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The mark of a good pop song is precisely in how well it can slot into a horror soundtrack.
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Jul 25, 2016 17:31
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:46 |
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Kin posted:The difference is the first film heavily implied something supernatural was doing all of that. You never actually saw anything that couldn't have been done by some dude with sneakers and that sucks you in visually as you're watching it. It's like, "yeah, ok, a pile of rocks isn't an impossible thing to happen practically, i'll buy that"; "oh their buddy has vanished, we/they didn't see him leave, ok, that's realistic", "they found a bag of teeth? Yeah, that's hosed up but could happen". While you're not wrong about things being different, very little in this film is strictly impossible either. Blair Witch has always been about how 'normal people' can be led to believe in the supernatural. The five original films are Hound Of The Baskervilles murder-mysteries, where the only actual supernatural claim is some ancient aliens bullshit from Curse Of The Blair Witch ("no human being could pile dirt like this!"). Not coincidentally, the writer on this film discarded all previous 'canon' except for Curse. But the implicit point of all the Blair Witch films is still that every person making a documentary will end up with a different witch. Always a witch because that's what they're primed to expect, and always different because there is no actual witch. 'Witch' is just the name given to anything traumatic or inexplicable - the blank spots in the narrative. (The VVitch is basically an unofficial Blair Witch prequel, given its basis in historical documents, and how the characters conjure up a witch to explain away all the problems in their lives.) This particular film just amps up the conspiracy-nut side of things by introducing Sasquatch and alien abduction imagery into the mix - but that's still ambiguous in the same way that 'real' Sasquatch evidence is. The creature is this blurry tree-looking thing that, whenever we pan back to where it came from, is revealed to be just branches or roots. When the pink-haired girl is killed, it's ambiguous as to whether she was struck or not. That's the logic this film is working with: each individual event is only slightly exaggerated beyond plausibility. So, shoving a girl causes her spine to break. The footage at the start of the film is not just similar but identical. Noises are amplified, and so-on. And that has a cumulative effect. But you still need to go back to the characters to see why this is happening - beginning with the clear incestuous undertone to James' search for Heather. Like the entire point of the movie is that he's chasing this image of his sister, and this woman literally turns out to be his love interest(?). James is clearly uncomfortable with Lisa's sexuality because of the resemblance, covering up her bare legs and so-on. And that's unavoidably linked to the very ending, where he kills her. It's his voice. All the stuff about witches and time-travel is just there to literalize this conflict.
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Sep 19, 2016 17:31
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MisterBibs posted:
Everything that the kids were subjected to in the first movie was literally the work of a small group of people dressed in camouflage.
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Sep 20, 2016 07:55
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There was criticisms that the first movie could've been something other than a witch... which isn't true.
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MisterBibs posted:Yup, a group of people dressed in camouflage who had to invent code words for the actors to ignore them and what they were doing, because it was impossible to do things without getting the actor's attentions. Well it's good that you acknowledge the difference between actors and characters, but you haven't extended this thought to the camouflaged people - who themselves play the role of 'Unseen Assailants'. The onscreen actors pretend not to hear them, and the offscreen actors pretend not be heard. Given that they are unseen, you might assume that these characters have magic powers or are the ghosts of a hundred dead children or something. But the truth is that you are filling in the blanks based on hearsay and patterns in sticks. That's the point of the film: that there are people out there, and their motives are unknowable to you. You may begin to imagine that there is a single intelligence in control of everything that transpires - but that's effectively a conspiracy theory. Instead, the film tells you outright what its subject matter is: A serial killer. The coldest winter on record. The tragic death of a child. The local nutcase.... Relatively mundane things are distorted by patchy evidence and conflicting accounts. As Pirate Jet observed, Blair Witch Project is not about a witch. It is about a legend about a witch. Its form is its function: 20 hours of footage from two cameras, trimmed down and intercut by unseen editors to create a saleable narrative. This was the point of the four sequel films as well. This new film is similar up to a point, but employs the fantastical conceit that the cameras are able to record the characters' hallucinations.
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Sep 20, 2016 11:51
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Ehud posted:I know you do your own thing or whatever, but you missed what happened in this scene. There was nothing ambiguous about it. She died because Ashley broke the totem that had her pink hair tied to it. That was confirmation that there is an actual witch with actual magical powers. The little figures made of sticks are voodoo dolls. Breaking the Talia voodoo doll = breaking her back in real life. No, I didn't miss that plot point. I'm talking about how it's filmed: as a mid shot, camera whipping around violently, characters lunging at eachother while screaming accusations, etc. While you can absolutely grab the blu-ray and go frame-by-frame to get a clear look at 'what really happened', the basic joke of the opening scene is that 'getting a better look' at the supernatural thing this way will actually distort your understanding of events and cause the narrative to make less sense. Every effect in the film is deliberately ambiguous that way. Like people complain that the 'witch' makes loud screams, but those are animal noises: coyotes or foxes, and things of that sort. Why does the witch sound like some coyotes? Simply because it is just some coyotes - and they're causing the characters to freak out, to imagine that they hear human laughter. The conceit of the film is that, in this mysterious Zone, your hallucinations become real. But that means, in order for these things to occur, you must first hallucinate. That's also why the witch can't hurt people who stay calm.
