Left Field Cinema

WARNING: Contains spoilers for both films throughout.

Sir Isaac Newton famously remarked in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke: “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, implying that every scientific success is based entirely on the success of those who have come before. This statement can, and regularly is, transposed into other areas of human endeavor such as philosophy or art. Without the discoveries or accomplishments of our predecessors we could not achieve what we have achieved today. This concept is particularly relevant to the art of film. In just over a century of cinema we have seen many great strides, but like any other art form, all that has come before has an influence on what is to come; thus the common view that “there are no more original ideas” stems from a perceived lack of originality in the arts, we can see how the greats of the past influence the greats of the present. Film is a nebulous art form, it is impossible not to be influenced by what has come before, from some of the very basic rules of how to shoot a scene to the three-act structure (which has its roots in theatre and literature before film was ever conceived of). Even the most audacious of cinematic ventures owe something to those who have come before; every film ever made owes a debt of gratitude to the likes of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Sergei M. Eisenstein and D.W Griffith whether the director has seen their works or not. Even the most audacious and bravest works of cinema like Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) or Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) are rooted in their cultural past; the old cliché that you have to know the rules in order to break the rules is as true today as it ever was. A filmmaker has got to know which genre she or he is working within if they’re ever to break free of that genre. They must know which conventions they’re expected to follow if they’re ever to confound expectations. When a film is credited as a ‘truly original’ work, there is always a degree of flexibility applied to the term; there isn’t a single film that I can describe as entirely original, but there are plenty of films which have claimed to be entirely original only for their roots to be exposed. One such film is Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999). This so called Home-Made Horror, or DIY Horror film, was a cultural phenomena at the end of the last century, often credited with several firsts for film culture including being the first to use the internet as an effective marketing tool, but more importantly it is credited as the first film of this new sub genre based entirely around the conceit of the ‘discovered tapes’. For the uninitiated The Blair Witch Project follows the exploits of three film students who investigate the legend of the titular Blair Witch and soon find themselves completely lost in the woods. There is little originality to be found in the films narrative, however there is originality in the execution; The Blair Witch Project is taken entirely from the perspective of the two cameras that the team take into the woods, the tapes of which have presumably been found after the events of the film and have been edited together. The conceit is that you are watching a genuine tape of genuine events, that what you’re witnessing actually occurred. Of course it didn’t and the majority of viewers were savvy enough to know that what they’re seeing is an elaborately constructed fictional narrative presented as the genuine article, however much of the films hype came from their truly inventive marketing campaign which included “missing” posters for the central actors and a promotional website which treated the film as the genuine article.

But advocates of The Blair Witch Project who claimed it was entirely original were soon shouted down as an earlier film, Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler’s The Last Broadcast (1998), emerged and boasted an almost identical conceit to The Blair Witch Project. The Last Broadcast followed a similar narrative wherein a camera crew traveled into the woods to find the Jersey Devil, only one of the crew emerged from the woods and he is now the prime suspect for the murders of the other team members. How much influence The Last Broadcast had on The Blair Witch Project is not known, The Last Broadcast certainly was not a huge success and was not widely seen until after the release of The Blair Witch Project and in fact promoted itself by playing on the similarities between the two films. One tagline reading “makes the Blair Witch look like a school project”. But each films claims of originality are ultimately deemed redundant as both films owe a huge debt to a film produced almost two decades earlier, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980). One of the most controversial films ever made, Cannibal Holocaust had at its heart (presuming the film has a heart) the very same ‘recovered tapes’ premise. As with The Blair Witch Project and The Last Broadcast the story features a camera crew traveling into the wilderness (in this case the Amazon jungle) where they’re killed by a tribe of cannibals, their footage is recovered and salvaged and we the audience watch the material and see what led to the crews horrific annihilation. The controversy surrounding Cannibal Holocaust mostly stems from it’s needless and exploitative cruelty towards animals; this is not a film recommended for animal lovers as a coatimundi, a turtle, a snake, a tarantula, a spider monkey and a pig are all killed on screen; the coatimundi is repeatedly stabbed to death and emits a chilling death scream, the turtle is decapitated and then disemboweled and the spider monkey has it’s face cut off. The film also features footage of real executions and allegedly used real human corpses for its effects shots (a man’s penis being cut off being the most distressing example for male audience members). This footage in particular caused another controversy as when it was eventually released in the director’s native Italy; he was arrested and charged with murder as the authorities thought they were watching a genuine snuff movie, the director then had to produce all of his actors in court to prove that the film was fake. How any court of law could have thought the truly dreadful acting was genuine is beyond me, but I guess law enforcement officers aren’t usually asked to be drama critics as well. The production even asked the central cast of actors to disappear for an entire year to help compound the films marketing assertions that the footage was the genuine article, so even The Blair Wtich Project’s famed marketing wasn’t an entirely original concept, it had been done before and arguably with greater effect - to my knowledge none of The Blair Witch Project team were dragged into court or accused of foul play.

