HAPPY HALLOWE'EN and WELCOME to aleph's great big BLAIR WITCH PROJECT LIVETWEET MEGATHREAD!!! i love this movie dearly & much more each time i see it; it's deeply mournful, smart, reflexive, funny, somehow counter-intuitively comforting. one of the best-ever films-about-films.

but also it has one of the great film production stories, and accordingly i've been drinking interviews from the firehose (read: at 1.75x), all the better to gush to you over these people & these images & all the great big circumstances that led to this movie being What It Is.

these sources range from heather donahue irl's comic-con 1999 q&a, in which she gets to be very smart and funny, and told 'you look better with makeup', and asked 'are you dating anyone', and informed 'you have a natural beauty contrary to what that gentleman said previously',

to more recent cast reunions at conventions, in which the legendarily-filmable interpersonal frictions are nowhere at all on display, and in fact i've teared up very much watching these 'war buddies' (as they describe themselves) getting to gel years & years down the line.

if you know about film even a little bit you know the general story, so don't worry, i shan't recount (except through paraleipsis) the bare fact of its prototypical internet marketing in some space between truth & fiction. there are plenty of other stories or details to share.

of all the cast members, i've listened most to heather, so i can tell you about her 4-year conservatory background, incorporating fencing and ballet. can tell you how excited she was by the prospect of having some sort of improvisational creative control.

her one interview question was 'you've served 7 years of a 9-year sentence. why should we let you on parole?' and probably you've heard that her response was 'you shouldn't', that she improvised a 'baby-killer' character terrorised by people throwing dummies on her lunch tray

you might have heard it with different numbers; also that's dummies as in pacifiers not effigies. whatever the details, she was selected as one of three successes from over two thousand applicants for 'the black hills project'. ad text follows in the next tweet, incidentally:

'you are about to read for the most unpleasant & demanding project of your career. if you are cast, we are going to drag you into the woods for seven days of hell. 168 hours of real-time improvisational torment. we're not kidding.'

'so if you're not serious about your craft then you're wasting your time and ours.' of course this got 2000 applicants. (josh notes btw that the contract was little a softer (as a trick-or-treat) but still firm: 'your safety is our priority. your comfort is not.')

the casting was gender-blind, alien-style, which did result down the line in some changes-of-plan (more on that later). heather, at the prospect of camping alone in the woods with two guys, 'bought a giant hunting knife and wore it on a leather sheath on [her] belt'. she owns.

as you know part of the conceit of filming was that the actors themselves would shoot 100% of the footage (or almost 100%—again, we'll get to that later). heather got two days to learn how to use the hi8; mike the same amount of time to learn the dap & cp16. character-building.

directors myrick & sánchez shared plenty of 'documentaries on creepy topics' (possibly, though i cannot find for sure, the 'in search of...' series) with heather so she could plan her documentary-within-a-movie in a similar style. which i love as a note on heather the character.

heather irl also wrote the heather character's diary, full transcripts of which were and are available on the website. captures her voice surprisingly well though there's much mysticism & numerology fascination that never makes it into the film proper https://blairwitch.com/journal.html 

all of this, heather irl says, was loosely based on an 'enfant terrible filmmaker who shall remain nameless', from whom she drew the determination verging on obstinacy as well as the overfirmness required of a female project lead trying to make herself proven to project coworkers

we can talk more about the backstory later. but for now it's time to start the movie :)

literally the opening shot after the iconic introductory text. of course it zooms & fumbles & resolves to some extent but WHAT an opening. one thing i *love* about this film's form is its willingness to play with images that aren't directly representative. that near abstraction

but this is also the first in a... series of instances of vocative 'man' being directed heatherwards, which

even in this first shot there's lots of theatricality to heather. she gets to be on tape—this is the first movie she's making—she describes herself as a theatre actress—oh yes and the character experiences these things too. minus the last.

