Ditch That Witch

Here’s a paradox, sort of:

Movies are a ‘visual medium.’ The Blair Witch Project is a movie. The central (most effective, most memorable) element of The Blair Witch Project is the Blair Witch. The Blair Witch never appears on screen.

Then where is the Blair Witch? You don’t hear it, touch it, taste it (thank god), or smell it. At best, you see where it’s been and what it’s done—or maybe not even that. You don’t really know for sure if it exists, although you’re given pretty good reason to believe that something awful and unexplainable lives in those woods.

So the Blair Witch doesn’t exist, but it also definitely does exist. It’s in the title, and the first section of the movie is just talking heads explaining the witch’s lore. It’s also in your head throughout the entire duration of the film (and, in my case, for several years afterwards).

The Blair Witch Project is an excellent example of a movie that scares you by not showing you something. This is a pretty widely talked about concept in horror across all mediums; you’ve probably heard the phrases ‘fear of the unknown’ or ‘the scariest monster is the one you don’t see’. Stephen King talks about this in Danse Macabre: “Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. 'A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible', the audience thinks, 'but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.’ ”

How does this work in The Blair Witch Project and why is it effective? I believe there are three key ingredients to a terrifying offscreen monster:

1. Your imagination is pre-loaded. – As I mentioned earlier, the first section of the movie is devoted to telling you all about the Blair Witch. This is incredibly important to the movie because it primes the audience’s imaginations. If the Blair Witch was given no more background than “Hey there’s a witch out in the woods,” then the audience would either not think too much about what the witch looks like or, worse yet, use their currently existing archetype of witches to picture it. The general concept of a witch in American lore is really not that scary (no thanks to The Wizard of Oz). A witch is usually a green older woman with a pointy nose and a pointy hat and a big cauldron (if you need evidence of this, google ‘witch’). The movie doesn’t want this kind of witch; it wants a creature so horrible and unimaginable that it can’t even be visualized on screen. In order to get the audience to create such a monster with their own imaginations, the movie plants seeds—little details, rumors, and legends at the beginning of the movie are kept just vague enough to allow the viewer to envision something far worse than any special effects could render.
2. You know it’s out there. – While trying to seem clever at the beginning of this post, I said The Blair Witch Project was like a paradox when really it isn’t. As with most all horror movies, what you see is what scares you—the only notable difference is that this movie’s visuals scare you through implication, specifically the implication that there’s something horrible in the woods. The Blair Witch is effective because it’s constantly reaffirming the idea that’s just around the corner, that it’s hiding in those bushes, that it’s right behind you. When our three protagonists wake up in the forest after a night of strange and unexplainable noises outside their tent, they find that something/someone has placed little wooden symbols all around the camp. The witch was right there in their camp while they were sleeping. This point is crucial, as it differentiates the witch from a character like Godot—the audience needs to know that the witch is a physical presence and a threat, not some far away concept.
3. You almost see it – The trick to the ‘unknown’ being so horrible is that you’re always almost on the brink of knowing it. Heather, the main character and director of the eponymous Blair Witch Project, screams something like ‘OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT??’ when sprinting through the woods at night and catching a glimpse of something that was probably the witch. We don’t see what she sees, but we come so close that it’s agonizing. Sitting on the cusp of a horrifying revelation is sort of like a meta version of peeking around a corner. The tension of almost realizing our fears, of wanting to see it but also desperately not wanting to, elevates the terror of the monster to explosive levels.

The Blair Witch Project created its monster with a tiny budget and a whole lot of well executed creativity, and the end result was a solid proof of concept that the most chilling tool in a filmmaker’s kit can be simple exclusion.