Documentary Conventions and the Fear of Reality in The Blair Witch Project

What is truth and what is reality? One might do just ask well to as what the meaning of life is. In art and film, at least, the former question has received much attention in an effort to differentiate narrative fiction and documentary films. But the lines of distinction are not as clear as one might think. In Introduction to Documentary, Bill Nichols demonstrates that the two modes of film are mutually characterized by substantial overlap. Both are subject to the artifice of cinematography and to the editing choices of the filmmaker. The documentary claim to truth is problematized by its own medium of representation. In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard complicates the problem even further, suggesting that the advent of simulation in film may very well be a simulation of no identifiable referent. In 1999 an innovative film emerged that spawned a generation of documentary-styled ‘found footage’ horror films and that celebrate the documentary claim to reality and truth as powerfully horrific. In The Blair Witch Project, the documentary style of the film locates the source of repressed fear in reality itself and inverts the psychology of horror. The monster is not merely some fantastical creature inherent to a fictitious narrative; the monster is reality itself within the boundaries of a documentary record, and the monster is as elusive as the referent. The Blair Witch Project is a film in which the monster is the documentary film format and its ability to delude and misrepresent. It is the use of documentary conventions that renders the absent witch's existence so convincing and that demonstrates a repressed fear of the representation of reality to which documentary films lay claim.
The Blair Witch Project’s first claim to authenticity emerges in its simulation of found footage. The film presents what the introductory inter-titular caption states is film footage that was discovered in the woods following the disappearance of three young filmmakers. The ‘found footage’ genre of art has a long history that predates the invention of film. Its earliest incarnation is the fictitious epistolary novel. Works such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787) attempt to appropriate the authenticity of apparently genuine letters into a fiction constructed out of the narrative contents of the letters. Of course, there are problems in maintaining the continuity of such a narrative when the narrative calls for omniscient knowledge. Richardson managed to circumvent the problem by inserting a lengthy prose narration into the middle of his series of letters. The result highlighted the epistolary characteristic of the rest of the novel as contrived and reduced its own authenticity. Critics such as Henry Fielding saw such a contrivance as entirely risible. His parody Shamela (1741) highlights all of the weaknesses of such a genre. However, the genre was not abandoned. The ‘found documents’ epistolary novel would find its most brilliant articulations when married with gothic romance in such novels as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This early form of horror ‘mockumentary’ would not be able to manifest itself in film until technology allowed it to do so in the late twentieth century.
In order to claim that the epistolary style of the ‘found footage’ horror film is contingent upon documentary conventions requires a working definition of the term ‘documentary.’ Bill Nichols admits that a solid definition of the term documentary remains elusive and that the best articulation of a definition of ‘documentary’ is relative. That is to say, he defines documentaries as a family of films that often have certain characteristics in common but not necessarily all of them (Nichols 21). Nichols delineates a definition that includes “An Institutional Framework,” “A Community of Practitioners,” and “A Corpus of Texts” (Nichols 22, 25, 26). This last category includes Nichols lucid description of six reactionary modes of documentary as he has observed them throughout the history of the genre. These modes include the “Poetic Mode,” “Expository Mode,” “Observational Mode,” “Participatory Mode,” “Reflexive Mode,” and the “Performative Mode” (Nichols 33-4). The Blair Witch Project is a film that demonstrates aspects of at least five of Bill Nichols’ documentary “modes” (Nichols 33).
At the outset, The Blair Witch Project demonstrates qualities of Nichols’ Expository Mode. Nichols defines the Expository Mode as one which “emphasizes verbal commentary and an argumentative logic” (Nichols 33). The introduction to the film presents a textual exposition which claims, “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found” (0:00:36). Shortly thereafter, while standing in a local cemetery, the character Heather Donahue provides an expository narration. She states,
This is Burkittsville, formerly Blair. It is a small, quiet Maryland town, much like a small quiet town anywhere. No more than twenty families laid their roots here over 200 years ago, many of whom remain either on this hill or in the town below. There are an unusually high number of children laid to rest here, most of whom passed in the 1940s, yet no-one in the town seems to recall anything unusual about this time, to us anyway. Yet legend tells a different story. One whose evidence is all around us, etched in stone (0:03:53-0:04:40).