i'm overreading just a little bit here. heather irl had no expectation of this ever making it to the cinema. she thought she'd get a video copy of it and be able to watch it with her friends. absolutely no-one making this thought it'd get the ratio it did, in every sense

every book heather brings along with her is directly important: 'how to stay alive in the woods'; field notebook (with her name written on top, a very sweet touch); the book with the article about coffin rock. she wants to be prepared for exactly enough and no light reading

literally their first interaction is frictious. (not fractious yet!) legendary duo

oh i forgot to say but i'm using the open matte for these stills because... i like the aesthetic very much okay

the cp-16 camera... does not belong to any of them, technically. rad praxis. reminds me of herzog making his early movies on a 35mm he stole from the munich film school

when i first watched... as late as feb 2017... i instantly fell in love at this sequence. being thrilled by the possibilities of the medium, getting to record one another, but also an elegant way of setting up: this is what each lens looks like & what goes into telling this way

plus... there are many famous Shifts Into Colour in movies but maybe the most well-known is the wizard of oz, in which fantasy is in colour and reality is in b&w. here... is there a difference between the two? you can look at the truth with different lenses. it's still spooky

and even if you want greater clarity you have to settle for less colour. lots of deeply elegant formal conceits already being established. PLUS! as noted. the cinematography itself is an extension of the acting. and to some extent vice versa. extremely cool effects all round

wise words for life

even here there's Playing with the camera—dollying along a diagonal to mike using the car as an artificial trolley. based on where i guess the steering wheel must be this isn't even like a single conscious decision by one character. so cool though

:( no you won't i'm sorry

heather & josh clearly i think know one another already but mike's new to both. 'i guess you're mike' above, plus all this really sweet studenty politeness of oh-i-guess-we're-grownups-and-have-to-be-professional-on-our-first project. how do we do that

'small-world country' is an *unbelievably*-telling malapropism and i think about it way too much. also yes, they did have SO many batteries. the 18kg/40lb weighted pack they carried was 'mostly batteries'. but extra batteries were still left at waypoints (more on that below)

heather irl and heather character both have SO much fun with the camera and honestly i love this silly attempt to communicate some tactile sensation entirely through an audiovisual medium

subs can't make it out but i'm pretty sure mike says 'like me', as in 'same'. king of being ahead of his time. these are genuine decorations—it was shot in late october and i believe the final day was either hallowe'en itself or the day before.

either way at the end of the shoot the remaining cast members emerged into a full hallowe'en-celebrating small town and there's something very much about that

i forget who said this (probably one of you so tag yourself and i'll ) is that so many other found footage horrors lean into This Is What Happens and How It Works, and that works just fine a lot of the time, but the sheer unexplainedness of bwp marks it out as truly Weird

it'd've been so easy to make bwp a story about ghosts or witches or demons but it's not any of those. those all have rules in some sense or another. whatever's in burkittsville doesn't, really. and it's foolish to think you can wiki it out.

As You Know some of these people interviewed in the town were planted actors and some were not. i cannot get verification for every case but i got enough to be able to be genuinely surprised. pretty sure their first interviewee's a townie though

me when i'm trying to assert some of my allergies

this is a FANTASTIC character note given her *wonderfully* kitschy project. and it's not even really making her the butt of a joke. it's beautiful. it's too much. i love this movie with all my heart

i have not yet talked much about the editing in this movie () but it's in my top 5 maybe top 3 maybe top 1. twenty hours of raw footage cut into 80 of the most brutally-effective minutes in film with SO many perfectly-placed grace notes and even angular rhymes

(heather's applying lipstick in that second shot and given the fame of her later makeupless look it's interesting to see what she does with it)

this is actually really interesting because bloodletting was, according to the curse of the blair witch promotional true-crime / unexplained documentary produced as marketing, the first thing that elly kedward, the supposed origin for the blair witch myth, was accused of

love the thematic overlaps but also just amazed by how willing they are to include footage that... isn't directly following action at all. it's just really beautiful to watch grainy 8mm video degrade & pixelate the dried grass. everything is fragmenting & they don't realise yet

okay i know i have said this about everything in this movie and i've spent 90 minutes livetweeting and we're... not even four minutes in... but i LOVE this sequence SO much. i love when young artists reproduce how they think a form Should be but the real art shines out the cracks

partly i'm thinking of that omineous head-turn in those last two images and the unwieldy movement-inwards by the camera, and partly i'm thinking of heather's Serious Voice Affect, but also there's a little chin-jut for emphasis at 'on this hill' and it is so Quietly Overwrought

what i'm trying to say is that i love heather donahue and hers is very genuinely a top-5 all-time performance

there's the faintest possible smile that comes with the chin-jut and for all her professional affect she's really, really overjoyed to be Telling a Story (the way she wants to, but also the way she looks up to) on camera. and honestly like. same.

