#85 One Cut Of The Dead (2017): 9/10
#86 The Blair Witch Project (1999): 10/10
Film crews are beset by monsters and witchcraft in today's pair of chillers. One Cut Of The Dead is about the shooting of a cheapie zombie film, True Fear, where the cast & crew find themselves preyed upon by the undead Foh Realz. At least, for the first half hour it is (captured in one, seemingly unbroken POV camera take). But then writer/director/editor Shinichiro Ueda pulls off a chronological and narrative coup, skipping back to show the audience what they say is not quite what the saw, in this frequently uproarious mixture of comedy and horror that's also a surprisingly sweet chronicle of the creative process, especially when ingenious, on-the-spot improvisation is called upon to make it all fit together. To reveal more would ruin a lot of the fun, so check out this Japanese production and prepare to laugh your ass off. "Pom...!"
Meanwhile, the film that essentially invented the "Found Footage" genre out of whole cloth is celebrating its 25th(!) anniversary this year, and The Blair Witch Project remains one of the most masterfully unsettling gimmick movies ever made. Purporting to be a complication of footage shot by a trio of vaguely pretentious film students (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, portraying "themselves"), who vanished in the woods outside of Burkittsville, Maryland in October of 1994 before their video and film footage was discovered and edited into a rough chronology, the movie showcases their initial enthusiasm and creative vigor gradually begin to fray as their well-laid plans start going South. At first, they get great, ominous footage of the townsfolk of Burkittsville relating the history of the local legend of the Blair Witch, and how this mythical figure from the 1800s seemingly inspired a horrible tragedy in the 1940s when a local named Rustin Parr murdered seven children at the behest of "voices". But when they actually venture into the woods to shoot footage of Coffin Rock (where five men met a gruesome death) and a rumored cemetery, they become hopelessly lost, which is bad enough, but then they start hearing erries sounds in the dead of night around their campsite. The clacking of rocks, the giggles of children, and more, shaking them to their cores, as they attempt to hike out of the woods with little success. Soon, they're exhausted, cold, starving, frightened out of their wits...yet still taping and filming, hoping to keep a record of sorts of their descent into terror and madness.
The brainchild of writer/directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, Blair Witch is a low-budget creeper that became a box office sensation when released in the late summer of 1999. Of course, in those days (when the internet as we know it was still a novelty only a tiny portion of the American populace had embraced), it was easy to pull off the movie's gambit that it was actually a true story, one supported by a faux-"documentary" Curse Of The Blair Witch which aired before the movie's release and keeping the film's three cast members under tight security and not allowing them to do interviews so as to preserve the movie's cachet. And it worked...people were buzzing about how "real" it was for months on end following its massive commercial success. But, even knowing it was all a put-on, and despite the wave of imitators that followed in its wake (plus a pair of lousy sequels), the original Blair Witch remains one of the eeriest films ever made, and the slapdash production values and scuzzy, grainy 35mm and Hi8 video footage lends the movie the queasy quality of watching a snuff film. Despite the fact that we see almost no physical manifestations of the Witch or anything else, really, the committed, rattled performances of the three leads (especially Donahue) and sound design whip the viewer into a miasma of suffocating dread. The movie remains divisive to this day -- some, like myself, loving its innovative structure and production style, while others found it a nausea-inducing chore where "nothing happens" -- and yet there's no denying it was a movie that invented its own horror subgenre, one that's still being utilized today.
