Its not quite Thursday but close enough.
The Blair Witch is a really really good witch. Her story totally goes against the typical scapegoat style of the pre-modern witch, even though much of her story is pre-modern itself.
If you are unfamiliar with the movie, its often credited as the trendsetter for the 'found footage' style, similar to the clip of Cloverfield we saw in class. What was also really cool about this movie was that the directors / producers slipped out a bunch of fake backstory and mythology surrounding the character onto the web prior to the release of the film. As a result of this, many people believed that the footage was real or at least based on a true story (which it is not in the slightest). People bought into it so much that the premise of the sequel was actually about people who went looking for the witch after seeing the first movie.
The planted backstory of the Blair Witch is the story of one Elly Kedward, who was banished from the village of Blair in 1785 after being accused of luring children to her home and taking some of their blood. She was presumed dead after being banished in the midst of a harsh winter. However, in the year following, her accusers and children of the township vanished. Hysteria causes abandonment of the potentially cursed town.
Some 50 years later, (remember, still a fake story) a new town is founded on the Blair site. During a festival, a young girl drowns in the town creek. Eleven witnesses testified to seeing a pale woman's hand reach from the creek and pull her in. Her body was not recovered. Come 1940, a crazy hermit ritualistically murders 7 children in the same area, claiming "an old woman ghost" instructed him to do so.
The found-footage picks up in 1994 with a group of students filming a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch for school. This part of the whole story is whats shown in the film. The TL;DW version is they are killed off one by one over the course of a few days. The characters never see the Witch or signs that it is in fact her doing the killing.
The fake backstory picks back up with the legal proceedings surrounding the student's dissappearance and discovery of their film in a duffel bag in the woods. Law enforcement chose to show only small parts of the film to the families and affirm their is nothing conclusive. The case is then closed, unsolved. The government classification on the films expires in 1997 and the families see all the footage. They contract a producer to piece together the events.
That summary got a bit wordier than I would have liked but I think its a great story and particularly interesting when considering some of the concepts we have looked over in class. The earliest 'reports' of the witch are very typical to the pre-modern archetype. She is satanic / evil / etc and a scapegoat for the harshness of life and a particular winter in her colony. After the turn of the century, her spirit (or whatever she is) strikes again and drowns a girl. Despite multiple witness reports of odd sightings, the mainstream does not fall into witch-hysteria and nobody is burned at the stake / hanged / banished.
Following the events of the film, despite very very clear evidence that the witch is real and malicious, law enforcement refuse to believe it unlike the law enforcement of 200 years prior. So as time and society move around the Witch, we see the shift in the archetype change from this Salem-esque scapegoat of all problems to the modern witches-cant-be-real-because-science school of thought.
Thanks for reading! If you haven't seen the movie, you definitely should. Make sure to do some digging online about the full backstory afterwards because that is part of the experience. People like to rag on the film but I think the whole thing is really a work of art that toes the line between fiction and reality, albeit with fake stories and information planted on the internet. It's like a 21st century War of the Worlds.
Grant
(Fake) Sources:
http://www.blairwitch.com/mythology.html
http://blairwitch.wikia.com/wiki/
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