What follows is a series of interviews from local citizens which extends the exposition. One gentleman explains that “Mr. Parr was an old hermit and he lived up on the mountain” (0:04:49-0:5:05). The man goes on to explain that “In the winter of 1940” the police found the bodies of seven kids that had disappeared from the area in Parr’s house (0:05:39-0:06:25). Another young man explains the method in which Mr. Parr committed the murders. He would take the kids into the “basement by twos and make one face into the corner and then he would kill the other one, and when he was done with that he’d grab the one out of the corner and kill that one too” (0:06:26-0:06:37). The end of the film visually suggests that this method of murder is the one suffered by Heather and Michael (1:17:01-1:17:08). Throughout the film, the narration of the three characters provides first-person participatory exposition of what they have experienced during time ellipses when the cameras were not rolling as well as what they see when the camera is not aimed at what they are discussing. For the fictitious narrative to unfold in an explicit way, the film depends on the expository mode.
The Blair Witch Project loosely demonstrates characteristics of both the Poetic Mode and the Participatory Mode as well. Nichols defines the Poetic Mode as one which “emphasizes visual associations, tonal or rhythmic qualities, descriptive passages, and formal organization” (Nichols 33). Throughout the film, the forest in which the action takes place is simultaneously romantically beautiful and horrifically sublime. The forest is associated with our most primal fears of the untamed wilderness and is presented as a location in which isolation and disorientation can create the most horrifying experiences. The use of a grainy, black and white 16mm film amplifies the fearful images of the deep, dark forest. Initially, the three protagonists revel in their wilderness excursion but they are quickly subsumed by the forest’s more terrifying aspects. As they succumb to hunger, fear, and disorientation the remainder of the narrative organizes itself around their attempts to navigate their way out of the wilderness in which they find themselves isolated. In this way, the makers of the documentary within the ‘found footage’ inadvertently participate as the victims of their own poetic horror documentary. Nichols defines the Participatory Mode as one which “emphasizes the interaction between filmmaker and subject” (Nichols 34). Within this poetic organizational framework, the three protagonists become the latest victims of the witch they are attempting to document.
The film also demonstrates characteristics of Nichols’ Reflexive Mode but in a substantially subtle way. Nichols defines the Reflexive Mode as one which “calls attention to the assumptions and conventions that govern documentary filmmaking” and “[i]ncreases our awareness of the constructedness of the film’s representation of reality” (Nichols 33). The introductory text defines the raw footage as the content of an intended documentary. By doing so the footage’s status and value as documentary is presented as a given which is not interrogated by an audience already in the throes of the suspension of disbelief. In a much less subtle moment, Josh laments his desire to escape the real situation in which he finds himself. “I can see why you like this video camera so much … It’s not quite reality … It’s totally like a filtered reality, man. It’s like you can pretend everything’s not quite the way it is (0:50:09-0:50:35). However, his situation is not real. Ironically, he is speaking from the diegetic confines of a fiction film masquerading as reality. His ironic comments emphasize the fact that the film is not reality but that documentary conventions have the ability to make it seem so.
The Blair Witch Project makes its most important claim to authenticity through its use of Nichols’ Observational Mode. Nichols defines the Observational Mode as one which “emphasizes a direct engagement with the everyday life of subjects as observed by an unobtrusive camera” (Nichols 34). In the movie, the entity or ‘witch’ that terrorizes the three filmmakers is clearly unconcerned with the presence of the cameras and proceeds to traumatize and murder Heather, Josh, and Michael. Even so, the witch is careful never to appear in any corporeal form in the film, but there is no reason to believe that such behavior is not standard to the witch’s modus operandi. Throughout the film, the claim to ‘found footage’ makes clear that what is seen is simply the raw footage that ‘observed’ exactly what the three filmmakers experienced in their descent into the horrors of the forest and their eventual disappearance. The otherwise inanimate footage makes a substantial claim to objectivity and authenticity. What is seen on the film must be real.
