A shadow creeping ominously into view through a motel room shower curtain. A
swimmer’s legs dangling tantalizingly under the water as something big and
hungry glides purposefully toward them. A terrorized baby sitter learning
that the calls are coming from inside the house. And a close-up of a single
frightened, crying eye of a lost camper in her tent at night, her sobs
interrupted as she breathlessly whispers to the camera, “What was that?”
These are landmark moments in cinematic horror, the ones that stick in your
memory and haunt you long after the house lights go up, and they only come
along once in a generation. If you don’t recognize the last one, it’s
because it’s from “The Blair Witch Project,” the darling of
Sundance and Cannes that’s already being buzzed as the scariest movie ever
made. That, of course, is debatable — but the fact that a shoestring-budget
mockumentary with no name stars, no special effects, no rivers of bloody gore and
not even a musical score can be this spooky is a testament to the storytelling ability of the filmmakers, and
to their trust in the audience’s imagination. It’s been a long time since a movie did so
much by showing so little.
The back story, outlined in the film’s opening, is that three student
filmmakers went into the Maryland woods to make a documentary about the
mysterious, gruesome legacy of a legendary local witch and never
returned. A year later, their footage was found. What we see next is a
chronicle of the group’s harrowing last days as they themselves filmed them, a kind of “Real
World” meets “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” with a splash of
“Deliverance.” It’s an ingenious device, one that efficiently and
economically exploits our cultural immersion in reality TV and
recalls our own amateurish and shaky home videos. It’s at once familiar and
disquietingly surprising. In the 20 years since Michael Myers first donned a mask and heavily breathed his
way through “Halloween,” the standard has been for horror movies to unfold
from the killers’ perspective. But “The Blair Witch Project” finally turns the camera around
and forces us to see through the eyes of the victims. It’s a far scarier
place to be.
Heather, Josh and Mike (in yet another authenticity twist, all three actors
perform under their real names here) rapidly devolve from a cocky trio of would-be auteurs into
three frayed, fearful individuals when they realize they are lost — but not alone — in the woods.
Mysterious piles of rocks appear in their paths. Strange voices seem to be
calling from points unknown. And signs of other unfriendly life become
more obvious with the passing of each desperate day. The
prologue of the film makes the characters’ doom a fait accompli, and
this information gives “Blair Witch” a new kind of suspense. In conventional horror, we know
how things are going to happen (watch out for the guy with the burned
face and the razors for nails, dude); we just don’t know to whom
they’re going to happen. Here, we are fully aware that nobody — not
even the plucky girl — is coming back from that camping trip. The
suffocating terror, and the gloomy poignancy, is in waiting to see what’s
going to keep them there forever.
The palpable sense of dread, which builds in a slow, steady crescendo throughout, is
exacerbated by the film’s utter lack of cinematic foreshadowing — there’s no “here comes
the bad thing” music, no telltale establishing shots of a hiding figure that compel us to shout, “Don’t go in
there!” at the screen. Instead, we have a one-way march toward the unknown,
a race to see what encroaches first: the elements, the enigmatic evil that
haunts the woods or the group’s own increasing paranoia. It’s fitting that “The Blair
Witch Project” should open the same week as Stanley Kubrick’s final film, since it shares
something psychologically — if not stylistically — with “The Shining.”
Both films explore the unnerving possibility that perhaps the worst thing
supernatural powers can do is to sit back and play with our heads, to let our
minds create a hell of their own. When Heather observes, “It’s all around
us,” she doesn’t notice that “it” is very much inside them as well.
For a cinema viriti horror story to work, the cast has to make you
forget it’s acting, a feat that Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua
Leonard — in particular Donahue — accomplish with an eerie agility.
“Method” filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez made “Blair
Witch” by having the cast go into the woods and camp for a week, giving
them only rudimentary information on what was going to happen each day. It’s
a concept that makes Steven Spielberg’s
href="/ent/movies/reviews/1998/07/cov_24review2.html">“Saving Private Ryan” boot camp sound like Club Med, but the results speak
for themselves: What we see on the screen are three people who look
genuinely scared out of their minds, proving that fear isn’t
manifested only in shrieking, slasher-flick bursts. Sure, Heather can scream like
a banshee, but she also shows the nuances of fear in subtler, more
unsettling ways.
In the soon-to-be-famous scene in the tent, the camera is
uncomfortably tight on her nose and right eye as she tries to calmly
apologize for everything that’s occurred. Her voice quivers, her eyes leak
tears and she croaks out what she seems to truly believe is her final message (“I love you, Mom …”) as she helplessly waits for the horror to
escalate. And escalate it does, building to an excruciatingly slow
crescendo, and leading ultimately to the most memorably disturbing final image
in a movie since the 1988 Dutch thriller “The Vanishing.”
