SPOOKY, REALLY SPOOKY: 'The Blair Witch Project' & 'The Sixth Sense'

Commonweal, Sept 24, 1999 by Richard Alleva

It was supposed to be the summer of The Phantom Menace and Eyes Wide Shut. Instead, two horror films reigned.

The Blair Witch Project is a stunt that succeeds in being something more than that, but its genre-straddling freakishness would set it apart from all other movies even if it were an artistic failure. Which it isn't.

The movie's prologue tells us we're watching 16mm. footage and video tape discovered in the Black Hills of Maryland where three student filmmakers utterly and mysteriously disappeared. Heather, Josh, and Mike were making a documentary about some crypto-supernatural slaughters that occurred fifty-five years ago. After interviewing townspeople, the kids trooped into the woods to locate the murder site, and their surviving video reveals that they got lost, crumbled psychologically, were (perhaps) stalked by murderous locals and/or supernatural forces, and (perhaps) met their doom in the same place and in the same way that the victims of half a century ago did.

Four genres are here aligned, if not fused:

First, cinema verite, for, after all, this is supposed to be a documentary shot by a small crew utilizing lightweight equipment. But...

Second, the young documentarians are stalked, terrorized, and, apparently, destroyed. So Project also belongs in the disreputable category of Teen-age Stalker-Slasher Bloodfests, a la Friday the Thirteenth and Halloween. However...

Third, there is no overt bloodshed and the only violence in view is the psychological torture that the characters inflict on each other. Is the supernatural force that is supposedly tracking them just a projection of their own psyches? If so, this would make the movie akin to such ambiguous ghost stories as The Turn of the Screw and many works by Walter De La Mare. On the other hand...

Fourth, there is no ambiguity about the protagonists' physical suffering as they wander in the woods. So this puts The Blair Witch Project close to such movies as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Sands of the Kalahari, and An Eye for an Eye, which show human inadequacy writhing in the coils of pitiless nature. Yet all this naturalistic suffering is encircled by a larger, supernatural menace. It's as if uncanny forces were watching these mortals snarling at each other under conditions demanding coolness, stoicism, and compassion. "Ah, they're ripe," the uncanny whispers, then moves in.

If this makes Project sound delicately shuddersome, be advised that the movie's style is deliberately roughhewn. This is Henry James meets "60 Minutes." The documentary texture was reinforced by the method of filming. Once the actors, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams (lending their real first names to their roles), were filled in on their characterizations and storyline, they were given two cameras and told to shoot the movie themselves. The actual writers- directors, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, kept to the sidelines, sometimes even out of sight, in order to promote an atmosphere of harrowing solitude. The performers delivered the goods both technically and emotionally. If atmospheric visuals are out of the question here, the terror of the woods nevertheless reaches us through the despair in the actors' voices.

The movie has two big flaws, one avoidable, the other not. The first was the failure to distinguish the two male characters. (This is a flaw in the scenario, not in the acting.) While Heather is a sharply defined egotist, Mike and Josh seem merely to be taking turns playing loyal follower versus brooding psychopath. Or is this a sociological comment on the emotional inroads of feminism? A woman gets to be Captain Queeg while the males quiver and equivocate?

The other drawback was inevitable since it's merely the flip side of Project's originality. Though the movie runs only seventy-five minutes, it soon begins to grate on your nerves instead of# playing upon them. The eye rebels at more than half an hour of hand-held, shaky, bobbing camera work. Vertigo begins to replace dread.

But hang on until the final scene, a truly nightmarish run through (surprise!) a haunted house. Innovations always end up honoring and freshening the hoariest of traditions.

he Sixth Sense has no innovations; it scares the old-fashioned way: You are drawn close to its characters and you jump when they jump. And because the characters are worth coming close to, their frights stay with you long after you leave the theater.

The oddest thing about this horror film is that it doesn't admit its genre until it's half over. Till then, the writer-director M. Night Shyamalan seems to be recounting a psychiatric case study of a disturbed boy named Cole, who can surely be cured by his wise psychologist. No ghosts appear until the child confesses to his doctor that "I see dead people." From that point on, the film slides right into the depths of Cole's mind and into his terrors. We see dead people, too.

Yet, the movie is unsettling long before. Cole's mother (wonderful portrait by Toni Collette of an earthy woman nonplussed by unearthliness) leaves Cole at the breakfast table so that she can rinse a bit of spilled food off his tie and turns back ten seconds later to find every cabinet door in the kitchen open and every drawer pulled out while her son still sits quietly munching his cereal. Later, standing in front of his school while all the other children run in for morning classes, Cole might as well be a visitor from another planet. The cameraman, Tak Fujimoto, has sentenced the story's locale, Philadelphia, to an autumn of perpetual mourning, while the director uses the public statues of the City of Brotherly Love as mute witnesses to the boy's fear. The Sixth Sense has precisely that feeling of inwardness, of the world being soaked in a character's consciousness, that was so ruinously absent from Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. In fact, we're drawn close enough to Cole to understand that he is a hero as well as a victim. Though he desperately wants to be rid of his visitations, he tries to shield his mother from knowledge of them out of concern for her. He doesn't want his oddity to ruin her life.