By using documentary conventions, The Blair Witch Project heightens the participation of the viewer in the horror presented before them and confuses fiction with reality. Nichols points out that “Fiction may be content to suspend disbelief (to accept its world as plausible), but non-fiction wants to install belief (to accept its world as actual)” (Nichols 2). He goes on to point out that “In documentaries we find stories or arguments, evocations or descriptions that let us see the world anew. The ability of the photographic image to reproduce the likeness of what is set before it compels us to believe that it is reality itself re-presented before us” (Nichols 3). The compulsion to believe has resulted in a powerful tacit agreement between viewers and filmmakers that documentary conventions must depict an objective reality. Referring to Mitchell Block’s 1973 film faux documentary No Lies, Nichols maintains that “[w]e are unsettled . . . by the off-screen filmmaker’s (Block’s) deliberate misrepresentation of the film’s status as a fiction with contractual bonds to its actors” (Nichols 13). When this social contract is breached it can cause serious backlash against the filmmaker. In her essay “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner,” Alison Landsberg states that “the experience within the movie theatre and the memories that the cinema affords–despite the fact that the spectator did not live through them–might be as significant in constructing or deconstructing the spectator’s identity as any experience that s/he actually lived through” (Landsberg 180). As a function of their identity construction, audiences might well react violently when conventional tacit agreements of documentary filmmaking are breached. For example, in the bonus materials included with Peter Jackson’s faux documentary Forgotten Silver (1995), he claims that he received hate mail and death threats following the film’s airing on public television.
Jean Baudrillard claims that what is simulated in artistic representations, which certainly includes film, has no cultural referent in the real world. He states that film simulation is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1). Furthermore, Nichols states that “the act of filmmaking alters the reality it sets out to represent” (Nichols 6). In documentary film this might be seen as a sort of artistic Heisenberg uncertainty principle. That is to say, the act of filming (the experiment) will inherently skew the reality it records (the results of the experiment). This ability to alter reality is not necessarily confined to the mise-en-scene or narrative within the film, but can have repercussions in the real world. Allardyce Nicoll articulates this thesis clearly when she states, “What we have witnessed on the screen becomes the real for us” (Nicoll 38). In “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List,” Thomas Elsaesser argues that “No longer is story telling the culture’s meaning-making response” (Elsaesser 146). In light of Nicoll’s, Nichols’ and Baudrillard’s arguments, then, what is simulated in a film becomes the origin, the referent itself.
The ability to construct reality is even more powerful if a fiction film appropriates documentary conventions.
Films like This is Spinal Tap [sic] (Rob Reiner, 1982) build this type of institutional framing into the film itself in a mischievous or ironic way: the film announces itself to be a documentary, only to prove to be a fabrication or simulation of a documentary. If we take its own self-description seriously, we will believe that the group Spinal Tap is an actual rock group. Since one had to be created for the film, just as a “Blair Witch” had to be created for The Blair Witch Project [sic], we will not be wrong. What we may fail to realize is that neither the rock group nor the witch had any existence whatsoever prior to the production of these films” (Nichols 23).

However, Nichols fails to recognize two major distinctions between the two films. First of all, The Blair Witch Project doesn’t highlight its artifice. There is no comedy in the narrative to mark it as a mockumentary as there is in This is Spinal Tap. In its documentary presentation The Blair Witch Project plays on audience expectations that the horror within is authentic. More importantly, while the rock band appears in its movie, the witch never does. Therefore Nichols is right that the conception of a Blair Witch is certainly brought into the same existence that the film simulates.
In Robin Wood’s pivotal work “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” he clearly articulates a Freudian argument which delineates how monsters in horror films are metaphoric representations of repressed social fears (Wood 200-201). He refers to these metaphoric representations as depictions of the “Other” (Wood 196). As we have already seen, the simulation of reality in a fiction film is rendered more powerful in a documentary style. If Baudrillard is right in his claim that film can create an illusion of a reality with no referent, then the simulacrum becomes equally more powerful. Baudrillard states that
One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But … metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination (Baudrillard 3).