A comparison between Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project will always raise questions of originality, did Myrick and Sánchez cannibalise (pun intended) Deodato’s film for their own ends? But arguably a more important question to ask is whether or not originality is as important a commodity as some would have us believe. This debate usually surfaces in relation to remakes, given that most cinephiles would agree the majority of remakes do not surpass their source material (I would argue this has to be examined on a case by case basis). Those films which have been directly influenced by those that have come before (the post-Tarantino gang for example) more often than not fail because they do not sufficiently develop the material which usually results in either a diluted version of a revered film or a poor facsimile with no heart. Remakes and sequels are directly associated with what has come before and are often restricted to a set of guidelines that the original laid out. But in the case of Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project there are clear differences between each film. Whatever influence Deodato had on Myrick and Sánchez, they certainly can’t be accused of plagiarism. The Blair Witch Project takes the best elements of Cannibal Holocaust and improves them. Cannibal Holocaust has had a lot of thought put into it, no matter how immoral or amoral you find the material, the viewer can’t deny that the film has been structured to maximise the discomfort factor. The story starts with an anthropologist heading up a rescue team to head into the jungles of South America to find the missing documentary crew, with his two guides they head into the wilderness and discover first the body of the TV crew’s guide and then the tribe which they believe has killed the TV crew. Shortly afterwards they discover the skeletons of the crew, and the cans of film which they’d shot. These events take us to about half way through the film and already we’ve witnessed one of the animal killings and a ritual torture and execution of one of the tribe’s women (she is tied up and then vaginally impaled with a large sharpened piece of wood). The second half of the film is set in New York where the TV station that sent the crew into the jungle piece together the footage to discover what happened to them. We view the horrific footage in stages and at every interval a character in the story either hints or flat out claims that the worst footage is still to come. It’s seemingly counterintuitive structure solves several mysteries within the first half, in part what happened to the TV crew (they’re all dead) and who killed them (the tribe where they find the footage) this would seemingly dampen much of the horror as one of mans most primal fears is that of the unknown. But we don’t know the full story and as the film continues through the second half we find out more and more about what the TV crew actually got up to and discover that their deeds are, in fact, far more barbaric than anything the tribe of cannibals did, until finally we’re rooting for the most violent deaths imaginable for the TV crew and actually applaud when their eventual demise is revealed. This is not a Home-made horror in the same sense as The Blair Witch Project, Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s [Rec] (2007) or even Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield (2008); the first half of Cannibal Holocaust plays out almost exclusively in the third person with camera angles impossible to achieve without a full feature film crew and a musical score to accompany events (a truly dreadful score it has to be said which kills the horror in a number of key sequences). The second half of the film mixes first and third person perspectives, but again Deodato is not brave enough (or inventive enough) to let the first person footage play out uninterrupted and even maintains the films dire score over events. The Last Broadcast suffers from a similar problem; it too breaks from the first person perspective in its final act and moves to a more traditional third-person perspective for the climax which ruins the mood it had created previously. The Blair Witch project takes Cannibal Holocaust’s undeveloped/half baked conceit of the ‘discovered tapes’ and in effect purifies it. The Blair Witch Project takes the concept as far as it can possibly go by playing from start to finish in the first person, we never break from the perspective of the camera crew from the opening footage of their documentary, conducting interviews with locals and setting up establishing shots, to their disastrous misstep in the woods and their inability to escape the curse of the unseen Blair Witch. The Blair Witch Project takes ‘fear of the unknown’ to extremes, we never see the titular witch and in fact we’re left uncertain that the witch even exists at the films climax. Using subtle hints at the films students’ inevitable doom and watching them implode as one turns against the other, they become increasingly uncertain of whether they will ever get out of the woods alive. Many who watch The Blair Witch Project do not find the film scary in the slightest, I would argue that fear can be as subjective as humour and personally I find The Blair Witch Project more terrifying than Cannibal Holocaust for what I can’t see scares me far more than what I can see. Cannibal Holocaust is a bloody, gruesome and dare I say it, nasty little film. The Blair Witch Project plays with psychology and subtlety to create its horror and is infinitely more effective for it.

However The Blair Witch Project is not superior in every way, it took one element of Cannibal Holocaust and improved on it greatly, but itself is little more than a ghost train ride at the local fairground, there are no serious ideas or questions at play in The Blair Witch Project, its sole purpose is to scare the living daylights out of you - perhaps that’s enough. Cannibal Holocaust is also attempting to scare its audience (although I’d argue it only succeeds at disturbing rather than scaring) but more important than the horror is the questioning at its core. Cannibal Holocaust examines the line between civility and barbarism, we expect to see progressive westerners being brutalised by the savage stone-age-like tribe in a simple horror exploitation of the ‘fear of the unknown’; but Deodato’s film turns this expectation on its head and presents the TV crew as evil, vindictive and selfish, taking liberties with humanity because no laws are there to stop them, reveling in the horrific acts they commit against the tribe and taking pleasure in raping, wounding and killing human beings. It’s an interesting contortion of a horror concept and is extremely critical of the Western superiority complex. The reasons Cannibal Holocaust is not consistently hailed as a masterpiece of horror are two fold; firstly the aforementioned cruelty towards animals often puts the film out of the running, secondly the questioning of Western society isn’t fully developed and is hindered by the largely one-dimensional characters. The murdered members of the TV crew are simply ‘evil’ and there is no explanation subtextually, textually or even supertextually as to why they’re so brutal and immoral – they just are. Even famous motiveless psycho’s from horror classics like Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) have a partial motivation in the form of their mental instability which is recognised by other characters within the story – no such recognition is provided here. In this area The Blair Witch Project can once again claim superiority, though we don’t know much about the character’s personal histories, through their actions during the film we learn much about them and their attitudes towards each other and their art form. They’re rounded three-dimensional characters when compared to the blatant ciphers in Cannibal Holocaust. These critical assessments of both films point to the value of originality - The Blair Witch Project may owe its existence to Cannibal Holocaust, but its success and superiority as a film stems from its own creations. Once again I ask what holds more value: originality or good filmmaking? I’d argue it is the latter.

M.Dawson