Good morning 🐣

Back from my summer break and October already rears its ugly head, ushering in an entire month of the ghastly and the macabre here at Cinescape HQ, but you know… danceable.

As is tradition, we’ll kick things off with a music video: Sabrina Carpenter’s pop hit “Taste,” in which Carpenter and scream queen Jenna Ortega brutally murder each other again and again. It’s the perfect soundtrack to Cinescape in October.

A brief intermission 🍿

The Crossing Over Express is an 11-minute short film, more heartfelt than scary, about a man who visits “a mysterious ‘doctor’ who can supposedly raise the dead, but only for two minutes.” Writer-directors Luke Barnett and Tanner Thomason developed the story after Barnett, whose mother passed when he was only 17, received a video and a “Happy Birthday” text from an unknown number.

“I clicked it, and my heart stopped. It was my mom,” Barnett recalls, reflecting on the moment. In the video, she was “telling me how proud she was of me and how she wondered what I’d become.” The director later found out the clip was from a school event in 1999, sent by a friend’s father. After this unexpected experience, Barnett couldn’t shake the thought of what he would say if he had the chance for one final conversation with his mother. This led to a discussion with his writing partner, Thomason, and together they crafted the short film as a response to that lingering question.

Now watch this 👀

All month we’ll be taking a Swiftian tour (of the Taylor variety, not Jonathan) through four distinct eras of horror and the legacies they’ve left behind.

With that brief introduction kicking off The Blair Witch Project, a true legacy of horror was born.

Released 25 years ago, this indie mega-hit (initial budget: $35,000; global box office: $249 MILLION) took the world by storm by recognizing the Internet for what it was long before most. It not only popularized the found-footage genre (e.g., Paranormal Activity), but foretold our current era of trusting nothing and no one.

Writer-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez laid the groundwork by creating a Web site collecting fictional newspaper articles and police reports, airing an 8-minute documentary about the “cold case” on TV, and hiding their actors from film festivals and other promotional work (they were even listed as “missing, presumed dead” on IMDb). By the time Blair Witch arrived in theaters, audience members were primed to believe every single word of it.

At IndieWire, Dalvin Aboagye and Conor Rooney spoke with several directors on the film’s impact, including Robert Eggers (The Witch), Zach Cregger (Barbarian), Nia DaCosta (2021 version of Candyman), Kyle Edward Ball (Skinamarink), and Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity), among others.

Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw The TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair):

Heather [Donahue]’s performance in that movie is incredible. It’s pretty heart-wrenching stuff. It’s emotionally visceral in a way that I think few horror movies are. Pure emotional horror.

[…] And the ending is so restrained, and so sparse that really does presage the cursed image tradition of the internet and the creepypasta realm and what can now be classified as sort of analog horror like “Skinamarink.”

Jeff Wadlow (Imaginary):

I can vividly recall talking to friends about whether or not it was real, which is just crazy if you think about it in hindsight. I mean, we’re talking about college educated, 20-somethings debating whether or not “The Blair Witch Project” was a real documentary. It’s just absurd in hindsight, but at the time it was a legitimate question. And I just thought it was really cool and seemed very powerful. And honestly, without “Blair Witch,” there is no “Paranormal Activity.” And without “Paranormal Activity,” there is no Blumhouse. It directly affected me as a filmmaker because I’ve made three movies for Jason [Blum] now, and I love playing in that space. And in that sense, we owe it all to “Blair Witch.”

When I saw it, I was fascinated. I mean, again, it was the first time I’d seen a found footage movie and that expression didn’t exist. I had obviously seen other mock documentaries like “Spinal Tap,” so I was aware of the kind of mockumentary subgenre, but I’d never seen it done to such a terrifying effect where the camera becomes a character in the piece. It’s evocative of “Rear Window” almost in that sense, where the camera is becoming you, the audience, and in a very literal way. From a filmmaking standpoint, I was really into it and taken with the notion.

Maya Salam, for the New York Times, in a piece titled “Before Reality Became Debatable, There Was ‘The Blair Witch Project’”:

Myrick and Sanchez were committed to injecting realism back into the genre, intentionally blurring the line between fact and fiction to move it away from the satire that had come to define ’90s horror (exemplified by “Scream”). For this feature, their first, the duo also wanted to create the feeling of a living nightmare. As fans of the television show “In Search Of …,” which explored folk mysteries like U.F.O.s and Bigfoot, they aimed to tap into a childhood state of mind, when the fear of the unknown overlaps with an openness to believe in the seemingly unbelievable.

On characters constantly filming, even when their lives are in active danger:

Experiencing life through a lens was once such a bizarre prospect that when conceiving the idea for the film, Myrick and Sanchez obsessed over the plausibility of its central storytelling mode: Why would Heather keep filming despite being lost and hunted in the woods? Today, that question wouldn’t even need answering. Our feeds are filled with first-person footage of war, natural disasters, concerts, strolls down city streets and every human experience in between.

On misinformation and conspiracy theories:

At its release, it was unusual for audiences to perform the mental gymnastics required to get through the film — to engage the parts of the brain that decipher whether something is “real” or not.

Twenty-five years later, it has become our default mode, leaving us to perpetually doubt our senses and, in turn, wonder en masse what is real or what is outright deception; what is staged, scripted or performed; what’s made by humans and what’s been generated by A.I.

[…] In 1999, the gray area between truth and fiction, where the person seated to your left believed the opposite of the person seated to your right, was contained safely with the movie’s run time. And as we all left the theater, we collectively realized it was all a ride.

Now, in a way, that ride never ends. And perhaps most unnerving is the knowledge that each one of us is living in an increasingly unique version of the world, making reality less of a communal experience than ever.

Now everyone is the Blair Witch.

Until next time! 👻