the brilliance of the editing extends, too, to the fact that these very serious & respectable & capital-a artful student film images are given exactly the tasteful rhythms you'd expect, at odds with the movie's own turbochargers. look at how proud they are of these framings

4 minutes 28 seconds in and i'm crying already

look how proud they are of this cut i love them so much

incidentally this does touch on something—the official fake story of the film is that once the footage was recovered it was bought by haxan films, who edited it into its release cut. curious whether, then, in-universe, they reassembled this footage after heather's vision

is this the other side of the wind

'woohoo!' 'yeehaw!' yes be so proud of yourselves i agree

fairly certain this is a plant given his extensive knowledge of the story but as we'll see that's no guarantee

was ABSOLUTELY chilled by baby ingrid on first watch, trying to cover her mother's mouth while she tells some generic story attributed to the blair witch, and then pleading 'no! no! no!' fun spooky fact: these weren't plants, just townies :) incredible serendipity

second-best performance in the movie and i don't know if she even knows she was in it

'it's not true. (it is true)'

this set of shots—the interview with this man—is the only footage not shot by the actors. early audiences were *so* confused by the ending that the makers (producers or directors, it's unclear) decided to add this little set of stories about kids being made to face the wall

obviously i think this is a blight on the movie which is so much the better the less it explains anything but really how much of a blight can it be. plus there's certainly something sinister to be found in the eerie resurfacing of motifs long-dead

heather does audibly ask 'really?' in one of these interviews with backwards cap guy but i'm 90% sure the audio is copied directly from the preceding shot. maybe this is why another reviewer complained that she was a bad improviser constantly talking over interview subjects

but i don't think that's a sign of bad improvisation at all! i think it reflects her character's inexperience and to some extent eagerness to be in her art—to be honest i think michael moore does this a lot and if he does it why wouldn't an excited first-time student filmmaker

this movie is very funny (also note the 'sir'. she literally gets called this or 'man' more times than anything appropriate)

as it turns out mary brown was a real-life person and not an actor at all but she was so interesting that the students *thought* she must be an actor. and went in & filmed her house in a giant breach of privacy. which obviously did not make it into the final cut

i'm really glad that they incorporate these non-canonical stories though because they really detract (in the best possible way) from the Official Myth set up by e.g. the website or the curse of the blair witch fake-out. you just can't nail the story down that cleanly. ever

extremely Much that they improvise all of this thinking mary's an actor and she's really not. this is just like all her life in a scene

in case you missed it... this movie is also about the u.s.a. being terrible

sorry let me extend that

hmmmmmmmm

this whole sequence went for about 90 minutes & continued into a diner across the street... i would *love* to see all 20 hours someday though that'll never ever happen T.T

i'm a grown-up and i get to follow the rules :)

love the banter of these two anglers though. one taking great offence to every implementation of 'supposedly'. the other having to shut up every so often to shoot him a withering look

impossible to overstate how ominous this shot feels. into the unknown

the 16mm imagery is certainly amateurish but still incredibly beautiful & evocative. does this shack have anything to do with anything? no, but it fits the mood. and it spooks up the edit for five seconds. that's all it needs.

funnily enough the person who first keeps the camera rolling is mike, long before josh goes to town on heather for continued filming.