The Blair Witch Project doesn't stop at demonstrating a simulation of an entity that doesn't exist. It proves Baudrillard’s thesis by example. It simulates something that doesn't exist in reality with a representation that doesn’t show the witch! That is to say, The Blair Witch Project perfectly represents Baudrillard’s lacking referent with a lacking simulation. Nichols points out that “Images lack tense and a negative form” (Nichols 30). The Blair Witch Project merely suggests that the antagonist is some sort of supernatural entity. There is nothing in the images of the ostensibly found footage that says it was not the witch. Nevertheless, the witch never appears in the film. In fact, nothing that occurs in the film is exempt from the possibility of otherwise mundane, if unlikely, explanations. The film even offers an explanation that a man named Parr was the murderer from the 1940s who insisted he was possessed by the witch. There is no reason to believe that all that transpires in the film is not the work of another twisted, but entirely mortal, “Other.” However, no mundane “Other” appears either. If there is no “Other” in the film, then what makes it so terrifying? The answer is in its form of representation.
It is reality itself, as measured by documentary film conventions, that has become the repressed fear. Early in the film, a local woman explains that she heard about the Blair Witch from another credible documentary source. “I saw a documentary on the discovery channel or somewhere” (0:05:18-0:05:22). In this way the horror film becomes a documentary about documentaries. By exemplifying Baudrillard’s thesis of an absent referent in the real world, it is merely the representation that is the source of fear. Indeed, as Elsaesser points out, the representation has become all too real in American culture. “‘Do you remember the day Kennedy was shot?’ really means ‘Do you remember the day you watched Kennedy being shot all day on television?’” (Elsaesser 146). Similarly, our memories of 9/11 are constructed around visuals presented on news television (primarily on CNN). It has become a cliché to refer to the documentary-styled images in broadcast journalism not as “the news” but as “the bad news.” Film has become our touchstone for reality rather than reality being the touchstone for filmic realism, and our film reality is a terrifying one.
The Blair Witch Project is a meta-cinematic representation of three filmmakers who create their own reality – one that is never simulated on-screen because it has no documentary (i.e. objectively real) referent in the real world, but that consumes them all the same. The movie is simultaneously a fiction and a documentary. Nichols delineates these categories as “documentaries of wish-fulfillment and … documentaries of social representation” (Nichols 1).
Documentaries of wish-fulfillment are what we would normally call fictions. These films give tangible expression to our wishes and dreams, our nightmares and dreads. They make the stuff of the imagination concrete – visible and audible. They give a sense of what we wish, or fear, reality itself might be or become (Nichols 1).

However, The Blair Witch Project does not make the nightmare concrete. It makes the nightmare all the more frightening by avoiding the concrete. The nightmare is entirely elusive. “Documentaries of social representation are what we typically call non-fiction. These films give tangible expression to aspects of the world we already inhabit and share” (Nichols 1). The Blair Witch Project blurs the boundary between these categories. The film conflates what we “fear reality … might … become” with “the world we already inhabit and share” (Nichols 1). As Nichols points out, “Every film is a documentary” (Nichols 1). The Blair Witch Project is a film that documents our fear of the real through a fictitious “Other” that is absent on-screen.
The Blair Witch Project demonstrates Baudrillard’s thesis of simulacra in three ways. First, it brings into existence the simulation of a witch that has no referent in the real world. Ask any film buff if they know what the Blair Witch is and they will assuredly answer in the affirmative. Second, the film deploys a documentary format to lend credibility to the witch’s existence. Lastly, the film proves Baudrillard’s assertion that film simulations have no referent in that the simulation itself doesn’t occur on-screen. In this way, The Blair Witch Project is brilliant - appropriating the documentary claim to represent reality, it creates fear of an entity that is present neither in the real world nor in the film. As such, The Blair Witch Project demonstrates that the fear has become a fear of the representation itself and that simulation, for the purposes the of horror film, becomes more frightening in the absolute absence of the referent on both the screen and in reality.



Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print.
Deren, Maya. “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality.” Film Theory and Practice. Eds. G Mast and M. Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List.” The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. Ed. Vivian Sobchack. New York: Routledge, 1995. 146. Print.
Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Body and Society 1, nos. 3-4 (1995): 190. Print.
Nicoll, Allardyce. “Film Reality: The Cinema and the Theater.” Film: An Anthology. Ed. Daniel Talbot. Berkeley: U of California P, 1959. 33-50. Print.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Print.
The Blair Witch Project. Dir. Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez. Artisan Entertainment, 1999. DVD.
Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Movies and Methods Volume II. Ed. Bill Nichols. London, England: University of California Press, 1985. 195-220. Print.