Editorials
Why ‘Blair Witch’ is so Important and Exciting to so Many People
Last night brought one of the most exciting horror announcements in probably the last decade: The Woods is actually Blair Witch, the third film in the franchise that began in 1999. Our own Brad Miska saw it several months ago and hailed it as the, “…game-changer horror fans desperately have been waiting for” and saying that it, “…breaks the mold of traditional horror and pushes the boundaries to the absolute brink.” You can read his full review right here.
This news set off what can only be described as a detonation of excitement across social media. There was a frenzy of people powering through incredulity and the vast majority of them arriving at a place of sheer glee and wonder.
As I watched this mass explosion of passion and delight, I found myself going back to when the first film came out and thinking about why it still has such an impact today. What follows are my own personal thoughts and opinions.
I remember when The Blair Witch Project was coming out. They hype around the movie was absolutely insane. It was written about in high-profile magazines, it was spoken about on talk shows… It was the water cooler hot topic discussion for a while and all for very good reason. The push was that this movie was groundbreaking, that it was the most terrifying movie in a long, long time.
But what set this movie apart was that the push wasn’t just how scary it was but also the attempt to keep up appearances that the events in the movie actually happened. This tactic was done through absolutely genius marketing that simply cannot be replicated these days.
You see, when they were pushing The Blair Witch Project the internet was a vastly different place. Google had been around for only a year and people were still using services like AOL or search engines like Yahoo, AskJeeves, Lycos, etc… Something to keep in mind about these search engines is that they weren’t exactly too hot at bringing the most accurate search results. The search engine game was still being worked on, something that Google was nailing but still building the user base for.
Not just content to create their own website, which is still around, I remember there being other websites created that corroborated the events in the film and added to the mythology. So what happened is that I went to search for “The Blair Witch Project fake or real” and the results made it seem like it was actually real. Furthermore, if you went to IMDb and searched for the stars of the movie, they were listed as “missing, presumed dead” (source). The studio planned it all this way and pretty much everyone fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. It was nothing short of incredible.
The marketing ploy worked and the film, which had an estimated budget of $60,000, went on to earn nearly $250 million worldwide, making it one of the best return-on-investment films ever released.
These days, search engines are so efficient that any attempt at creating a hoax will quickly be sniffed out and labeled as such. Snopes is almost always the internet user’s best friend but sometimes, just sometimes, it can be a real stick in the mud.
One question that I saw come up a few times (not often, mind you) on social media was essentially a rephrasing of, “Who cares? What does it matter?” After all, Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows was critically panned (although there are those who defend it), so why should people be excited for a third film that took 16 years to arrive? Honestly, those are fair questions. For many people, The Blair Witch Project wasn’t something they were a part of. Perhaps they were too young to appreciate the brilliance of the marketing. Maybe they never watched the original until found footage became a huge thing, so it felt like it couldn’t really compete against films like Paranormal Activity or [REC], which moved at a far brisker pace and definitely brought more in the way of visual trickery.
But what I’m seeing here is much the same as what I saw when Jurassic World or Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out. The high school and college kids who saw the first film in theaters have aged to the point that they might have kids that are old enough to see Blair Witch with them. It’s not just a horror movie, it’s a celebration of nostalgia while simultaneously passing the torch on to a new generation. For many, that alone is something worth celebrating. That is something to be excited about because it’s a chance to connect to our own youth and relive those days when we felt terror. Only this time we’re not alone.
Last night the horror community bonded over this reveal and it was a glorious sight. It was the kind of event that reminded me how our passion can surpass our differences. Sure, we may not agree on the worth of remakes and we definitely don’t always see eye-to-eye when it comes to the use of CGI over practical FX. But those can all be put to the side when we recognize that there is the potential for a great story, one that will shake us to our core.
That’s the power of Blair Witch. That’s what it awoke in all of us. Whether the world agrees with Brad’s review or not after September 16th doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that nearly all of us came together in joy and hope that we’d be seeing something special. That right there made it all worthwhile for me.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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