the film almost overplays its hand here—too ominous maybe to keep this constant looking-back towards the Car, which is clearly going to stay there (and in fact was featured heavily as Evidence in curse of the blair witch)—but that's a phenomenal restaging w/ actors walking past

once in the woods the actors would break character together by saying their safeword in unison, a construction they figured out on their own. the safeword was 'taco', which as you can imagine was a terrible choice by the hunger of the last day

so much depends
upon

heather trips up while reading: 'blood at the edges of the head indicate that this act had committed—been committed while...' and i wonder how many takes she made of this recording, and of her earlier recordings, and which ones haxan films chose for the edit in-universe

ah, i see, she rushed this one, BUT oh my god look at that second shot with the trees reflected in the watch face. i don't really subscribe to the spookier interpretations of this movie but that's a fanTAStic image of nature invading & overwriting technology

i do love these finicky details BUT!!! ALSO!!! look at what we have here for the first time—heather's voice, in narration, over a *separate* image of her. the edit's already begun to split her voice from her body

that's it that's the whole movie

this movie has no right throwing these images at us but they don't take away from the tension at all. they just transform it into something much richer and sadder i think

i think it was a day or two after *this* rain in particular but the actors did actually cheat once—trapped in a torrential downpour, they made it all the way to where the directors had set up the tent for them, but it was flooded in about 10cm (4in) of water,

and of course they didn't want to sleep there, so they walkie-talkied the directors with their emergency codephrase, 'bulldozer'. no response. after repeated attempts. (the directors were delayed by the rain too.) so the actors found a house in the woods & knocked on the door

specifically heather. because she was less scary. and they all went in, had hot cocoa, and watched the world series. but they weren't allowed to shower. for obvious reasons.

thinking about her 'best friend', featured in curse of the blair witch

hold that thought we'll be returning to it later :)

heather has an excellent face. i just want to say

'man', again, but also this pan over the drying clothes & improvised clothes-horses is an excellent & totally accidental rhyme with the later stick figures

once again... her voice & her image are from separate times. this is going to be a pattern. this is an arc.

just like the film makes room for images that aren't directly plot-relevant, the lack of direct scriptwashing leads to these really lovely little moments that don't feel like they're included to Lead anywhere. they just... exist. and you catch glimpses of ways this Could've gone.

but also, as heather irl would say at comic-con... what makes you think the witch is a woman? (and as she would continue with spooky 'oooooh' noises, so will i.)

but sometimes even the sequences that deliberately Aren't Going Anywhere accidentally rhyme. like... this is begging to be read in dialogue with mary brown's description of the 'witch' as entirely hirsute. 'like a symbol' indeed

also that 'blank, hairy, blank, hairy' construction compels me to link this pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald%E2%80%93hairy

the great thing about this movie is that it is simultaneously extremely tight and extremely dense. almost any given shot feels like its rosetta stone

can't see it as well as in motion but the sun winking through these branches... s-tier oneiric cinema

although there's friction with josh even from the beginning, mike feints towards antagonism early on. the directors watched the dailies each night while the actors slept and had to scrap a planned romance (between whom, unclear) on account of all the arguing happening on-set

i am told that much of mike's arguing with heather was cut from the film in order to keep it from seeming as if the boys were ganing up on heather. understandable, though i would've been interested in that cut definitely

josh plays peacemaker here but according to heather mike was much more of a mediator & calming influence, 'the sweetest guy you could possibly meet'

definitely something mike irl was feeling too apparently :(

for the first time heather's interest in recording & record-keeping & storytelling clashes with the frustration of *being* recorded. a recording is a witness that will tell the same story over & over and maybe that's grounding and maybe it isn't

the number of times this bleeds into irl and vice verse is immensely moving somehow for me. although as noted above none of them ever expected this to go beyond a low-budget video, which contributed a bit to the shakiness & resultant nausea some people felt from the big screen

thinking about how much of a Stunt this actually is, and how much it is to ask your actors to do this with their only recording equipment

this is i think the first time people really recognise the mismatch between heather's voice and image—maybe because the conversation's been proceeding for so long plausibly under more conventional editing that it's a shock to pan to heather and see oh. she's not talking. hmm.

a+ abstract grainy nature footage

i *believe* this is the story to which mary brown refers but it's about jacob, not esau

but this is great because they get out the 16mm to apply their Sombre Documentary Tone to these rocks, and the result ends up being haunting but in a kind of commodified way, and statelier and maybe eerie-looking but in a Safe way. you look through the lens and you nail it down

it's not, and i'm glad it's not because that'd be again nailing things down, but again the film isn't thinking about the spookiness of a particular place so much as the bloodsoakedness of the u.s.a.