“The Blair Witch Project” is not a perfect film, and there are times when the viewer may
ardently wish for less setup and quicker payoffs. And despite the
movie’s realism, there are significant and frustrating holes in logic: Why do the
young makers of a documentary on the Blair Witch spend so little time actually talking
about her? Why does Heather pack a book called “How to Stay Alive in the Woods” and then never
use it? And why, even when they’re running away in terror, do they take their cameras everywhere?
Despite these occasional lapses, “The Blair Witch Project” still emerges as
a fascinating, unforgettable mystery. The film leaves
us, like the filmmakers, abandoned in the woods, with no one there to save
us. And Heather’s terrified “What was that?” is up to us to answer.
Days after, you may still be replaying certain scenes in your head, puzzling over
their exact significance.
In what may be a first in cross-media storytelling, the movie’s creators, sensing the intense curiosity it might provoke, have
offered some ingenious alternative sources of further information. There’s a
spooky-in-its-own-right Web site
full of “evidence” from the case, and a Sci Fi network mockumentary on the
mockumentary that gives both the background of the legend and a postscript on the investigation of the
students’ disappearance, with additional materials (including a comic book) to follow.
Even without the supplemental story lines, though, “The Blair Witch Project” stands on its own,
the most inventive and genuinely frightening horror movie to appear in years. “Scream” may
have revitalized the genre by giving it wry, self-referential wit, but
“Blair Witch” does it by proving that there’s nothing scarier than looking
fear in the face. It is, quite simply, a movie you have to see, and
preferably with a friend. Because this is a film you’re going to need to
talk about when it’s over, and afterward you definitely won’t want to walk home alone.
A moment of silence, please, for the talent of John Carpenter — or perhaps a wooden stake would be more in order, since he seems to qualify as a member of the living dead. Carpenter’s sci-fi satire “Dark Star” has become a scruffy low-budget classic; he essentially invented the slasher movie with “Halloween”; he has delivered solid genre entertainments like “Escape from New York”; and he made what’s probably the best pop critique of late ’80s capitalism with “They Live” (a film that’s far smarter, more insightful and more relevant than “The Truman Show”). He’s still making movies — but he’s making movies like “John Carpenter’s Vampires,” which, in the grand tradition of most films whose titles include such a possessive, is the sort of thing you can’t believe anyone would want their name attached to.
It’s the story of a crack team of vampire slayers, led by Jack Crow (James Woods), who resemble a photocopy of a photocopy of a Peckinpah clichi — that is, a ragtag band of brutal, unshaven mercenaries who work for … the Vatican! Like several other aspects of “John Carpenter’s Vampires” (most of them associated with James Woods), this bit of back story is so ludicrous, it leaves you wondering if it might be a joke (apparently not). On the plus side, we get a scene in which Woods kisses a cardinal’s ring. On the negative, there are countless attempts to wring humor from the spectacle of Woods using rough language with the green young priest (Tim Guinee) assigned to help him when most of his team gets slaughtered in New Mexico by a supervampire named Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith).
In one of the movie’s few good lines, Woods explains that the vampires he hunts are savage animals, not “a bunch of fags in evening clothes running around seducing people with Eurotrash accents.” However, Valek — raven-haired, handsome, spectacularly tall and hardly from Kansas — wears what is unmistakably a black velvet cloak, and even if he does seem to be forced by his plastic fangs into breathing wetly and noisily through his mouth, he looks like a feverish Anne Rice fantasy made flesh. That’s just one example of the confusion and ineptitude of “John Carpenter’s Vampires,” a movie full of exchanges like this: (Sidekick) “You can’t do that, the rule book clearly states that [verbatim recitation of item from vampire slayer regulations indicating how thoroughly these guys are drilled]“; (Woods) “Somebody’s changed the rules. We’ve got to do whatever it takes.”
To the tune of grinding, bluesy electric guitars (Carpenter also composed the film’s music), Woods spends much of the movie staring flintily at potential vampire nests, wielding a crossbow, defying Vatican authorities and spitting tough clichis at the hapless priest, a vampire-infected but not yet “turned” hooker (Sheryl Lee) and the last remaining member of his team, played by Daniel Baldwin. Some of this dialogue is so clumsy, so creakily expository, and delivered by Woods with such deadpan literalism that I occasionally thought, “They can’t be serious.” I oscillated between wondering if Woods intended to deliver a high-camp sendup of the extremities of cinematic machismo and suspecting him of being exceptionally vainglorious and stupid, even for an actor. By the end of “John Carpenter’s Vampires,” the second interpretation seemed the only viable conclusion.