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Sep 20, 2016 19:08
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Stan Taylor posted:My real secret theory: a witch did it. Ok, so what is her motive. Why is she using her virtual omnipotence to make coyote sounds & knock over tents, instead of simply becoming a millionaire. For your reading to be stronger, it needs to be able to account for more textual evidence.
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Sep 21, 2016 00:10
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Stan Taylor posted:She doesn't like people cause they killed her. She wants to be alone. She is an unknowable force of evil born of the evil of man. It's spooky. You can't just say it was a witch and then define a witch as 'monkeycheese', because then the film is about monkeycheese and you've admitted failure. The film sets up the logic of how the supernatural 'works' in the earliest scenes - for example, when the Bluetooth cameras are used to convey drunkenness in the early bar scene, and then there's a hard cut to crisp daytime footage. The fact that the characters are drunk causes the camerawork to become looser, while the casually-worn handsfree cameras have lower resolution. So the camerawork itself 'gets drunk'. "Obviously in this film, we embraced the idea that found footage horror sometimes works best as POV horror and the film kind of transforms into that more and more as it goes on. That was very intentional from the start." -Simon Barrett Barrett and Wingard repeatedly stress that their goal was to make a fusion of strict found-footage logic and the logic of highly subjective POV films like the Maniac remake. This film is basically a synthesis of Blair Witch Project and Book Of Shadows. BWP is just blunt evidence, while BOS is the corny reenactment that strives to present the characters' subjective hallucinations. In Blair Witch 3, the ridiculous hallucinations actually appear in the evidence itself. That's the entire point: to make the audience feel as though they are hallucinating. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Sep 21, 2016 |
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Sep 21, 2016 01:20
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Sir Kodiak posted:I can't think of another movie that half-introduces something as weird as a wound with something moving around inside of it with a seeming life of its own, then completely drops it without mention. That really is the appeal of the film: the pure thematic storytelling. The leg wound in the creek has no relevance to the plot, but it's absolutely relevant to her putting on a headlamp and dying in a tree. If anything, it's her specific motivation for climbing the tree: to get away from the ground, to look up into the heavens for an answer. The idea of being infected by a plant is straight out of (the very excellent film) The Ruins, and is a good shorthand for horror towards the materiality of the body. The drone is also a good contrast to the cameras surreptitiously shoved at her wound, to get a good look in there. She's sort-of reduced to being 'the girl with the foot injury' and, in that sense, the weird plant ends up feeding off the attention of those around her. (Note how the paramedic can only perceive a normal infection, while the boyfriend can see this weird pulsing thing.) But if you're looking for the specific innovation, it's in this idea that there's no real connection between events. The foot infection isn't really related to the massive sliver that got jammed in her shin while she was stumbling around blindly, and neither of those things is related to the fall from the tree. It's just death - but people cant help but assign it a name like 'witch'. Ashley herself has made the unavoidable connection between that branch-breaking sound when she took a bad step, and that girl she accidentally snapped like a twig.
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Sep 24, 2016 07:06
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a cop posted:Uh, as other posters have detailed, the back to back "Fake out the characters to turn around before immediately killing them" working on two people who were standing by side by was loving stupid. It would have been so much more compelling if the entity tried to get the other person to turn around but it didn't work. What would happen then? You're mistaken; they aren't tricked into being killed. James turns around and sees his sister, so he calls Lisa over - to check out this weird YouTube clip on his computer. They are both yanked back into the opening scene, memories erased, doomed to reenact these events forever. This is why the Paul character talks about being part of the previous search party, despite seemingly being far too young. The problem is not that they die, but that they cannot die.
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Sep 25, 2016 21:32
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Len posted:Someone needs to do a found footage movie the same way they did Alien Abduction Incident in Lake County. It aired on TV without the credits or anything indicating it was a movie plus before and after commercials it had UFO experts discussing the footage and how real it was. Somewhere we still have a grainy VHS copy recorded off TV with all those and I used to watch it all the time. I would pay cash money for a copy of that VHS. That's an extremely rare film that you should digitize or something. Also, what you're talking about has been done, recently, with hoax documentaries like Megalodon, Mermaids, and Wrath Of Submarine.
