Willow Creek

Year of Release:  2013

Director:  Bobcat Goldthwaite

Screenplay:  Bobcat Goldthwaite

Starring:  Bryce Johnson, Alexie Gilmour

Running Time:  79 minutes

Genre:  Horror

This found-footage horror film revolves around a young couple: Jim (Johnson) and Kelly (Gilmour), who are on a trip into the Six Rivers National Forest in California to make a documentary about the legendary Bigfoot.  Jim is an enthusiastic believer in the creature, but Kelly is a sceptic.  Needless to say, they soon discover the truth.

Written and directed by comedian turned filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwaite (possibly best known for his recurring appearances in the Police Academy films), this is similar in style to The Blair Witch Project (1999) if the opening scenes of the Blair Witch extended for over half the film, and the wandering around in the forest only lasts for the last half hour or so.  For much of the film it's like a satirical look at the Bigfoot tourist industry, and pop culture impact.  They travel through towns where everything seems to revolve around Bigfoot, and visit a Bigfoot diner, bookstore, and eccentric local folksinger who sings Bigfoot-themed songs.  Jim and Kelly are searching for the location of the famous Patterson-Gimlin Film, which purportedly shows a female Sasquatch walking, and you have probably seen a still from it if you have ever looked up Bigfoot.  Aside from a disturbing encounter with a aggressive local, the scares don't come in until late in the film, in an extended scene where Jim and Kelly are in a tent and we hear strange noises and something thrown against the tent.  It all ends very abruptly.  It does have some very effective moments, and Jim and Kelly are likeable and engaging characters who, unusually for a found footage film, actually do have character and personality. It's not really scary enough to work as a horror film, but it is an entertaining diversion.

Kelly (Alexie Gilmour) meets a new friend in Willow Creek

      

Blair Witch

Year:  2016
Director:  Adam Wingard
Screenplay:  Simon Barrett
Starring:  James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Brandon Scott, Valorie Curry, Corbin Reid, Wes Robinson
Running Time:  89 minutes
Genre:  horror, supernatural

James Donohue (McCune) finds an online video which seemingly contains an image of his sister Heather, who disappeared twenty years previously in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while investigating the local legend of the Blair Witch.  Believing his sister may still be alive, James heads off into the woods, accompanied by his friends Peter (Scott), Ashley (Reid) and film student Lisa (Hernandez) who intends to film their search for a documentary.  They are joined by Burkittsville locals Lane (Robinson) and Talia (Curry) who uploaded the footage.  Before long a series of strange and frightening events befall them.  

This is the second sequel to the influential The Blair Witch Project (1999), following the unsuccessful Book of Shadows:  Blair Witch 2 (2000).  As with the original film, this is a "found footage" movie, where everything is allegedly filmed by the characters on screen.  While in the original this was novel and innovative, here it looks kind of tired, due to the flood of found footage films that unleashed themselves after the success of Blair Witch Project.  By and large this has the same basic structure as the original, except everything is bigger: instead of the original trio, here there are six people lost in the woods; whereas in the first film they had a couple of cameras, here they have an arsenal of DV cameras, spy cameras, ear-mounted headset cameras, and a drone.  Also, while the original film thrived on subtlety and ambiguity, there is nothing subtle here, with sudden jump scares, loud noises, crashing trees, and tents, equipment and people shooting into the sky and crashing back to earth.  This turns it into a fairly conventional horror film, also, unlike the original, you are left in no doubt that the threat is supernatural, and the Blair Witch feels thoroughly demystified by the end.  There are some tense scenes and some elements, such as the way time and space become distorted, are quite effective.  However, the characters are pretty much one dimensional and spend most of the time bickering or screaming.  The found footage style quickly becomes tiresome and frustrating, with the jerky, grainy images.

Valorie Curry runs afoul of the Blair Witch

          
  

The Blair Witch Project

Year of Release:  1999
Directors:  Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez
Screenplay:  Jacob Cruse and Eduardo Sanchez
Starring:  Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, Michael Williams
Running Time:  81 minutes
Genre:  horror

It's hard to picture, seventeen years on, the phenomenal impact that The Blair Witch Project had when it was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in late 1999.  It managed to split audiences among those who were caught up in the film's ambiguous chills and genuinely frightened by it, and those who thought it was 81 minutes of tedium, and annoyingly shaky camera work, that could have been made by anyone with a bunch of pals and access to some woods and a video camera.  The idea, as we are informed in the opening titles, is that in October 1994 three film students (Heather (Donahue), Josh (Leonard) and Mike (Williams)) go missing in the forests around the small Maryland town of Burkittsville while filming a documentary about a gruesome local legend.  A year later their footage is found, and it is this footage that is allegedly presented to the viewers.

The film made use of a very innovative marketing campaign, selling the entirely fictional film as if it was a true story, with the help of television "documentaries" and being one of the first films to really utilise the power of internet marketing, at a time when the Web was just becoming widespread, and also of course word of mouth.  The film was promoted by issuing "MISSING" posters for each of the three characters (all of whom shared the same name as the actor playing them) even the venerable Internet Movie Database got in on the fun, listing the cast as "missing presumed deceased".  Of course, the cat was out of the bag before long.  This small film became the most successful independent film of all time, and popularised the "found footage" sub-genre of horror although  Blair Witch Project wasn't the first to use the technique (that honor probably goes to Cannibal Holocaust (1980)).  The film keeps it's horror ambiguous, an approach that beguiled some viewers and frustrated others.  The ending in particular is open to interpretation.  It's even debatable as to whether there is anything supernatural going on at all.

Looking at it now, on DVD, away from all the hype, the film has lost a lot of it's impact, particularly after the glut of found footage horrors that came in it's wake.  It's not without it's merit though.  A good horror film needs a basic fear to latch on to in the viewer, with Blair Witch Project it's being lost, alone and frightened with no way out.  I would venture to suggest that most of us have had experience of being lost at some point in our lives, to a greater or lesser extent, I'm sure very few of us have been stuck out in the woods and tormented by a powerful supernatural force, but you may have been stuck out late in an unfamiliar part of town, or stranded in a strange place and unsure how to get back.

There have been two sequels to date:  Book of Shadows:  Blair Witch 2 (2000) which was released exactly a year later, and is widely regarded as a disaster, and Blair Witch (2016).

 Heather Donahue in The Blair Witch Project