The most scared I’ve ever been was during the summer of 2012. I was a young teenager, and spent an afternoon of my holiday subjecting myself to the new viral craze with two friends. We drew the curtains, huddled around the laptop and started playing Slender.
Slender was a survival horror video game where the player finds themselves in a dark forest equipped with only a flashlight and one goal — evade the eponymous Slender Man. He is a pale, featureless creature with long, handless arms and a scruffy suit who haunts the forest and appears at various distances partially concealed behind trees. The more you look at Slender Man, the closer he appears the next time. You know you always have company and need to get as far away from it as possible. You are isolated, but never alone.
There was nothing innovative or complex about the way Slender scared you. Yet, as a nervous fourteen-year-old who avoided all things horror, I found it devastatingly scary. I would scour over the dark images of the forest, terrified I might spot that shifting demon in the periphery of my torchlight. Even after the game finished, I’d continue to anxiously scan for mysterious persons when I walked home in the dark or saw a scary movie. The horror that affected me most has capitalised on this fear by hiding unsettling and blurry figures in the background, such as in Lake Mungo (2008) or The Haunting of Hill House (2018). But in these examples, there always was something hiding in the background: the directors had placed figures there to unnerve us. The most unsettling horror, however, makes you think something is hiding without ever showing any evidence of it. This is a horror of atmosphere and gradually building terror, horror that implies terrifying things rather than flat-out showing them. Horror like The Blair Witch Project (1999).
When three film students — Heather (Heather Donahue), Josh (Joshua Leonard) and Mike (Michael Williams) — venture into a Maryland forest to shoot a documentary about the titular folklore legend, they find themselves lost and preyed on by unseen forces. They find piles of stones and hanging stick figures haunting their journey. They hear unsettling noises outside their tent at nighttime. They begin to feel helpless and disoriented. Whether their tormentors are human or paranormal in nature, either a local serial killer or the monstrous Blair Witch, is left uncertain. The three characters’ gradual realisation of their own inevitable doom is documented on two cameras. The shaky, handheld camerawork and low-resolution footage root us firmly in the characters’ perspective, and we feel their minds unspooling as they confront the unlikelihood of them ever escaping with their lives. At one point, Heather breaks down crying at the enormity of the realisation that her death will likely be drawn-out, painful, and ruinous. It is an utterly hellish situation and a terrifying experience to imagine.
It’s an experience that is so clearly communicated to the audience without the need for conventional scares. There is nothing frightening about The Blair Witch Project‘s setting in the daytime. It’s just a forest. But it is an endless forest devoid of human life, where the only signifiers of company are eerie, foreboding rituals that mark some unseen party’s territory. The thick layers of trees aren’t scary, but the possibility that someone stands among them is. Watching the film, I am convinced that somewhere, obscured in the foliage, stands a watchful killer, ready to prey on our characters whenever he pleases. He is in complete control, watching them lose their minds.
Except there is no one hiding in the background. There are no online compilations of all the sightings of the Blair Witch hidden amongst the trees, no subtle glimpses of the local serial killer stalking our characters. What I find scary is not physically in the film. My response of fear is incidental and disconnected from the text. It says more about me and my anxieties than it does about The Blair Witch Project.
But isn’t that, in its purest form, horror? When something taps into your personal fears, reaches out beyond the screen and makes you feel that the terror is coming specifically for you? True horror is that of implication, that which promises the monsters will linger around long after the film has ended. More than just about the scares, horror is what sticks with you. There may be no creepy figure lurking in the background of The Blair Witch Project, but there could be. The fact that I never spotted them highlights the insidious thought that they’re just very good at hiding and thus hold all the control. Near the climax, Heather is mockingly asked, “You gonna write us a happy ending, Heather?”, emphasising how little autonomy she now has over the narrative. Her skills as a filmmaker have proven useless against the real orchestrators. She is no longer in command of the story, but someone unseen is.
Either way, being able to spot a hiding killer wouldn’t give the characters any more power in their situation. Seeing their fears in physical form would only confirm their helplessness, validate their paranoia and further isolate them in the desolation of the forest. Just like playing Slender, actually visualising your hunter can bring death on you because in acknowledging their corporeal presence, you’ve broken the power dynamic between the tormenting voyeur and panicked subject. They will destroy you because of your transgression. What’s worse, the fact that nobody can hear you for miles, or that somebody can, but they’re coming to hurt you?
