Gary Larson once drew a panel for his cartoon The Far Side in which a kid huddled underneath his bedclothes with a snorkel-esque apparatus attached to his face; the apparatus had a tube that snaked out from under the covers and up to fresh air, and on the floor next to the kid’s bed lay a box that said “Monster Breathing Device” on its side. As a kid, I often prayed that such an invention would hit the market. My family lived in an old house that did a lot of “settling” (not that I believed that parental explanation for a minute, mind you), and I suffered from an unfortunate addiction to ghost stories as well, so I spent a lot of time suffocating in a rigid ball under my blankets and waiting for various imagined ghosts and beasties to get bored and take their leave of my room. One evening, after I’d whiled away a lazy day with a book called Hair-Raising Tales Of The Supernatural that I now totally regretted buying at a garage sale for fifty cents, I lay in my bed stiffened with terror and not breathing as a determined creature scratched at my closet door from the inside. One of my ghost-story books had said that presences from the beyond the grave could not speak until spoken to, so I whispered boldly in the direction of the closet, “Who goes there?” No answer, save more of the ghastly scratching, which seemed to have become more threatening in tone. I tried again: “What do you want?” Still the spirit did not respond, except to claw at the closet door with ever-increasing ferocity. I had no choice – I would have to open the closet door and confront The Evil Scratcher. I tiptoed over to my desk and fashioned a makeshift cross out of two Garfield pencils; the means of demon banishment in my left hand, I grabbed a Snoopy lamp with my right hand, in case the specter took a shape solid enough to get bashed over the head with something. I took a deep breath to try to slow the wild pounding of my heart, then yanked the closet door open with my right foot. Sure enough, I unmasked The Evil Scratcher: the family cat, who had wandered into the closet for a nap and gotten closed in by mistake at bedtime. Ding stared at me and my cartoon-character weaponry, shrugged, and hopped up on the bed as I swooned against the closet door with relief. I always preferred to sleep with the cat anyway, since I’d also learned from various wives’ tales that I could spot unseen phantoms by looking between an animal’s ears, and also, this cat had once caught and killed a bat, so I hoped that the average incubus would think twice about messing with me if I had Ding curled up right there.

Incidents like this occurred almost weekly, and despite the fact that I never once saw a phantasm of any kind or any convincing evidence of poltergeist activity, every creak of the steps or scrape of a pine branch against my bedroom window had me utterly convinced that Something Had Come For Me. Why the dead would come for me in the first place, or what they would actually do to me once they wended their skeletal way into my room, I hadn’t worked out, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t identify the source of the creak. I couldn’t say for sure that a vaporous entity hadn’t perched itself on my window ledge. I didn’t know what had made the sounds, and the very not-knowing became the fear. Usually, I wished that The Thing, whatever shape it took, would just make itself manifest already; once it had done so, I could either faint dead away from fright or have a pleasant conversation with it, but not knowing just made me afraid. (My steady diet of Stephen King books, Victorian gothic horror compendia, and Sunday-night viewings of In Search Of didn’t help either. Summers, when I had nothing else to do all day, I wound up averaging about three hours of sleep a night and waking up in the blaze of artificial light that had protected me from marauding ghouls.)

The best, scariest horror films capitalize on the innate fear of the unknown that most of us carry with us, and The Blair Witch Project does it better than any film I’ve ever seen. Of course, a lot of people don’t believe in ghosts or life after death or witchcraft, but I don’t think you have to believe in these things for this movie to leave you breathless with fear. I have an over-active imagination – I always have – and I do believe in ghosts, but at the same time, I tend to bring a healthy dose of skepticism to ghost stories and horror flicks myself, probably because I’ve seen dozens of slasher movies and read literally hundreds of ghost stories (both fictional and “genuine”). As a result, I won’t believe, or get scared by, just anything; I have high standards. I went into The Blair Witch Project knowing the whole story: the ending; the tricks used by the filmmakers to elicit realistic fear from the actors; the “mythology” behind the Blair Witch legend. I still looked over my shoulder the whole way home, and you don’t get much farther from the woods than midtown Manhattan. It still worked. How could it still work? (NB: If you haven’t seen the film yet and don’t want me to ruin the ending for you, you should scroll down a page or two now.)

It worked for a couple of reasons. For starters, it took a while to get to the payoff. The bulk of the film chronicles the infighting in the group, the quarreling over getting lost and running out of food and not returning the rented film equipment on time. Nothing menacing happens for what seems like ages, although the audience expects something to happen, because from the first frame, we know the outcome – and the first spooky things that do show up do so in daylight, which makes them seem not so much spooky as merely weird. Up until the three kids find the stick-figure collection in the grove, I spent more time laughing than I did cringing in anticipation.

