Post by Stu on Aug 8, 2005 15:13:56 GMT
Dir: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez
Independent movies are finally given the resurrection we’ve been craving in the form of Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez’s classic documentary style chiller ‘The Blair Witch Project’. Not since Wes Craven’s indie classic ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ has a movie of such imagination and creative genius gripped so many.
The originality of writer/directors Myrick and Sanchez’s juicy tale about three students who venture into some wood’s near Burkittsville, Maryland to make a student documentary, has helped ‘Blair Witch’ become the most successful low-budget picture of all time surpassing John Carpenter’s brilliant ‘Halloween’.
Student filmmakers Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams take a 16mm camera and some sound equipment into ‘Black Hills Forest’ to investigate the myth of the ‘Blair Witch’, which dates back some two hundred years. Gruesome, mysterious deaths are blamed on the ‘Blair Witch’ myth but as yet nothing is proved.
One year on the footage from their documentary is found.
This is an absolutely brilliant and clever piece of filmmaking. The nighttime sequences mainly provide a blank screen to the audience leaving just the audio to move things along, which it manages with an eerie effectiveness. The winning factor here is Myrick and Sanchez's reluctance to show you the 'witch'. Everything is left to the imagination providing the same winning formula which made the first hour or so of 'Jaws' so effective.
The ground shots as the cameraman flees from whatever it is he’s fleeing from, is a very imaginative way of incorporating a documentary feel to the film. I found myself inching my head upwards trying to get the actor to hopefully show us something but he never does. Amateur video images sometimes used in news reports have the same effect. When something unexpected happens the cameraman can sometimes lose control of his or her camera therefore preventing you from seeing footage you might want to see, ‘Blair Witch’ has that same effect.
Since ‘The Blair Witch Project’ many films have tried in vain to capture the same appeal that this film has in abundance but for me none have come close. It’s not the scariest film of all time, which might explain why there are a lot of people out there who were not sold by it’s genius. One might suggest watching it with an open mind, hopefully you will not be disappointed.
Quite simply a masterpiece of inventive filmmaking.
Independent movies are finally given the resurrection we’ve been craving in the form of Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez’s classic documentary style chiller ‘The Blair Witch Project’. Not since Wes Craven’s indie classic ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ has a movie of such imagination and creative genius gripped so many.
The originality of writer/directors Myrick and Sanchez’s juicy tale about three students who venture into some wood’s near Burkittsville, Maryland to make a student documentary, has helped ‘Blair Witch’ become the most successful low-budget picture of all time surpassing John Carpenter’s brilliant ‘Halloween’.
Student filmmakers Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams take a 16mm camera and some sound equipment into ‘Black Hills Forest’ to investigate the myth of the ‘Blair Witch’, which dates back some two hundred years. Gruesome, mysterious deaths are blamed on the ‘Blair Witch’ myth but as yet nothing is proved.
One year on the footage from their documentary is found.
This is an absolutely brilliant and clever piece of filmmaking. The nighttime sequences mainly provide a blank screen to the audience leaving just the audio to move things along, which it manages with an eerie effectiveness. The winning factor here is Myrick and Sanchez's reluctance to show you the 'witch'. Everything is left to the imagination providing the same winning formula which made the first hour or so of 'Jaws' so effective.
The ground shots as the cameraman flees from whatever it is he’s fleeing from, is a very imaginative way of incorporating a documentary feel to the film. I found myself inching my head upwards trying to get the actor to hopefully show us something but he never does. Amateur video images sometimes used in news reports have the same effect. When something unexpected happens the cameraman can sometimes lose control of his or her camera therefore preventing you from seeing footage you might want to see, ‘Blair Witch’ has that same effect.
Since ‘The Blair Witch Project’ many films have tried in vain to capture the same appeal that this film has in abundance but for me none have come close. It’s not the scariest film of all time, which might explain why there are a lot of people out there who were not sold by it’s genius. One might suggest watching it with an open mind, hopefully you will not be disappointed.
Quite simply a masterpiece of inventive filmmaking.