Filming Ideas vs. Idealized Film
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's The Blair Witch Project and M.Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense
J. A. Hanson
July 1, 1999
The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez (Artisan Entertainment,1999), 144 minutes. The Sixth Sense, Directed by M.Night Shyamalan (Spyglass Entertainment,1999), 106 minutes. It was the summer of the sleeper horror movie; The Blair Witch Project, which was made on the money that the filmmakers found beneath their sofa cushions, grossed millions, and The Sixth Sense, a craftily written thriller from little-known filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, cleaned up after Blair Witch and ruled the box office for more weeks than anyone expected. There was something elementally compelling about Blair Witch, but in the end the backstory was more fascinating than the story itself. Critics and viewers alike talked long and hard about the do-it-yourself aesthetic of "directors" Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, who provided their actors with only the rudiments of a script so they could terrorize them by night and elicit impromptu responses from them (which were filmed by the actors themselves) in the search of that genuine terror with which they hoped to infect their audience. In this way Blair Witch was more about an idea of filmmaking than the practice of it. It occurred to me after I watched Blair Witch that it is a fundamentally unrepeatable exercise. Once done, no one else can do quite the same thing. It's a stunt, a novelty. This is not to say that it doesn't have its own charms. Blair Witch is the punk music of cinema. Like punk, it extends a certain negative logic to its extreme, purging the art of its trappings and aspirations, getting down to videotape and sixteen millemeter brass tacks and going for the simplest thrill, the most visceral impact, the guiltiest pleasure. Some of the greatest horror directors ...
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