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The evil two books and one video do
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Nov. 24, 1999 |
I'm unforgivably late on this topic, but
"The Blair Witch Project" scared the living shit out of me, for days and days. I did a small test-group study. It turns out that the people who saw "Blair Witch" on video (like me), as opposed to the big screen, got the full weight of the escalating dread and horror. I suppose it is harder to feel a totally isolated sense of terrible creep-out when there are a hundred other people near you in the dark -- around the campfire, as it were -- enjoying the collective thrill of feeling adrenally spooky together. When you are home, however, and the dark room is quiet except for the radiator whining like a baby in pain, there is no arresting point for the abusive, mental- If you're a person prone to worst-case-scenario fantasies of rank metaphysical hoodoo to begin with, it is triply disturbing when someone of great creative skill is able to unlock your own overactive ability to scare yourself -– it can give you a pervasive, if temporary, sense of all life being innately creepy. "The Blair Witch Project" knew that the biggest motivator for fear is the Unknown Thing in the Dark, which is what most other movies do exactly wrong: They show you the big-budget computer-animated latex beast, which looks fake and silly and not at all as banal as real evil -- too many bells and whistles, too much silly imagination and techno-wank -– and dissipate all of the fear the movie has generated by exposing the Thing. The most formidable Bogey Man never shows itself, except in abnormal phenomena -- the birds behaving weirdly, the chairs assembling themselves into a pyramid -- evidence that the unseen Thing exists, and doesn't like you. Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Wednesday in People + Archives
Late at night, for days after the movie was safely back on the video shelves (I actually wanted to park the video outside the house when I was done with it, for fear of its infectious evil power), I resorted to sprinting back to my bed from the bathroom in the middle of the night, fleeing from invisible goblins in my hallway -- such was the power of the film's sinister suggestion. I was miserable. Then, later that week, when I was auditioning for a demolition derby film in Tribeca, I saw "Mike" -- the "Mike" from "The Blair Witch Project." The last and most vomitously terrifying shot in the film: Mike, standing there, with his back turned. He was dressed virtually the same way that he was in the woods; big plaid woolly anorak, hat. There he was, Mike, warm, happy, still unshaven, sitting on a leather couch next to an expensive potted plant, reading Xeroxed scenes from a new screenplay. Our eyes met for a second. "I' m so glad you're alive!" I whispered hoarsely to him. He laughed. "Do you get that all the time?" I asked, thumping my chest to indicate palpitations, "people being totally relieved to see you?" "Ha ha ha, yeah!" he said. You could tell he was psyched to be a part of such a huge phenomenon. Future Mike, sitting before me, now Present Mike. It's OK, said his presence in the present. Really. Life is not so creepy. I sent a message of Future OK-ness back to my "Blair Witch" terrorized-self of recent past. Hang in there. OK, so "The Blair Witch Project" may be a great ghost story, with all of the crackling, poisonous glory that a ghost story can manufacture. But I'm really worried about Lynda Barry. It always makes me wonder when people with the power of creation, the artistic Prometheuses as it were, delve at length into the deadly, kinky and evil. It means that they have voluntarily stowed their heads in the Dark Compartment for a very long period of time -– long enough to create a whole project. I just read the novel "Cruddy," because whatever Lynda Barry does is golden; she cooks with the genius sauce; there are four-panel episodes of "Ernie Pook's Comeek" that I think should be hanging in the Smithsonian. I first noticed that Barry had been listening to the scarier muses when there started to be more bad sex and insanity in the comic strip; but she would always balance it out with some ripping flight of the funniest thing you've ever seen, a week later. This spring another one of her cartoon books, "The Freddy Stories," came out, and I was dismayed to see that she'd left out a lot of the tickly hilarious Freddie material in favor of the horrific, mentally ill, fear-driven stuff. "Cruddy," the newest Barry offering, has no rays of sunshine, no redemption. It reads like an extended cry for help -- basically, everyone dies, in terrible ways. It rolls from squalor into deep squalor into deadly squalor into Bloodbath Hell, and the suicide at the end is supposed to be the beautiful, happy ending (which is revealed at the very beginning). Barry has assigned herself a task on the first page, i.e., make this suicide OK. Make the readers believe the suicide is indeed a "happy" ending. But she doesn't. How could she? How can we, the Gentle Readers, root for an abused teenage girl to kill herself? It made me want to send Barry a big box of peanut-butter cups and some potted begonias and a Jack Russell terrier and a family-sized bottle of Paxil, because I think she's horribly depressed and wants to die. Buck up, Lynda. Oh, dear Ms. Barry, hang in there. You are so beloved.
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