This underlines the dichotomy of terror that reverberates through the film — two vastly different sources of fear that are separated by day and night. In the daytime, our characters are lost; they cannot find their map, become convinced they’re walking in circles, and are scared that nobody is going to find them. During the night, noises haunt them and a distinct presence is felt around their campsite, so they become scared that somebody is going to get them. Both fears lead them to the same conclusion — they’re going to die out here.
These two opposing fears drag Heather, Josh and Mike through a hellish, lurching rhythm of terror. During the day, the more they can see of the forest, the more open and empty they realise it is; whereas the obscuration of the night compounds onto them the unshakeable feeling that the only safe space is inside their claustrophobic tent. What’s most compelling about the film is how it slowly makes you question if these two distinct terrors are in some way connected. During the daytime sequences, upon the realisation that they are all completely lost, Mike starts laughing hysterically, something that first amuses Heather before it starts unsettling her. The chaotic terror of the night, the feeling that they are at the whim of external forces that dominate the woods, is beginning to expand to the day. Admitting we are lost is a submission to our lack of control: in being disorientated we cannot understand our surroundings.
This is why living the experience of The Blair Witch Project would be abject hell. The horror genre is predicated on the question, “Will our characters survive?”, and for decades franchises have been attempting to one-up each other in terms of shocking, nightmarish premises. Yet the most unsettling horror comes not from external threats, but from the unwinding of psyches from inside out. In The Blair Witch Project, the arduous road to death is playing out excruciatingly, a psychological torture where three hapless students are removed from any sign of civilisation and left at the mercy of a creature who seems to feed off their fear and delirium.
While there are certainly filmmakers who are cleverly experimenting with the found-footage genre, such as Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007) or Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s Spanish-language [REC] (2007), most audiences remain tired of the format, thanks to a glut of cheap and flat flicks in the past decades. While it’s debatable that The Blair Witch Project was the first found-footage film, it was certainly the first major successful one, and together with a terrific online marketing campaign, it cemented itself into the horror canon pretty much immediately. The slew of copycat films didn’t even appear until post-Paranormal Activity, which makes The Blair Witch Project’s 1999 release date all the more important as it wasn’t as clear to audiences as it would later be that what they were watching didn’t actually happen.
What makes The Blair Witch Project hold up after over two decades is how much it convincingly suggests what we’re watching is recovered footage — these are the last recorded moments of three strangers whose ramblings and mannerisms have all the awkward, cringe-inducing sincerity of real people. We’re not supposed to be seeing this footage. Heather, Mike and Josh never edited it together and will never see the completed film of their journey. The viewer acts as an uncomfortable intruder into the most intimate and personal reflections a human being can have — how we react when faced with death.
Horror bridges the gap between fiction and our own personal anxieties. It ruptures the safety and comfort from which we watch the film by bringing to life situations where our deepest fears are triggered. The horror we find scariest is that which feels like it was made explicitly for us alone, so compellingly does it manifest our worst nightmares. It separates us from the protection of others, makes us feel targeted and vulnerable. It makes us feel alone.
I am scared of becoming disoriented in a vast and unpopulated forest from which I can’t find an escape. I am scared of a shadowy figure hiding in the background, watching me flounder in panic. I am scared of never seeing the people I love before I die. I am scared of being made to feel alone.
Back in the summer of 2012, our games of Slender would always end with slamming the laptop lid shut, throwing open the curtains and giggling at the intensity of our horror experience. It’s only now that I realise that this reaction is fundamental to our enjoyment of horror: the return to safety. When we’re scared, we’re dangled over a chasm of danger and uncertainty, desperately reaching for a safe zone of comfort. We need to experience the return to normality in order to reestablish balance, consoling us with an appreciation of a normal world where the monsters can’t get us. The characters in The Blair Witch Project are never granted this luxury. The ending, which has been aped by many found footage films since, leaves the exact details of their fate unknown. The camera shakes and drops from their hands. Audiences get to leave the cinema or turn off their computer and get back to normal. But they always do so with a heightened feeling of caution. Because while we all understand we’re back in our safe reality, we’re a little bit more aware that danger can be lurking just out of sight, waiting to pounce.