heather is way less uptight than the others think she is, and even than heather irl thinks she is, and it's a Lot that she's still making jokes during this second camp

by the way there are seven piles of rocks, which a comic-con 1999 audience member identified with the seven children rustin parr killed. heather irl nodded along that that seemed plausible, then made an extended face & a shrug indicating she had no idea whatsoever.

queen of not caring about lore. we need her heroism these days

perspective :)

love this interaction & the very silly object of pedantry but also LOOK at how much these faces haunt the frame. it's so beautiful

screaming @ this edit

who needs backstory and myths when you have images like this

look how much darkness they're willing to have on screen even during such a crucial moment. look how much faith they have in everything and it WORKS.

everything changes and nothing ever changes back :(

i had never before noticed that she KISSES the cairn as she puts it back together. there is something infinitely sad about this

i'm an independent filmmaker in the 90s and i'm going to put many consecutive seconds of near-total grainy black on screen and it's going to make back 5000 times its budget :)

cannot tell you how totally i'm blown away that the filmmakers just decided. okay. we're going to take this grainy-black digital footage that's not even the same effect as a deep black in film. and fill the screen with it. like there's something improbably gutsy about that

Extremely Defined Images to Offer Reassurance and Certainty

have a feeling this is the day of the torrential tent mentioned earlier

silly of him to suggest something like this, of course, but i think the whole point is we reach to explain with genres that we understand. burial grounds, deliverance, witch stories—they're just explanatory models that tell us more about the person suggesting them.

what i'm trying to say is that you should double-feature this with the happening

the actors themselves did get lost at least three times, and that was with the help of a gps. not as though this were particularly difficult territory, either; they saw a bunch of mountain bikes early in the shoot, which for obvious reasons never made it to film

(they'd be given waypoints to punch into the gps, and know when they were getting close to the campsite due to milkcrates with little orange flags sticking out the top. these would contain 35mm film canisters with their individual daily notes inside. it's a metaphor)

(incidentally these notes would sometimes be along the lines of when you pass this log with this sign make sure you have the camera ready for what's just beyond )

there is such smart editing of audio across scenes it's honestly hard to believe how well it all flows. really perfectly-polished movie which is extraordinary considering how much looseness was allowed in its construction.

honestly, do you think it might be possible to write about blair witch project & procgen. how this was the 80-minute story you picked out of 20 hours of footage by looking for it & then constructing it

what counts as marking if your images are this haunted

heather turns around to record mike but she doesn't. she records the leaves. there is SO much of this movie where the images are just counterpoint to the dialogue in oblique ways and it's gorgeous

i would genuinely watch a whole movie of this

look at mike's arms!!! look at how beautiful this almost entirely lightless footage becomes!!! i'm FLAILING

and the darkness JUST GOES ON. like. i genuinely cannot think of anything to compare this to. this isn't the ugly badly-graded stuff people criticise about 00s & 10s movies this is just. what happens if we have no light to see by. what if we let your pareidolia work for it

i am actually just genuinely speechless at this point

because the 8mm is the only camera that picks up sound sometimes we'll hear the 16mm with heather's voice nearby. but it's not nearby it's near the 8mm. and so even on whatever rewatch this is i was caught off-guard by heather's emergence with the other camera

this is what happens when you set your draw distance to 0

i'm not going to spam the thread with much more images of digital black but i do want to say this is probably the most accurately-ghostly set of images ever set to film

at comic-con heather irl got asked lots of theories about these rocks. 'surprisingly popular', she noted

again a phenomenal edit in itself but heather is i think the voice of the audience for a second. directors are audiences sometimes. (welcome to jurassic park)

but also... i have been tweeting for four hours straight and i am *exhausted*. i promise to pick this back up tomorrow. i just did not expect to take this long even on an 80-minute movie. but that's what they get for cutting the densest jewel of all

happy hallowe'en everybody

HELLO. i have RETURNED from death. happy all saints' day. john darnielle voice i am going to finish this thread tonight if it kills me

really love how this shot is close enough that heather is clearly looking directly at josh, not at the lens as we're so used to. the camera is not the person, the puppet is not the person, but a good puppet-operator knows how to blend the two. sometimes not even that's enough