20 October: The Bay

 

Today for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween, we’re talking the much-maligned genre of the “Found Footage” film. Though there were earlier examples of the genre - namely Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust - when you mention found footage most people tend to think of The Blair Witch Project. These films are usually chock full of first-person perspective, official news footage, surveillance camera footage, and/or pre-existing footage of some sort, all of which are presented in a faux-documentary style. Oh, and shaky-cam. Lots and lots of shaky-cam.

(I am fighting the urge to go off on a tangent about my hatred of shaky-cam. It works well if you are showing someone being chased through the woods, but not so well if you are showing someone crossing the room to get a drink of water. Buy a tripod and leave the darn camera alone, folks.)

Anywho...where were we?

Oh, yeah...found footage movies.

Let’s talk Barry “Diner” Levinson’s 2012 f-f, eco-horror picture, The Bay. And let’s do it quickly, because it creeps me the heck out!

The bay in The Bay is Chesapeake Bay, a 64,000-square-mile watershed that covers parts of six states along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. It’s a beautiful area of the country, but thanks to the chicken industry, it’s become one of the yuckiest and most dangerous. Due to the use of steroids to make the chickens bigger (bigger = more money, natch) and the dumping of the chickens’ droppings into the bay, the water of the Chesapeake around the town of Claridge, MD, has become toxic.

But the toxicity of the water is only one of the problems facing the good people of Claridge. It seems the chicken-poop infected water has affected a tongue-eating louse, Cymothoa exigua, in the bay. These isopods are a normal part of the environment, but thanks to the toxins in the water, their life-cycle has sped up. They are no longer willing to settle for feeding on fish...they want bigger, two-legged game now.

Not only is The Bay a great found footage horror movie, it is also another variant of one of my favorite movie genre: the “We aren’t closing the beaches!” picture. Yep, it seems Claridge’s mayor, John Stockman (Frank Deal), took a page from Amity Island’s Mayor Vaughn’s playbook. He doesn’t want anything to get in the way of tourist dollars, even if that means that the streets of his town fill with corpses.

Who’da thunk that Barry Levinson would be able to bring the yucky, horror goods the way he does here in The Bay? Using pre-existing material that he’d shot for an actual documentary on the problems facing Chesapeake Bay, Levinson constructs are really creepy-crawlie film that’ll have you brushing imagined (or are they?!) isopods from your arms, neck, and legs.

8 October: The Blair Witch Project

It’s 8 October. While I sit at my desk pondering today’s challenge for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween -- “Slow Burn” if you’re scoring at home -- I have the windows open and can happily say that it officially feels like fall here in SoCal. The air is slightly cooler, the leaves are turning colors, and the stick figures are hanging from the bare branches of trees like some kind of eerie fruit. Well, maybe that last one is only happening in the woods surrounding Burkittsville, MD, the site of today’s movie: The Blair Witch Project.

Released in 1999, The Blair Witch Project was, at the time, a movie like no other. Made for a measly $60,000, it was a purported found-footage documentary filled with jerky camera work, a mixture of 16mm film and video, and really bad hiking decisions made by three young, independent filmmakers. (I do not encourage would-be visitors to the woods to kick their map into a creek.)

Was it really a documentary, though? Certainly the film’s website and an hour-long special aired on the SciFi Channel, Curse of the Blair Witch, made it out to be so. It was hard to separate the fact from the fiction, because the fiction -- official looking police reports, newsreel-style footage, interviews with family and friends of the missing filmmakers -- was so convincingly presented as fact. By the time viewers sat in their seats at their local multiplex, their heads had been so turned around by the film’s marketing campaign that they were ready to believe anything.

In 1999, I was one of those people. While I didn’t visit the website or see the SciFi Channel faux-doc, The Blair Witch Project worked on me like no movie had done so before (or since, if I’m being honest). I knew what I was seeing was only a movie, but everything -- the camerawork, the performances, the “texture” of the footage, the slow build-up of little events over the length of the film culminating with that final scene in the basement -- felt so darn real. I was shaking when I walked out of the theater. That night, I did not sleep a wink. At all. I lay in bed all night thinking of the movie, the characters, and...the witch.

I’ve never been so terrified in all my life.

I can’t think of higher praise for a movie.