Oh no, another list! This time: 50 Greatest Indie Films

[plan9superfan]

Just for the record, I actuslly bought "The Blair Witch Project" on VHS and have seen it several times (mostly on Halloween).

And I NEVER thought they were dealing with an actual witch. I always thought they were dealing with a psychotic, hulking, Michael Myers-like human psychopath that toys with his victims and then kills them, using the Blair Witch legend to scare his victims.

That's what makes it so creepy: they went into the woods with all the intent of finding an actual witch, and they found a disturbed slasher that uses the Blair Witch legend to horrify his victims.

Witches are fictional. Deranged human mudereres are very real. Truth is always scarier than fiction.

[dean]

I really don't see the 'slasher' angle in Blair Witch, just going on how it ends.  That one scene was worth the first hour or so of 'freaky' yet kinda slow and boring at the same time.  

I mean, I quite enjoyed it based on the end, which freaked the hell out of me [something that hasn't happened often since.]  I think seeing it at the cinema helped.

Plus you gotta admit, filming it in that way was darn impressive!  It's nice when people take a risk when making a film, in tems of style and how they did it: if we don't experiment with the media, it'll just become formulaic and stagnant.

[Derf]

dean Wrote:
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> > I really don't see the 'slasher' angle in Blair
> Witch, just going on how it ends.  That one scene
> was worth the first hour or so of 'freaky' yet
> kinda slow and boring at the same time.  

(And yet again with the SPOILERS)

It's been a few years since I've seen it, but the townspeople talk about an escaped lunatic teacher (student?) or something that made pupils stand in the corner and then tortured and killed them. The ending scene shows one of the characters standing in the corner while the others are killed. That's where I got the slasher angle. I know I'm mixing up some details, but the ending left me with the impression of a non-supernatural killer. I can see some of plan9's point on the reality of psychos, but the movie built itself on the supernatural angle, so I wanted supernatural. It's kind of the same
kind of problem I have with From Dusk Til Dawn--it builds up a story one way (bank robbers running to Mexico) and then suddenly switches gears and becomes a vampire movie with no further plot developments (I was enjoying the bank robber angle; the vampire angle was boring to me).

[plan9superfan]

"The Blair Witch Project", for all we know, took place in the real world. In the real world, there are no such things as witches.

I mean, what do you consider scarier: Count Dracula or Jeffrey Dahmer? Freddy Krueger or John Wayne Gacy?

See what I mean?

[akiratubo]

Maybe I'm just too cynical, but The Blair Witch Project to me is nothing but a well-designed business strategy.

They designed their movie as carefully as possible to seem "arty" and "edgy" while still being incredibly cheap to produce.  Then they put together an amazing advertising campaign, the cornerstone of which was implanting the meme that the collection of video tape they were going to show you was real.  Then, shortly before the (cough) movie was released, they let it get out that it was all staged in a move that simply reeked of avoiding potential, bottom-line damaging lawsuits or protests.

The business model behind the film is amazing.

The movie itself is just some people with camcorders running around the woods.  Thousands and thousands of teenagers with video camera make that same "movie" every week.  The businesspeople behind The Blair Witch Project just managed to sell theirs on a large scale.

[ulthar]

The idea I had when I first saw it, and I don't think this is discredited upon multiple viewings, is that the dude that killed those kids was an incarnation of the witch.  That is, the witch is a 'spirit' that takes over people to do its bidding.  Or something like that.

If you listen to the interviews and Heather's narrative of the lore, there were several people who did evil things near the town; the malevalence of the 'witch' was the common thread.  So yes, technically it was that man who killed the kids, while making one stand in the corner, but it was the witch acting through him. The evil things occured over a hundred years (or more? it's been a while since I watched it).  In other words, the bad stuff in that area predates that one man's lifetime and that's why I never thought it was an 'ordinary' person doing the killing.

Presumably, it was a newer incarnation of the witch that was killing Heather at the end - some speculate in the body of the one of them that disappeared.

[Derf]

I guess it must have succeeded in doing what it meant to do since we're still arguing over "what really happened" seven years after it came out.

Anyway, I can't argue with any of your interpretations; I can only say that the only interpretation I saw when I watched it six years ago was disappointing to me. As I said before, there were some good elements to it (yes, the marketing was probably the best element of the movie), but overall it didn't scare me the way Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version) or A Nightmare on Elm Street did.

[ulthar]

Derf Wrote:
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> I guess it must have succeeded in doing what it
> meant to do since we're still arguing over "what
> really happened" seven years after it came out.

I was thinking that EXACT same thought as I opened this thread again!

>I can only say that the only
> interpretation I saw when I watched it six years
> ago was disappointing to me.

