Areas of Unrest

30 July 1999 - Really Scary or Why The Blair Witch Project Isn't

I was once telling somebody why not to introduce me at a storytelling concert by saying that I'm funny. It sets up a challenge, I explained, with the audience thinking "oh so she thinks she's so damn funny but I know better and I dare her to make me laugh." No matter how well I performed, I'd have lost half the audience to that dare.

Scary works the same way as funny does. A lot of what makes both humor and terror work is the element of surprise. Even knowing that, I went to see The Blair Witch Project, which the reviews were all claiming is truly scary. It's certainly an interesting movie. But I found myself looking at my watch about every 15 minutes and thinking "so when is it going to get scary"?

It's not like I knew what was going to happen in the movie. All I knew was that it was supposed to be scary. And, what with everything being shadows and sounds, it sounded like it might actually work - usually horror films are merely disgusting. But I just couldn't get myself into the action enough to get creeped out. I think part of this was because I found the voice of the female character to be fairly irritating. (Not for any obvious reason; it just rubbed me the wrong way.) But I wanted to think further about it.

So I came home trying to think of any movie that had ever scared me and I still haven't thought of one. It's not like I haven't tried. Back in high school, I was thoroughly addicted to late night horror films and I always had this mixture of both pride and disappointment when they didn't keep me from sleeping. The creepiest visual image I remember is from the Night Gallery adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's short story "Cold Air." And even that has a certain element of simple gore.

After a lot of reflection, I finally came up with the one time I couldn't sleep because of a media experience. Assuming, that is, that books count as media. The book in question was Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon and I read it for a class titled "Evil and Decadence in Literature." I don't want to write a spoiler, but what I found so terrifying was that the evil came in a form that seemed very innocent - and that continued to look innocent externally even after it was revealed for what it was.

And that is why The Blair Witch Project failed for me. It's an interesting and provocative movie, but the evil is too obviously evil for it to fully succeed. The supernatural is just never unexpected enough.