Then, sort of suddenly, it started to get scary. The scary parts came and went, but whenever the sun began to fall, the audience shared the characters’ dread. The ethereal laughter of babies, almost inaudible at times over the voices of the filmmakers, sent ice up my spine, as did the headlong blind dash out of the tent in the middle of the night. Could we see the babies? No. Did they see anything in the woods as they ran? Yes, Heather does, but she doesn’t know what, and the audience sees nothing at all. (Apparently, a crew member clad in white ran right by the cast and scared the hell out of Heather, an unscripted moment that I’d known to look out for, but which still startled me.) But the agonizingly long stretches of audio with no accompanying visuals – with the DAT on, the audience could hear bags unzipping and the muttered curses of the terrified students, but couldn’t see anything – made the moments when the camera lights finally went up even more nerve-wracking. Of course, when the lights did go up, anything visible had fled. I froze every time a panicked Heather yawed the camera back and forth across the trees, but I never saw anything in the woods. I couldn’t see the viscera in the bundle of twigs very clearly either, so naturally I assumed the worst – intestines, testicles, a nose (according the film’s creators, the bundle contained Josh’s teeth). Again, though, the precise contents of the bundle didn’t matter. Josh had vanished. Whatever he had run across – or whatever had abducted him – while the other two slept had removed parts of Josh’s body and wrapped them up in bloody pieces of his shirt. Heather and Mike heard him calling to them, screaming himself hoarse, and they couldn’t find him, but whatever had gotten Josh had found them with no problem. But they couldn’t identify it, couldn’t see it, and couldn’t make their way out of the forest and away from it.

What we can’t see makes the movie scary. During her apology, Heather paused, and her eyes, which took up most of the screen, flicked to one side and widened. The shot seemed to last forever, because we couldn’t see what she was looking at, and she couldn’t see anything either. The last five minutes of footage – a series of jump cuts during which I didn’t breathe once – sent Heather and Mike staggering through an abandoned house, following Josh’s voice. The things I could see, the tiny handprints and the empty eye-sockets of the broken-out windows, made me apprehensive. The things I couldn’t see at all, because they could barely hold their cameras steady as they dashed up and down the stairs pell-mell, made the little hairs on my arms stand up. I didn’t know what would greet them around the next corner, and neither did they. Then we found out. The final shot, curiously stable, still lingers with me.

The Blair Witch Project doesn’t show any gore. We never saw the Witch, and we never saw Josh again, and we didn’t see Mike or Heather get killed. We didn’t find out, in the end, exactly what became of them. I can’t think of anything more frightening than not seeing, and not knowing the nature of, but sensing a presence in this way. I lived in a haunted apartment briefly myself, and I never saw a conventional ghost or specter, but I knew without a doubt that my roommate and I did not live there alone. At first, I shrugged off the cold patches, and the sensation of someone watching me in the kitchen, and even the glass of water that flew across the bedroom and landed on my chest without spilling. I even shrugged off the slamming of doors at first, blaming it on wind or uneven doorjambs. Then, annoyed by the constant din, I propped a door open with my copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia. For those of you not familiar with this tome, it has about three thousand pages and weighs at least twelve pounds. I stood there as it slid out into the hallway, and I stood there as the door slammed shut. And opened again. And slammed shut. And opened again. And slammed shut. I didn’t see a thing – not a hand, not a mist, nothing except a book I could barely lift crawling across the floor – and that made it ten times creepier.

Ambiguity, mystery, invisibility all make horror films much more horrifying than vast quantities of fake blood. Compare any given scene from Halloween or Friday The 13th, in which the various gory demises of the characters might startle us but which don’t really make us afraid in any real or lasting way, with one of the opening scenes from The Changeling. The Changeling stars George C. Scott as a music professor who has recently lost his wife and daughter in a freak accident and comes to live in an old mansion maintained by the local historical society. The house keeps to itself for a while, and then one day, Scott’s character finds a stuck key on the house piano while trying to compose a piece. He leaves the room to mention the problem to the mansion’s caretaker, and the camera dollies veeeerrrry slowly around from the door Scott has just exited to the piano and zooms in on the stubborn key. After an eternity, in tight close-up, an invisible finger presses the key, and it sounds a clear note. The eerieness escalates from there as Scott delves into the mansion’s past and discovers the truth about the child spirit that haunts the place, but without much bloodshed (in one scene a car turns over) and without the customary heavy-handed scoring that tells us when to hide our faces in our hands. The first time we rented the movie, the entire Bunting family had to sleep with the lights on (well, except for my father, who called it “not bad of that genre” and proceeded to sleep like an irritatingly rational log while the rest of us quaked in our beds), and not because we’d seen throats slit, either. We lived in an old house too. Children had grown up in our house too, children we knew nothing about. The things we can’t see and don’t understand, but believe possible anyway, will always frighten us the most.

Get creeped out in the comfort of your own home.

More creepiness.

Share!