The horror movie has been around almost as long as the movie itself. One of the first horror films was The Golem, a German film shot before the first World War. The film was remade in 1920, and had a big influence on what became the Hollywood school of horror. The 1920s saw the creation of such European horror classics as Nosferatu (one of the first takes on Dracula) and the The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Hollywood too embraced the genre with gusto in silent movies like The Phantom of the Opera. The arrival of sound in the late 1920s and 1930s ushered in more classics. Bela Lugosi starred as Dracula, while director James Whale used all sorts of sound and light effects to create Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein.
Unstoppable monsters were the order of the day - the Mummy and the Werewolf became two serial movie stars! The 1940s saw the arrival of what are generally described as more atmospheric thrillers such as The Body Snatcher and I Walked with a Zombie. Then, during the 1950s, Cold War worries about nuclear bombs and missiles gave rise to all sorts of stories of aliens, mutants, robots and even killer insects. Horror comics also influenced films at this stage, giving rise to teen horror flicks with titles like I was a Teenage Werewolf. In the 1960s psychological horror took off, with the likes of Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Psycho spawned plenty of cheap imitations, and the slasher, or exploitation, film came to the fore. Into the 1980s, and gore continued to grow alongside the psychological terror.
The last two decades have seen several "serial" films, such as Nightmare on Elm Street and more recently Scream. These are generally aimed at teenage fans - they are often classed as ideal "date" movies - and Scream, in particular, is full of in-jokes that play on viewers' knowledge of the genre's conventions and cliches.
As well as having universal themes which terrify, horror films from each era reflect the concerns of the time. They are also heavily influenced by developments in technology and the sophistication of the audience. The more sussed the audience, the more clever the director has to be - and there have been some exceptionally brilliant horror film directors over the decades. But in recent years, many horror fans feel the genre had taken a bit of a turn for the worse, with the likes of Scream being a bit too much of a parody to enjoy.
Which is where the directors of The Blair Witch Project come in, apparently injecting a new lease of life into horror, and setting it on course for a new journey. Three actors, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, play three students making a documentary about a local witch story. The actors were trained in camera use by the directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Then, they claim, they left the actors more or less alone in the woods for eight days. Apart from leaving them notes on plot development and sneaking up on their tent at four in the morning to freak them out, the directors didn't have any contact with the actors, we're meant to believe. (That's if we don't believe that what we're seeing is actually "true" - see below).
The result, The Blair Witch Project, takes the idea of the true horror story to a new extreme. The actors really were exhausted and, maybe, frightened - and the film footage looks very much like your typical badly made home movie. It plays with the sort of "real TV" footage audiences have come to recognise as real life. There are no slick Hollywood special effects, nor exotic panoramas. In fact, it takes quite a novel approach to film-making: often the audience can't see much but pitch blackness on screen. The insistence on veracity has worked. People really believed, and believe, the film is a true story. There is no gore, in-jokes, not even any teen sex - all of which have become part and parcel of the horror package.
However, it is hard to know where you could go from here. Myrick and Sanchez are adamant they will not be making a part 2 (though a prequel is not out of the question). Besides, everyone knows the tricks now - how could anything using the same techniques be as effective?