As for Carpenter, has he forgotten the basics of setting up shots or did he actually want to photograph the swaggering Woods in such a way that you really can’t help but notice that our hero is a tad, well, diminutive? Occasionally, “John Carpenter’s Vampires” summons a shred of visual style by juxtaposing the dusty desert landscape, with its floridly colored light, against the inky, mitteleuropean Valek. But Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 gem “Near Dark” did the vampires-out-west thing first and so much better. Finally, while the movie opens with a bloodbath, and a certain perfunctory ultragoriness prevails throughout, it’s never particularly scary. Carpenter could always induce a shiver or two, even in otherwise unsuccessful efforts like “Prince of Darkness”; now, even that’s gone.
While Wes Craven’s “Scream” series deftly deploys and parodies the genre Carpenter invented, the creator of “Halloween” can’t seem to muster his own second wind. Of course, one of the conventions that Carpenter launched was the death-defying monster who, despite seeming finally and utterly defeated, pops back up like a jack-in-the-box to have another go at the heroine with a butcher knife, or to slink off into the shrubbery to return to terrorize another day. Perhaps that will be John Carpenter’s story as well — or perhaps we should tell ourselves that such feats, alas, only happen in the movies.
Bah, humbug! The official beginning of the Christmas shopping season seems to kick off a little earlier each year. In case you didn’t notice, this year it leapfrogged Thanksgiving and started in the second week of November. One day there’s a pumpkin patch, then — poof! — it’s a Christmas tree lot. By the year 2034, Yuletide shopping will be rolled back so far that it’ll collide with the previous Christmas and we will experience the living hell of year-round holiday Muzak and shopping-mall Santas. As with tabloid journalism, overzealous consumers are as much to blame for this invasion of our sanity as perpetrators of seasonal greed. My solution: Send retailers a message by staying away from their stores until mid-December. Save your money, make your lists of who was naughty or nice, scour those catalogs — just don’t shop until you can see the whites of Rudolph’s eyes.
A better way to buck the system altogether is to make your own gifts. If you have a lot of foodies on your Christmas shopping list, let your fingers do the shopping by crafting a gift that will spice up their day and save you a bundle of cash to blow on post-season sales. Herbed olive oils are very popular these days, and for good reason: They are an instant 911. A splash will instantly resuscitate pastas, pizzas and vegetables, and magically convert a plain piece of toast into a sophisticated slice of bruschetta before your very eyes. With a little creativity, you can customize labels and make your offering totally unique. Contrary to anything the folks at Williams-Sonoma might like you to believe, there’s no secret recipe. Just connect the following dots.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
BOTTLES
- Use clear wine bottles, Orangina bottles or any other decorative bottle you can get your hands on. Bottles that previously contained fancy oils (preferably that someone else overpaid for) are also ideal. Be sure to wash thoroughly before filling.
OIL
- Purchase your olive oil in one-gallon cans from a Middle Eastern market or your local bulk food store. Ask for a robust oil, but don’t splurge on anything too virginal, since the delicate flavoring will be overwhelmed by the herbs.
SPICES
- Fresh rosemary sprigs
- Fresh thyme sprigs
- Dried Italian herbs or herbes de provence
- Dried chili peppers
- Peeled garlic cloves (if you choose to add these, the cloves must be removed within four days to avoid scary health problems that could ruin Christmas dinner)
- Olives
- Whole black or multicolored peppercorns
FANCY EXTRAS
- Labels and hand tags: Just improvise. Use fancy paper, or make a prototype and then color copy it. If you’ve got kids, steal their crayons, or better still, let them do the designing. If you go the label route, pick up a spray can of 3M super 77 Spray Adhesive at your local art store or Staples outlet.
- Spouts: Liquor pouring spouts can be found in most grocery stores, as well as all restaurant supply stores and Williams-Sonoma. For the initial presentation, cork the bottle and hang the spout around its neck.
- After corking the bottle, dip the top in melted paraffin wax or sealing wax.
TECHNIQUE (OR LACK THEREOF)
- Simply stuff a selection of the flavoring ingredients into the bottle and add oil. As a general rule, the more the merrier. Make sure the contents are totally submerged in the oil to prevent mold from forming. It generally takes four days for flavors to impregnate the oil.
Le Secret: Stick a chopstick or fondue fork in the bottle to create an appealing arrangement.
