Happy B-day, “Blair Witch Project”

Can you believe it’s been 10 years since the wide release of “The Blair Witch Project”? It’s hard to remember now, but in the summer of ’99, it was just about impossible to get away from one of the first great viral marketing campaigns – maybe even the most effective viral marketing blitz of all time – and the movie wasn’t bad either.

Like everyone else who went to a movie that summer, I had the trailer memorized. Two sentences, written in basic sans-serif white type over a black screen. Some film students disappeared in the woods, and a year later their footage was found. The “BWP” marketing worked because it was consistent in insisting that it was all a true story. The Sci-Fi Channel mockumentary and the film’s promotional Web site gave us a lot of supplementary material – police search photos, interviews with the students’ families and professors, etc.

It was interesting marketing, and it turned out that it really helped. Because if you just watch “BWP” with no prior knowledge of its mythology or how it was made, it’s just a shaky-cam mess. At its best, “BWP” always felt to me like a really good campfire ghost story: a little creepy, sometimes cheesy, but when you’re trying to get to sleep that night and you hear rustling in the woods, THEN it gets scary.

I went to see it with my Mom and my friend Molly. It was Molly who explained the significance of the film’s last shot to me (I’m ashamed to say I totally didn’t get it), and once she did, the ending went from “Huh” to “Holy SH*T, that’s freaky!”

On the way home, we stopped for gas at the Neighbors right down from Molly’s house. If you’ve never been to Pilot Mountain, this is the Neighbors that’s right at the junction of Highway 52 and Highway 268 – not exactly the wilderness. And being a gas station it’s bathed in bright yellow light. So I’m standing there pumping gas, wondering if it’s too late to be eating potato wedges, when somebody on the other side of the parking lot cranks his car. BOOM. I jumped like I’d been shot. Clearly, I was more on edge than I’d thought. Then we got to drive home… through the woods… in the dark. Fun.

For me, though, “BWP” was one of those movies that was better the second time I watched it, and then it went downhill from there. Some of the improvised dialogue is sloppy. And yes, while it’s true that what you don’t see can be scarier than what you do see, occasionally you do need to see *something.*

For whatever reason, neither the “BWP” filmmakers nor principle actors have gone on to do much of anything else, major film-wise. Who knows, maybe the Hollywood powers-that-be think they really did disappear in the woods. Anyway, what they put out may not be perfect, but it’s certainly intriguing, and more imaginative by far than much of what gets released 10 years later.