Fair enough; to each his own.  :)

[loyal1]

Pink Flamingos...wow.  Has anyone else seen this John Waters film?  I remember where I was and who I was with when I saw that, and I remember I didn't care for eggs for quite sometime after seeing it...lol.  What is it with the chicken obsession anyway?

Although I am not one to truly judge what indie films should be in the top 50, I was glad to see and really liked the following

Happiness
Mad Max
Texas Chainsaw
Cube
Momento
Evil Dead
Roger and Me
Night of the Living Dead
The Usual Suspects
Resevoir Dogs
Life of Brian
Donnie Darko
Lost in Translation
The Terminator

Ones i haven't seen and would like to:

Drugstore cowboy (I can't believe I haven't seen this one yet!)
Nosfurato
City of God
The Descent
Eraserhead
Blood Simple


Curious about:

Bad Taste
Sweet Sweetback Baadaass

Not sure about the others...will have to look them up.

[loyal1]

You know for some reason your post reminded me of M. Night Shylaman's whole scifi stunt before The Village came out.

I really wanted that movie to be good.  I really wanted to like it.  It would have been fine until well...I rather not talk about it.  Mixed feelings all around. :(

[Ash]

Sorry loyal1...I know you wanted to change the subject, but this Blair Witch stuff has my interest piqued.

Forget the human stalker in the woods.

------------------------------------------------------------------

From beginning to end, I've always believed that the Blair Witch herself manipulated the events that occured in the woods.

She did it herself...(even though we can't see her)

She messed with their compass and deliberately led them in circles....

The Blair Witch is an evil and sentient spirit that can act physically in our world...able to actually abduct one of us and mess with our psyche at will.

She can make us hear voices and other sounds...
She can also construct objects like those stick figures and hang them.
She can arrange rock formations around a tent.

She can interact with us at will.
She can induce deep fear.

She is real!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Remember the scenes where Heather & Mike can hear Josh's screams of pain and pleas for help in the middle of the night?

I imagine Josh really tied to a tree in the darkness, still alive...and hearing Mike yell, TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE JOSH!!! And he can do nothing about it.

I then picture Josh tied against a tree with brute force, his mouth forced open and his tongue, eyeballs and teeth pulled out by an unseen force.

This is how I perceived the events in the film.

There was no psycho killer.
It was the witch herself that haunted those woods.
She did it.

[Ash]

Many of you have totally missed the point of the Blair Witch Project in my opinion.

READ HERE FOR FURTHER CLARIFICATION

[plan9superfan]

You STILL don't get it, do you?

The "Blair Witch" is as real as "Keyser Soze" was in "The Usual Suspects".

The killer in this movie is a psychotic slasher who uses the whole Blair Witch legend to horrify his victims, and then gut them and chop them apart. Think of him as a Scooby-Doo villain on acid.

There was no evidence whatsover that there was an actual witch in the woods.

Besides this movie (like "Unbreakable"), took place in the "real" world. And guess what? In the real world, witches are fictional, but insane murderers are VERY real.

[ulthar]

plan9superfan Wrote:
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> And guess what? In the
> real world, witches are fictional, but insane
> murderers are VERY real.

And insane murderers live hundreds of years in the REAL WORLD?  The Blair Witch legend went back several generations, at least.  I think this comes out in the movie, too, but you can read that the Blair Witch story began in 1785; Heather and company disappeared in 1994, so I guess your ordinary human 'real' insane slasher has lived over 200 years.

Do you dismiss The Amityville Horror in the same way?  I mean, after all, ghosts don't exist in the real world, at least not with any more certainty than witches do.

How about the dark paranoia of The Thing?  After all, shape shifting aliens that have been frozen for 300,000,000 years don't exist.

The point is that the CHARACTERS believe it is real. What makes it creepy to US, the viewers is exactly Roger Ebert's point in the link Ash posted: TBWP taps into our real, instinctive, fears - noises in the night of unseen 'creatures,' etc.  In the same way The Thing can be said to be more about paranoia, TBWP can be said to be about fearing the unknown.

No one pretends that the approach taken the producers the Blair Witch works for everybody.  But trying to argue "realism" about a fictional work of art is pretty short of substance.

[plan9superfan]

"The Blair Witch Project" is realistic. It has no scripts, actors or special effects. It takes place in OUR WORLD.

"The Amityville Horror" and "The Thing" do NOT take place in our world, but rather in Movie World, an alternate univrerse where fictional movie characters live.

Yes, there was a Blair Witch legend. And the killer in the woods used that legend to his advantage, to scare his victims into submission before he kills them.

That what doesn't exist can't kill you. A real, flesh-and-blood insane msdman CAN kill you.

My pint is: there are NO "characters". That iswhat makesit so creepy: it could all really happen (unlike The Amityville Horror, that couldn't happen in a million years).