Eduardo Sánchez knows how to make people getting lost frightening. We rate The Blair Witch Project for its performances and deliberately awkward footage, though it also shows his difficulty in knowing when to move on.
Fi1m perspective
The camera is still recording, but nobody knows the way back. In The Blair Witch Project (1999), three student filmmakers take their documentary into the woods and lose the confidence that brought them there. Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, who share the writing, directing and editing, understand how filming something can give people a mistaken confidence that they understand it. We were frightened by the students’ growing helplessness, which made their cameras seem increasingly useless.
As editors, Myrick and Sánchez let the footage remain awkward enough to suggest that getting a tidy shot has become the least of anybody’s worries. The performances carry much of the fear, with the actors making the loss of nerve convincing. The editing respects what these people could plausibly have recorded. A more polished account would have made their predicament harder to believe.
His first solo feature, Altered (2006), took him into science-fiction horror. Lovely Molly (2011), which he wrote, directed and edited, explored possession through psychological horror. He continued experimenting with found footage in his V/H/S/2 (2013) segment, “A Ride in the Park”, and the Bigfoot film Exists (2014). The subjects change, but the commitment to horror persists, with the camera itself remaining something he can experiment with rather than simply a means of recording the action.
The reservation is already there in The Blair Witch Project. Even at 81 minutes, it keeps returning to panic that no longer tells us anything new about the people experiencing it. We are ready for a change before the filmmakers supply one. Their patience makes the fear convincing, but they do not always recognise when a scene has done its work, and the repetition costs a short film some of its force.
From the mid-2010s, Sánchez also became a regular director of television episodes, including Supernatural, Yellowjackets and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. That work has continued alongside occasional horror features, so a list of his films tells only part of the story. Start with The Blair Witch Project, for the performances as much as the fear, and allow its directors a little more panic than they need.
Biography
Eduardo Sánchez is a Cuban-born American film director, screenwriter and editor. He was born on 20 December 1968 in Havana and moved to the United States as a child. He is best known for co-directing, co-writing and co-editing the 1999 found-footage horror film The Blair Witch Project with Daniel Myrick.
Sánchez studied television production at Montgomery College in Maryland and film at the University of Central Florida. With Myrick he received the inaugural Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award in 1999. He has directed further horror features including Altered (2006), Seventh Moon (2008), Lovely Molly (2011) and Exists (2014), and has worked on television series such as Lucifer, Supernatural and Yellowjackets.
