In 1999, I spent almost an entire summer working a water gun game on the boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ, USA, so maybe this should be called “my greatest movie theater experience”. I first heard about Wildwood in primary school when one of my classroom pals went to America on holiday and came back wearing a hideous khaki wind sheeter type thing, upon it, the name of his vacay destination and tales of a huge toy shop as he drew me an “R” the wrong way round. 12 years later, my friends and I booked a 2 week return flight to New York and when we got there we each phoned the airline and extended it to 3 months, the maximum time you were allowed to spend on holiday in the states. There was no need for a visa. When I say working, it was a fairly leisurely occupation. I manned the game during the day shift and tried to get customers to stop walking past me in the 40 degree heat with 100% humidity and play the game. Business wise, the day was notoriously slow so I mostly just listened to albums I’d taped and looked longingly at people heading down the beach towards the lapping waves of the Atlantic Ocean or watch the tramcar taxi vacationers on loop from beyond the Convention Centre at one end to past Gateway 26 at the other. Wildwood was once a thriving summer getaway where Chubby Checker first did The Twist and Bill Haley’s Comets debuted Rock Around The Clock. It was the home of the Doo-Wop motels in the 50’s and 60’s and now I was listening to Lauryn Hill singing about that era. The boardwalk still came alive at night when thousands of people of all ages enjoyed food outlets selling cheese steaks, dollar pizza slices, funnel cake and ice cream. The stores sold t-shirts and henna tattoos while the neon lights of the games and amusements, in unison with the craic of the carny’s, enticed folks to try and win prizes. While all this was going, I was back in the house watching tv and waiting for my mates to finish work so we could go out. Among the many, many commercials across every television show were adverts for movies that were out. Austin Powers 2, Wild Wild West, Deep Blue Sea, Mystery Men and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace were all standard summer blockbusters and of no interest to me. The Blair Witch Project on the other hand was very intriguing. The brief synopsis was part of the marketing:
“In October 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary... A year later their footage was found.”.
The film had opened to much fanfare at the end of July. I asked my friends if they would go to see it with me but I was met by the usual derision that “it’s not real” or “it’s not a true story”. I didn’t know or care whether it was true or not. In my mind, the tagline was just about getting the audience up to speed with where the movie would begin. The trailer had worked its magic on me and I wanted to see the full thing. One night, I took a break from going out drinking to go to the flicks and see what all the fuss was about.
The Strand Movie Theater was further on down from where I worked. It had been there from the 1940’s when it was Hunts Pier, owned by William Hunt, the man responsible for turning the boardwalk into an amusement park complete with a ferris wheel, rollercoasters and dark rides. One of these dark rides was called The Witches Forest. It was a humid Saturday night in August and the seafront was still hiving with people as I bought a ticket for the late show from the box office. I went into the single floor theater and felt like I was going into a ghost train. The corridors were dark and the air conditioning was refreshing but eerie. I got inside and could have sat anywhere as there was nobody else there but I took a seat near the back out of habit. As the movie began, I was immediately sucked into the world of the three documentary makers as they prepared to head off into the woods in search of the eponymous Blair Witch. First stop was a meeting with an extraordinary looking local woman who reminded me of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard Of Oz. In the theater, I suddenly noticed that not only was I alone but also how run down the place was - the seats were tatty, the air conditioning was now too cold and the walls were exposed pipes that creaked whenever the real tension began in the woods. In 2011, I attended a two day class with Elliott Grove from Raindance on how to make a low budget feature. How The Blair Witch Project was made and marketed accounted for a large portion of the course. This was, after all, the film that made a thousand times what it cost: 250k budget, 250m box office, yet I saw it in an empty cinema. It premiered at Sundance earlier in 1999 when movie goers were queued around the block to see Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myricks hyped up, found footage, horror. Apparently, the audience were told the film would start an hour earlier than it did to create the buzz. This was the first movie to be properly marketed using the internet. I had only just recently created a hotmail account and while I was online nearly everyday, paying for an hours internet surfing so I could check my emails and see if Liverpool signed anyone in the summer transfer window, I wasn’t yet aware of online forums and the ones dedicated to discussing The Blair Witch Project. The film even had its own website with missing posters of the 3 students. As the movie continued and the scares increased, I didn’t care if this was real or not. It was terrifying. The little carns of stones left outside the tents each morning reminded me of the Ballykeel Dolmen I’d grown up near, supposedly built by Druids. Now, here they were in a major motion picture scaring the bejaysus out of me and these students. Obviously, I knew there wasn’t going to be a good ending to the film but I was there to find out if the found footage showed what happened to them. I can still remember vividly the end of movie and the petrifying feeling I had in the final moments. After it was over, I rushed back out onto the boardwalk, stunned. It was after midnight and deathly quiet. Only the sound of the waves in the distance reassured me that the world hadn’t ended while I was inside. I went to find a pay phone to call home and then I went to look for my friends to tell them what they’d missed.
The Blair Witch Project still had not been released in Ireland and the UK when I got home a month or so later. I watched the Beastie Boys documentary recently and they mentioned how it seemed like the British tabloids built them up as these American bad boys of rap and then created a witch hunt. The red tops panned The Blair Witch Project for not being real and us Brits wouldn’t fall for this like the stupid Americans had. There was a big deal made of the fact that the jumpy camera work gave the audience motion sickness which detracted further from the spectacle. This was a rollercoaster of a film not a theme park ride like the Great N’Oreaster on the boardwalk. On the back of all this negative publicity, other friends who hadn’t travelled to New Jersey that summer, went to see it and were totally underwhelmed. Nevertheless, everyone wanted to see it and paid money to do so but I thought and still think it is worthy of more than just something that people had to see. It’s a brilliantly made, fantastically scary film that leaves you cold at the end. Later, I would learn that the actors were sent off into the woods alone with the cameras and they shot the footage we see. They were left messages, directions and instructions for where to go and what to do. They used GPS, a tool I didn’t hear about until years later when I borrowed a Garmin watch to monitor my marathon training. They left their footage at designated spots and the Directors collected these each day and giddily watched the rushes. There were Blair Witch sequels and prequels but I haven’t see any of them. This was a one off and deserves to be remembered as such. Elliott Grove was left wondering if there would ever be anything like it again and then came the Paranormal Activity series which repeated the feat and then some. The Blair Witch Project was part of the beginning of the tidal wave of reality tv that makes up a lot of what we now watch. It showed anyone who wanted to make films that they could do it themselves without huge amounts of money, the opportunities increased further with the advent of digital video and editing software like Final Cut Pro.
The Strand Theater closed in 2012 and is now just another store on the boardwalk selling funnel cake and cotton candy. 21 years on, Toys R Us are no more and I’m guessing it has been virtually impossible to work a summer in America without a visa since Trump got in, even though it was just seasonal work like fruit picking that only working holidaymakers would want to do. Believe me, one of the stuffed toy prizes I was pushing could have done a better job so if any Americans had've wanted it, I would have been looking for something else. I’ve watched The Blair Witch Project again many times and it’s still every bit as frightening but nothing comes close to when I viewed it for the first time, alone, in a cold, creepy, empty cinema in the wild, wild woods.
pictures from www.cinematreasures.org
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