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Sep 28, 2016 17:29
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sweetmercifulcrap posted:All of the lore both in the films and viral marketing says that Elly was the "witch", there can be an evil presence in the woods controlling her but she's still "the witch". Saying that the thing you saw in the movie that you had every right to assume was the witch wasn't the witch is a really stupid way to drum up publicity and only hurts this movie overall. Up to (and including) this Blair Witch 2 The Woods, the point of the franchise experiment was to create an urban legend out of nothing by creating a series of equally-unreliable and mutually incompatible documents that all express various individuals' belief in 'something'. Instead of making a series about Bigfoot, they effectively made a series about belief in Bigfoot. The more you research the Elly Kedward backstory, the more ridiculous and unsubstantiated the claims become. In the context of the entire Blair Witch series, Blair Witch 2 The Woods is diegetically Adam Wingard making a purely (science-)fictional horror film about a 'real' offscreen phenomenon. Wingard and the others are character in the story, trying to explain where belief comes from. And that's what you see in the film: Elly Kedward appears because the kids are told about Elly Kedward, and then thrown into this hallucinatory environment where their imaginations run rampant. The villain really is "something evil in the woods", but that "something" is directly analogous to the black goo in Prometheus. It's this unsymbolizable Thing that cannot be captured through objective documentation. If you were to take a step back, you would find only some boring animals and trees. But these kids took a step forward, into the darkness. In other words, when Elly Kedward originally vanished in the woods, she was the first person to be taken by the Thing. Literally: something happened to her body. The fact that we don't know what the thing is is what makes it a thing. Did she escape to safety, eventually freeze to death, or become consumed by animals? Some versions of the story have her crucified on a tree, while others show her strapped to a cart. In some, she's simply exiled from the town. Did people actually go back to look for her body, or is that a narrative embellishment inspired by the biblical story of Christ vanishing from his tomb? The witch is made out of these gaps in the narrative. The drone had to fall because, if it were to actually fly all the way up, it would reveal nothing extraordinary. The feeling that you're being denied some crazy supernatural reveal, when it breaks, is deliberate.
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Sep 28, 2016 21:29
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precision posted:Two seconds of Google later: Unfortunately, that's the director's cut. The TV cut is half an hour shorter, and is actually much better edited.
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Sep 29, 2016 22:11
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IMB posted:Why does it sound like a bone cracking every time Ashley's foot hurts. It's the sound of a branch breaking, part of the overall point that there's nothing 'actually' there. It's all fear and misperception. The image of her leg, combined with the sound of the branch, is enough to make the injury seem cartoonishly bad - not only for the audience but for the other characters.
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Jan 18, 2017 18:48
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sweetmercifulcrap posted:that's absolutely not what they were going for but they made the whole thing vague enough so you can say "you can't prove that it isn't". The fact that they straight up said "yeah there's meaning behind this but the film didn't do well so now we're not going to tell you" only further supports that there isn't any deeper meaning. The film is a hybrid of pseudo-documentary films like Blair Witch and 'immersive' POV films like Maniac. The supernatural events appear exclusively on the footage from the bluetooth headset cameras. Other cameras - the drone, the handheld cameras, the trail cams - pick up absolutely nothing unusual. This is on the surface: different types of footage stand for different things. The 'objective' documentary footage (there is nothing supernatural, they are just being scared by animal sounds and whatever) is in collision with the subjective fiction (the character is hunted by her literalized nightmare of a witch that appears onscreen). The film expresses this concept through the fictional conceit that these specific headset cams can record hallucinations. Much is made of the headcams' 'sci-fi' properties, like that they are all connected to central hub via GPS - information that has no bearing on the plot.
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Jan 18, 2017 21:00
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:46 |
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Emissary666 posted:Important question: have you gone through the movie and checked to ensure that the headcams are only getting supernatural stuff and the handhelds aren't? Based on your previous analyses, I am inclined to believe that you are not the type to make objectively false statements to fit your interpretation, but far too often I have encountered people who do just that. There is no conspiracy against you. I saw the film in theaters, and paid close attention. If someone would like to go shot-by-shot to confirm what I've written, then by all means. If I've somehow missed one or two counterexamples, then what I've written still holds for the vast majority of shots in the film. And, as it stands, neither you nor I can think of a single such counterexample. On the other side, we have the masses of textual evidence that support what I've written: like the scene where the medical professional examines a 'magical' wound and finds nothing unusual. Or the entire ending scene where the witch explicitly does not appear in the viewfinder of the handheld camera. Objective versus subjective.
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Jan 19, 2017 06:27
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