As I sometimes do, I returned from my place in the West Virginia mountains the other weekend via a winding back road out of Sharpsburg that eventually passes through this quiet little village now famous as the setting for the film “The Blair Witch Project,” described by some critics as the scariest movie ever made.
Driving through the town, which from the heights to the west appears laid out in the pattern of a cross, I had the most disturbing vision.
It was only my imagination, of course, but it was truly scary — indeed, one of the most gruesome and disgusting scenes a mere mortal could contemplate.
Pausing there at the town cemetery, just north of the intersection of Burkittsville and Garland Roads, I found myself imagining not witches, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, fiends or zombies, but something close.
I had this vision of Hollywood moguls, sitting around a hot tub on an oceanfront teakwood Malibu deck, gnashing their teeth in despondent frenzy because none of them had thought up “The Blair Witch Project.”
Scarier still, in this imagining, they were trying to come up with their own rip-off version of the film so that they, too, could be considered geniuses, making big bucks on the smallest imaginable investment.
After all, “Blair Witch” cost all of $60,000 to make, about what Barbra Streisand’s ex-hairdresser boyfriend turned producer and studio boss probably spent in a year on pomade.
Yet in less than two weeks “Blair” grossed more than $5 million, and that was in a limited, 50-some theater run. Now that it’s in theaters everywhere, the take could equal that of, say — speaking of horror movies — a Julia Roberts-Richard Gere film.
So I’ve no doubt — as I was imagining in my disturbing vision — that in short time we will see coming soon to a theater near us “The Beware the Witch Project,” “The Blair Witch Files,” perhaps even “Austin Powers III: The Witch Who Blaired Me.”
In typical Hollywood copycat fashion, the rip-off producers will seize upon what they will see as the “Blair Witch” formula — and so will set their pix in a historic little town like Burkittsville, use lots of disorienting hand-held cameras and have lots of scenes of people running around the woods in the dark.
But being careful (greedy) businessmen and businesswomen, they will also employ other formulas they consider time-tested and bankable, and so we will see at least two teen stars from prime-time TV sitcoms, a haunted house that resembles that adjoining the Bates Motel as closely as possible, human eyes that glow like flashlights, lots of Hollywood red syrup and gore gel, masked figures running around with long daggers, panting sounds, a thumping soundtrack and a dozen fireball explosions.
And it will all be about as thrilling as watching Cindy Crawford try to act.
Aside from the universal truth that creativity and business have absolutely nothing in common, what these producers will overlook is that the scariness of “Blair Witch” has not to do with teenage actors or horror-movie schtick.
It has absolutely everything to do with authenticity and believability and, more to the point, what it leaves to the imagination, which, in terms of its scariness, is pretty much everything.
Thirty-one years ago, the nation’s moviegoers responded with equal thrill to a similarly cheap and scary cinematic phenomenon called “Night of the Living Dead,” which was snapped up almost immediately by the highbrow curators of the Museum of Modern Art as an artistic landmark.
And with good reason. Unlike the Hollywood horror crud of the time, it was highly original and creative, and authentic and believable. Instead of teen TV stars, the producers used real people from the Pittsburgh area (perhaps the realest people there are).
And, except for the perhaps-overwrought climax, they left most of the scariness to the imagination. Who was that strange man who appeared in the field near the young couple? Why did he keep coming after them?
Nothing happened to the couple there. They weren’t slashed or strangled. They drove away. But the scene ends with every movie viewer’s skin atingle.
No horror-movie maker, including the fellows who made “Night of the Living Dead,” has achieved the same effect with any film since.
Until “The Blair Witch Project.”
I should hasten to point out that Burkittsville is in actuality a lovely little village, where nothing particularly bloodcurdling has happened since the nearby Civil War Battle of Crampton’s Gap in 1862.
My wife has a friend who lives right in the very center of Burkittsville, and, aside from getting a ride from an odd man with an odd dog from the Brunswick station one evening, nothing untoward has ever happened to her.
The only things that go bump in the night here are the cars that pass over the speed bumps that the town has for some reason put on Garland Road, but you can see those from a long way off.
During the day.
I never come here at night.
