byronic :: mad bad and dangerous to know

Erica U. has a terrific short essay about The Blair Witch Project on brightwalldarkroom, a film I still cannot bring myself to watch. 

Here are my favourite extracts, but you should read the whole thing (or drum up the courage, cuddle up tight with your loved one, and press play):

After its unaffected style, the film is most masterful in its understanding that if we are left without adequate information, we will fill in the gaps with the worst possible thing we can imagine.  

Take the movie’s portrayal of nights. 

The noises begin subtly.  One 3 am, in the surrounding distances of the tent, it is the sound of rocks hitting rocks in the echo of gravel pits. The clap of stones.  The next, it is the muted calls of children.  

Each time, the group clamors out of the tent with cameras and lights and sound equipment, frantically aimed in a questioning 360. They capture nothing but trees and noises undeterred by their presence.

The daylight brings its own unwelcome omens. Three balanced piles of stones surround the tent one morning. Built up like cairns, which troubles me. Is this ritualistic or logistical – marking someone’s way back to them?  

[…] There is no justifiable reason we should be afraid of clapping in the night. And it shouldn’t be dread inducing when the group wanders in to a pause in the forest, tangled with dozens of wooden hangings.  Sticks bound together like clumsy pentagrams, like men splayed out, spinning and dangling from the tree branches above.  But captured on Heather’s 16 mm black and white memory, even in broad daylight, the gallery is dreadful. As menacing as it is indecipherable. 

That is the brilliance of this movie – its ability to drill into and then magnify our propensity to be scared even by the gentle suggestion of something we don’t understand. 

[…]

Rewatching this movie, I decide all our fears are based on two base phobias: the fear of the unknown and the fear of losing control. 

I avoided the woods so long after I saw this because I didn’t know if I needed to or not.  

Because I didn’t know if every hunch I had overcome in order to love the darkness of the forest was suddenly validated. More hefty and logical than I had given them credit for. 

At this age, I am still afraid of the laundry room in my building, and the storage room and the industrial hallway between them if it is late enough and dark enough. I feel uneasy waiting for the water to fill coin operated machines in that low ceilinged echoing room and my pulse skitters as I run back up the three stories to my apartment, which I have left unlocked of course. I am afraid, a bit, of the man who lives next door and cries out sometimes at night, whose handshake is too light and words too slow. Of the trees watching me through old storm windows and the way the yellow lights hover over the park across the street, waiting for something. 

I am afraid of everything that probably won’t hurt me. And not at all of the city or all the things with likely more treacherous constitutions, because I understand the risk. It is the uncertain, the ephemeral threat that undoes me. You could spend your whole life scanning the horizon with your camera and not capture anything on tape.  But that doesn’t mean nothing is out there.