The Adventure Club: Save up the Sunday comics and use them as wrapping paper.
Liability Disclaimer: The International Olive Oil Council’s manual states that flavored oils should be refrigerated and consumed in two days. Let this fact be your guide. Although I am not encouraging you to follow my irreverent ways (in this particular instance), I keep my flavored oil for months and display it on my kitchen counter.
Music to Flavor By: Jane Siberry, “Child” (Sheeba Records): This is an atypical collection of seasonally inspired songs — without the sugar coating.
If arts and crafts are not your thing, here are a few gifts that most foodies would love to find under their tree.
10 great gifts for foodies
1. 10-inch non-stick sauti pan — Silverstone makes a fine pan for $25. All-Clad makes the Cadillac version for $100.
2 8-inch chef’s chopping knife, $60 & up
3. Large solid colored Fiestaware dinner plates, $20 each — Can’t choose a color? Mix and match.
4. Seeds and soil for an herb garden, $20
5. Wooden Caesar salad bowl, $40 & up
6. Small braid of garlic, $15
7. A coffee plunger, $20, and a grinder, $20
8. A year’s subscription to a food magazine, $18 to $30 — Saveur gets my vote.
9. The new Joy of Cooking, $30, an excellent crash-course cookbook for new cooks and seasoned foodies alike
10. “The Surreal Gourmet,” $15, or “The Surreal Gourmet Entertains,” $17 — Hey, my mother likes them! (Call 1-800-FAUX-PAS.)
Three cool stocking stuffers
1. A honey bear
2. An IOU for breakfast in bed
3. A chunk of imported Italian parmesan Regiano
… and four gifts not to buy
1. An apron that says “chefs make better lovers,” or anything similar
2. Potholders in the shape of fish or lobster claws
3. The latest “better mousetrap” corkscrew
4. An electric pepper grinder, or one made out of acrylic plastic
Next week: Appetizers for your Christmas party: Citrus-olive tapenade and Chipotle dry rub shrimp with a cilantro dipping sauce
The first time I heard Portishead’s debut album, “Dummy,” each song built
rapturously on the one before. Just as I was convinced that a song was
the record’s pinnacle, a new, lazy, smarmy, brilliant track would play,
eclipsing the one preceding it. Maybe that’s why listening to the band’s eponymous second album was such a disappointment — my hopes were way too high. As the
songs plodded by, my heart sank and my head hurt from struggling to hear
the band I adore in the dull, dark music pouring out of my stereo.
On “Dummy,” singer Beth Gibbons seemed to teeter on the edge of a
breakdown. Like Billie Holiday, her voice was full of angelic ennui,
with the fault lines lurking just underneath. It was the tension that
made the album so compelling.
On the new record, Gibbons has cracked. Whereas before she seemed to
exhale the lyrics like a cloud of opium smoke, here she spits them out.
“Dummy” hinted at something frightful and dissolute, but “Portishead” could
be the soundtrack to a horror movie. The opening few seconds of
“Humming” sound like the score to a cheap haunted house flick, but
without the playful irony that made the “Halloween” samples on Massive
Attack’s “Heat Miser” so darkly delightful. Instead, “Humming” comes
across as a dead-serious goth song.
Part of the hype on the new record is that the band created all their
own samples, which may explain why at times it seems like a rock record
with the beats just tacked on (there are even shrill electric guitars
on “All Mine”). I was listening to the album with a friend when he gasped, “This sounds like Grace Slick!” I hate to admit it, but he’s right. There’s a cheesy psychedelic rock-opera vibe to some songs, especially the dreadful “Seven Months,” “Cowboys” and “Elysium.” On
these songs, Gibbons hisses the vocals, and the band seems to be going
for an over-the-top noir sound with just a touch more subtlety than,
say, Bauhaus.
Despite all this, there are a few sublime moments hidden on
“Portishead.” On “Dummy,” Gibbons’ singing was cool and detached, and she
evidently wanted to put more raw emotion into this record. She succeeds
on the undeniably gorgeous “Undenied,” a restrained, heartbreaking blues
song with a mellow, muffled dub beat. “Half-Day Closing” has the spare,
narcotic sound of Portishead’s debut, and it’s heightened by the quiet
pain in Gibbon’s voice. There is also a fantastic, molasses-slow rap on
the end of “Western Eyes” that seems to come from someone as grizzled
and burnt as Nick Cave or Tom Waits. Usually, a new album with three
good songs would be thrilling, but coming from the band that put out
“Dummy,” it can’t help but be a letdown.
i spent my first Halloween in New York the other night. The plan was this: we take over a small bar. We devour the atmosphere. We become so large and rambunctious and filled with alcohol that nobody will contest us — nay, all Others, excluded from our pack, will be forced by the sheer weight of our mighty presence to leave and find another bar.
