Episode 93: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

[JeffreyMcDonald 65]

Supplemental:

RLM also discussed this recently, for those interested.

[sycasey 110]

Yeah I feel very differently. I feel like The Blair Witch Project is a big gimmick and a fad, and as the decades go by it will work for fewer and fewer people and seem less and less important. That doesn't mean people shouldn't experience it for themselves, but it does mean, for my money, it's not a canon movie. I feel similarly about Forest Gump, Shawshank Redemption, and The Sound of Music (though I wouldn't call them gimmicks). Those movies are important to a lot of people, and anyone that's read up on a bit of film history should see them for themselves, but they didn't make it into the canon, and I think it's perfectly justifiable.

 

This is an interesting case I think, because I can tell that my experience with The Blair Witch Project was dramatically different from the people that love it. But I guarantee if they experienced the movie the way I did there would be no question this movie doesn't belong here. It's just a curiosity to me, not a great film, not even a scary film, and often pretty irritating.

 

Honestly, I think your personal dislike of the film is blinding you a little bit to its overall cultural impact. I mean, it's already been 17 years since The Blair Witch Project's release and people are still talking about it, and clearly it's still popular enough to inspire a sequel/reboot. I'd say that's enough to qualify it as more than a gimmick or fad. It hasn't faded.

 

That said, I agree that simply having a large cultural impact and/or influence on future filmmakers isn't BY ITSELF enough to make a film worthy of Canon status. It's a big point in the film's favor, but it's not everything.

[DannyHutch 0]

I vote yes. Watching this film reminded me so much of sere school (it's a celebration of life), to the point I was mentioning it to my friends who went with me. I was so excited when I found out the creators went to camp slappy. I remember during the course, in the middle of the night, I hallucinated something that looked just like the blair witch, except with a pigs head. I also saw someone walk out of the woods right up to my face. He whispered, "Stay awake. Stay alive." Then he strode straight back into the bush. They really captured that feeling of being chased through the woods.

[Galactiac 91]

 

Honestly, I think your personal dislike of the film is blinding you a little bit to its overall cultural impact. I mean, it's already been 17 years since The Blair Witch Project's release and people are still talking about it, and clearly it's still popular enough to inspire a sequel/reboot. I'd say that's enough to qualify it as more than a gimmick or fad. It hasn't faded.

 

 

Nostalgia. And I really believe it will fade as more time passes and there are more and more adults who weren't old enough to see it in 1999. I was, but I put it off for 17 years. I think it will feel more and more staged to people; which obviously it is, but when you "feel it" the spell is broken and the film turns into a pumpkin.

[sycasey 110]

 

Nostalgia. And I really believe it will fade as more time passes and there are more and more adults who weren't old enough to see it in 1999. I was, but I put it off for 17 years. I think it will feel more and more staged to people; which obviously it is, but when you "feel it" the spell is broken and the film turns into a pumpkin.

 

Don't think the odds are in your favor on this one, but you are welcome to your opinion.

[Galactiac 91]

 

Don't think the odds are in your favor on this one, but you are welcome to your opinion.

 

 

I mean it already has a pretty poor audience score on RT. Maybe that's just some kind of hipster backlash that will clear up in a few years, but I think it will just get worse.

 

But hey, obviously that's not the majority opinion here, so welcome to the canon The Blair Witch Project. I surrender. Really fun discussion, guys.

[sycasey 110]

 

 

I mean it already has a pretty poor audience score on RT. Maybe that's just some kind of hipster backlash that will clear up in a few years, but I think it will just get worse.

 

But hey, obviously that's not the majority opinion here, so welcome to the canon The Blair Witch Project. I surrender. Really fun discussion, guys.

 

I wonder where that audience score comes from. A lot of it might be from the original release, when a lot of people went to see it based on the media hype and didn't know what they were in for. Experimental or avant-garde films tend to get bad audience scores, because general audiences don't like feeling confused. It doesn't necessarily prevent them from building a major legacy.

[NathanGordon 1096]

People give too much weight to aggregate scores like Rotten Tomatoes. I'm not sure that they could be more arbitrary indicators. There certainly is a less than precise correlation between "fresh/rotten" and a film's box office, to say nothing of the disconnect between critical reviews and general audiences.

 

*also lol at "hipster backlash"

[Galactiac 91]

I often disagree with Rotten Tomatoes, but I think it's one of the best indicators of the reception of a film.

 

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome at 81% blows my mind. I just have to assume all of the reviews are from thirty years ago and the critics were just taken in by the scale of the production. Terrible movie.

[ScottMorris 49]

Beyond Thunderdome is one of the most weirdly-bisected movies ever made. A solid forty minutes of fairly serious Mad Max goodness, before going completely off the rails with all that godawful lost boys crap.

Similar issue that The Devil's Rejects has, where Rob Zombie suddenly tries to humanize these evil bastards by having them act nothing like they ever did before. Tonal whiplash. Which may be the point, granted, but I don't think it works.