKER_02

I saw The Sixth Sense before I saw this movie, The Blair Witch Project, probably a month separation. Okay. My appetite for a horror movie in the summer of 99 was set up by that. And two other titles, which also came out in July. One, Summer of Sam by Spike Lee. I'm a sucker for his work. Well, you know what? Sucker for New York stories, and I'm a sucker for things that are exactly as old as the story as I am, as a 73 story.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, yeah. I I actually need to revisit that because that that was the first Spike Lee film I ever saw. Oh my god. And I thought it was so dumb. I thought it was so dumb. Yeah. But now that I'm far more acquainted with Spike Lee and really enjoy his Peccadillos and Idiosyncrasies, I need to revisit that because I probably will have a much different opinion on it now. But yeah, I was I was tremendously disappointed.

SPEAKER_02

And I saw that in New York City with an all New York audience that was pretty split between those who were like, ah, Spike's brought us another. Right. And the other, there was a guy literally just going through a six-pack who kicked over his whole can set with his empties, leaving that you're like, what the hell was that? Drunk and stumbling. It was kind of outstanding. But it's a horror movie about how this Metropole of eight million people really felt that they were being preyed upon by a single unhinged individual. Unhinged is the word of the day. So that was July for me. The other, which was just a goofy little silly, kind of a Jaws-ish ripoff, Lake Placid, with Betty White as a woman who grooms an alligator out at Lake Placid. It's a complete escape, dumb, dumb movie, but I enjoy it.

SPEAKER_03

See, I actually have not seen Lake Placid either, but yeah, you're making me want to watch it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And that was July. So that's in my rear view. Summer of Sam's in my rearview. The Sixth Sense is in my rearview. And then I get this big head of steam. You're gonna love it, Garrett, and then I don't.

SPEAKER_01

The Blair Reach Project.

Lost In The Woods Is Real Horror

SPEAKER_03

Did you ever see The Descent? No, no. The guy that made dog soldiers.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, I love that movie. I have not seen Descent.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, so in that movie, what's scary is there's cave creatures. These chicks are all going spelunking, and there's cave creatures trying to eat them. But what's really scary about this movie is just the spelunking. Being trapped in tiny places, you know, not knowing if they can squeeze through openings, if they're gonna run out of air, where the hell they are, how they're gonna get out. And then you add the cave creatures on top of that. I am never going spelunking in my life. I I have I was already confident in that before I saw the descent. Yeah. Afterwards, it's double confirmed. You will never, I will never, I don't care how many caves are, I'll never go in one ever. With Blair Witch, it's kind of similar in that they're following, you know, the sort of Hitchcock logic, right? It's not what you show them that's scary, it's what you don't show them, right? Right, and and we're getting just these little, you know, these little tastes, these little tidbits, right? Oh yeah, Josh's teeth. Yeah. Um but the reality of being lost in the woods is something that makes sense. Now that's scary. Because that's real.

SPEAKER_02

And that could easily happen.

SPEAKER_03

For example, there's there's the part in the film towards the end where they wind up coming, they walk up on like a tree that they've already crossed and they realize they're walking in circles. But that's the kind of thing that actually will happen to people when they're sort of lost in the wilderness, right? Or are they being manipulated by these supernatural forces? Because also, so they're as they're going through the forest, you know, they they keep finding themselves in the same spot, but then at the end, then they discover this house.

SPEAKER_02

Why didn't they see it earlier in full daylight when they had the opportunity?

SPEAKER_03

It's already scary of the idea that you would be lost. Them getting upset with each other and panicking and not knowing what to do, kicking the map into the river. That that's scarier than the Blair Witch hovering over them.

SPEAKER_02

This movie affirms for me Garrett should not camp.

SPEAKER_03

I

Iconic Snot Shot And Filtered Reality

SPEAKER_03

actually was fairly impressed by the performers in this because they weren't given much, but also they shot the movie.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_03

None of these people are cinematographers. Right. Um, according to the MDB trivia, Josh had some time, uh it took him some time to get used to focusing like the 16 millimeter. And you can see it. Uh right. For example, the shot from the original trailer of Heather Donahue in the tent, paralyzed by fear, apologizing to the that shot is is iconic now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

That's hers. Right. That's a great shot. And of course, then Scary Movie rips it off, and the the runny nose with the crying eyes. Right. The confession has been reused and reused. It's it's become quite funny. It's like a meme. It's also a pre-serious bit of revelation. Right. Because she really does have to cry. You know, she does have snotbling out of her nose.

SPEAKER_03

She's going through it, and she's totally in earnest. Right. Right.

SPEAKER_02

And at that point, all of the difficulty of managing and thinking about that personality up to now, which is by then 75 minutes of the movie, she's not been a very likable person. But she peels back those layers, begins to cry, and comes on glue because she knows that she's right at the end of the mortal coil. Is this going to work out or not? Something's hunting me. Yeah. That's a scary feeling. Yeah. Every amateur can occasionally touch on the greatness of what they're trying to learn. I point that out because they're smart people. They're educated in images, and they have a few moments where they're dialoguing over what they're up to.

SPEAKER_00

It's not quite reality.

SPEAKER_02

Reality says we gotta move.

SPEAKER_01

No, but it's totally like a filtered reality, man.

SPEAKER_03

It's like you can pretend everything's not quite the way it is. My dad recently we had his birthday party because he's a million years old. And it was to celebrate one of his million-year achievements. So what I what I did, I went through their old records and I found a bunch of like his old records from like the 50s and 60s, and I like you know, I digitized them. So for his birthday, I played like his old music like all day, right? It was awesome because I had a job to do. It's a tremendous relief if I'm in social situations to be able to be the DJ or to have a job like that. Him talking about like Heather's filtered reality, that rang super true to me because like that little device.

SPEAKER_02

It takes the emotional pressure off of your fear.

SPEAKER_03

Exactly. Because now it's like, oh, well, I'm here to shoot this, so I'm not actually engaged in it in the way that would make me think.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right. It's the Blair Rich project.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_02

I guess the jury's still out. Boop booboo.