I decided to be one of those charismatic psycho-Christians who reads the New Testament,then handles poisonous snakes. Moe and Spanky came as Dead Musicians. Boy Strange came as a Porn Star. Pink painted the entire half of his upper body and perched on his bar stool like a gargoyle all night. Three fairy princesses got frightened and left before the second round. Soon the bar was a slobbering mass of my dearest friends, beating each other merrily with plastic pitchforks to DEVO.
When I was a child, my mother used to dress me for Halloween, and given the costume-ish things she had lying around, I always ended up looking sort of weirdly sexy. Other friends in second grade were bedecked in handmade fun-fur baby animal costumes or pastel ballerina tutus — I always ended up dressed like a gypsy prostitute, with a liquid eyeliner job that looked like my mother had applied it to me while she was drunk or underwater.
We always went trick-or-treating in the hills in Sausalito, because we all knew that there was some kind of noblesse oblige required of the wealthy orthodontists and drug dealers who lived there. They couldn’t just give you a bite-sized Snickers and be done with it, there had to be merchandise: toys, bicycles, scholarships to college. A good Halloween in Sausalito, if you hit the right guilty rich people, was almost as lucrative as a bar mitzvah.
Later on, in my pre-teens, candy and goods got less interesting than trouble, and I figured out that I could cause more problems if I dressed like a man, given the athletic versatility of male footwear. For years I went as Groucho Marx, if he had been disgraced in his career and lowered to the station of alcoholic subway flasher. Those were the years that there were episodes: throwing the Barbasol in the bushes before the cops checked my bag, sneaking the cooking sherry out of the parents’ liquor cabinet, upchucking in yards. After that there were Halloweens in the Castro, before those turned into mass excuses for suburban queer-menacing and aimless violence. There would be three or four of us, little black-clad punk rock girl urchins shuffling around, stopping every now and then to remark: that guy is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. There were some drag queens so outstandingly beautiful they made us feel like sexless, faceless potatoes.
One Halloween I went to the Vats, after recklessly ingesting a tiny piece of paper with a picture of Saturn on it. The Vats was an abandoned Hamm’s brewery that served as San Francisco’s main punk squat — many disenfranchised youth had taken up residence in this place, which was like a cross between a three-story men’s room and a prison camp. I walked up the steps to the Vats right as the acid started to braid its metallic tingle into my inner ear. Every one of the 50 or so punks who were twined around the stairs like rude ivy had heavily tattooed Queequeg faces and the viney ink on their necks was winding together into one big hostile tapestry. They all seemed to be singing some Viking war chorus consisting of the words “Fuck!” and “Fuck!”
A huge bull dyke in a Carmelite nun’s habit was beating up our friend the clubfoot heroin dealer. She was trouncing him with her steel-toed boots in prismatic slow motion and threatening to piss down his back. Both of their eyes were blue and quivering like napalm; her big-sleeved punches seemed to soar like deadly condors from miles away. During their battle, they struggled with a terrain which appeared to be a four-inch pink soup made of beer, jism, blood and industrial cleanser, lubricating the tile beneath them and forcing them to compensate Twyla Tharpishly for balance.
Deeper into the Vats, there were giant dry bathtubs about 20 feet long and 12 feet deep, which was where beer used to live. Some skinheads had been pushed down the slick, unclimbable walls by their friends, who were now throwing garbage at the prisoners, who would not be saved without the aid of complicated suction equipment.
I stepped onto a tarp made of hefty bags that I realized was covered with human shit: a communal restroom! I exalted. It seemed an oasis of Order compared to the rest of the environment. All sound echoed deafeningly off the tiled walls like an underwater volcano, then swirled into a laser point and bored a little hole in my scalp, and the whole evening began to sit small and distant in my head like a tiny nativity scene set inside a sugar egg. I don’t exactly remember much else.
After the third or fourth round of drinks this Halloween, my dear friend Bitzy exposed her nipples and three of us began swirling green paint around them. I was stripped frenziedly down to my sturdy Christian foundation garments by two dirty elves and a lesbian pirate. I then collapsed on the floor, frothing at the mouth with my rubber snake, screaming spirited glossolalia. Seven of us all used the restroom together. Spanky leapt screaming from the bar to tear off his vinyl pants in the middle of 7th Street. In short, the evening was a pleasant success.
