Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez make an unnerving horror film from handheld footage and people losing their nerve. We recommend it for the performances and the dread, with a warning that the panic can become repetitive.
The Blair Witch Project is frightening because its filmmakers understand how quickly confidence becomes useless when nobody knows the way back. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, who write, direct and edit, keep us with three student filmmakers whose documentary takes them into the woods. It is a strong horror film, with a little too much repetition even at 81 minutes. Its principal interest is what happens to people who begin by thinking that filming something means they can understand it.
Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams make the group convincing without making it particularly agreeable. Their performances leave room for irritation as well as fear, and their less likeable moments help the pretence of documentary feel credible. Donahue is especially good at letting confidence become effort: keeping going begins to look exhausting. The distinction between the documentary they intend to make and their behaviour around it gives us a useful measure of how far their composure slips.
Cinematographer Neal Fredericks’s handheld images deny us the comfortable view we tend to expect from a horror film. We cannot calmly inspect the woodland and decide where the danger will enter; the camera belongs to somebody caught up in the same confusion. We were frightened by the stretches of darkness because we kept trying to find something in an image that would not give us enough to look at. The roughness works, although the restless movement also makes watching unnecessarily hard at times.
Ben Rock’s production design works particularly well in its small, disturbing objects. The stick figures look crude enough to belong among the trees, and that helps them trouble us more than a fussier prop might. Tony Cora’s music matters less to the effect than the sound around those uncertain images, which keeps us attending to things the camera cannot clarify. When the screen provides so little information, listening becomes a way of searching, and the soundtrack makes that search uncomfortable.
The editing by Myrick and Sánchez largely respects the limits of the material. They let the footage remain awkward enough to feel like something being recorded by people with more urgent concerns than making a tidy film. But the repeated panic does lose force, and stretches begin to restate how frightened and helpless everyone is without changing our understanding. We are ready for the film to move on before it is ready to do so, which is a noticeable fault in something this short.
Against horror built around clearly displayed threats, this approach asks more patience and makes unusually good use of it. There is pleasure in recognising how little the film needs, but the actors keep that admiration from becoming a detached exercise in spotting tricks. We believe in their mounting alarm enough to stay with them through the repetitions. Watch it when darkness and uncertainty sound more appealing than explanations, and take the unsteady camera as a serious caveat.
