-Caveat Lector-
from: AMERICAN ATHEISTS
subject: AANEWS for July 18, 1999
A M E R I C A N A T H E I S T S
#612 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 7/18/99
http://www.atheists.org
ftp.atheists.org/pub/atheists/
http://www.americanatheist.org
---------------------------------------------
A Service of AMERICAN ATHEISTS
"Leading The Way For Atheist Civil Rights
And The Separation Of State and Church"
----------------------------------------------
In This Issue...
* Bewitching .. but is it fact or fiction?
* World Church of the Creator -- what do you think?
* Resources
* About this list...
WHICH WITCH IS WHICH? THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT...
"On October 21, 1994, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael
Williams hiked into the Black Hills Forest to shoot a documentary film
on a local legend called 'The Blair Witch,' and were never seen again.
One year later, their footage was found."
So reads the introduction to what promises to be one of the most
controversial films of the summer season, "The Blair Witch Project."
Already the subject an official web site -- and dozens more seem to be
appearing every day -- and a torrent of news articles, the film
managed to creep into last year's Sundance Film Festival where it
reportedly left audiences shaken and "ashen faced." Written and
produced by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez who spend a paltry
$23,000 on the 87-minute film, "The Blair Witch Project" was
immediately grabbed by a distributor for $1.2 million.
Since then, there seems to be no end in sight to the speculation and
questions raised about the film. "Is the scare of the summer real?"
asked a headline in Entertainment Weekly online. The reviews in USA
TODAY and elsewhere were obtuse, and we are informed that "Blair
itself pretends to be not a movie but a true account pieced together
from raw footage left behind after the threesome vanished..." Odeon
Films.Com suggests that this screen work is one "Brilliantly blurring
the lines between fact and fiction," that along with its "sheer
cinematic ingenuity, urgency and invention," The Blair Witch Project
"is the firsthand account of three student filmmakers who venture into
Maryland's remote Black Forest to discover the truth about the mythic
Blair Witch."
The Project web site, which has received over 11 million visits since
going on line, perpetuates this fiction -- or could it really be fact?
-- by including film clips, a historical timeline, photos, biographies
and other material. None of this serves to answer the skeptic's
question, though, "Is any of this real?" Nor did the Sci-Fi Channel
provide any definitive answers last Monday night, when it aired "Curse
of the Blair Witch," produced in conjunction with the film's
distributor and owner, Artisan Entertainment.
First, there is the story line, which begins with one Elly Kedward who
immigrated to America and settled in the town of Blair -- now the site
of the very real community of Burkittsville, Maryland. Both the
Project and Curse says that she is the basis of the Blair Witch,
having been accused of witchcraft and tied to a tree and left to die
during the deep of winter. The following year, children and other
accusers mysteriously disappear, thus setting in motion a cycle of
mysterious events and calamities that occur every fifty or sixty
years. Blair is abandoned, but later reestablished when the railroad
comes through the area. What follows is a cadence of mysterious
drowning, abducted children, and the psychopathic murders of seven
youngsters carried out by Rustin Parr. Police find the bodies
disemboweled, and Parr insists that he was compelled to carry out the
heinous crimes by "an old woman ghost" haunting the nearby woods. And
there is even a rare book, "The Blair Witch Cult," detailing the
exquisite horrors around Burkittsville, including Coffin Rock, where
in the 1880s the naked and eviscerated bodies of a search team looking
for missing children were discovered.
On October 21, 1994, the Blair Witch mystery cycle again hits a
periodic peak as the three students, intent on shooting their own
documentary about the legend, hike into the woods never to be seen
again. The following year, the footage is discovered in a strange
entombment; the containers of film seem have materialized inside of
the undisturbed soil of a mound surrounded by carefully arranged
rocks. The film reveals the gradual deterioration of the students as
they realize that they are hopelessly lost, and are taunted by
mysterious sounds during the night -- their trek still documented on a
High-8 handheld camera.
"We aren't trying to pull a hoax here," declared Daniel Myrick, who
admits that while the movie and website "look and feel real," he has
also "revealed the process of how we made the movie." That is not
readily apparent, though, even from the reviews which seem to avoid
stating whether The Blair Witch Project is entirely a fabrication, or
based on a kernel of factual events. Viewers will find this tension
between fiction and reality enticing, yet disturbing in a way. Myrick
and Sanchez have done for film what Orson Welles did for radio when he
and the Mercury Theater aired "War of the Worlds" six decades ago. A
critical ear, and certainly a familiarity with the H.G. Wells novel,
would have revealed the fictional quality of the broadcast. But
technology, and the inventiveness of The Blair Witch Project producers
has rendered this film more immune; even a hardened skeptic might
wonder, "Couldn't some of this at least be true?"
Sorting out any verisimilitude in Blair Witch is a daunting task,
beginning with the fact that the producers employed a compelling
technique, method filming. Myrick and Sanchez reportedly interviewed
over 2000 candidates for the task of playing the student trio. The
three were given a 30-page outline, and dispatched into the woods for
several days, charged with shooting the footage of black-and-white
film. This cinematic verite telegraphs viewers the eventual fate of
the students; it also carries us into the action itself, almost as
participants rather than static viewers.
By some accounts, Myrick and Sanchez covertly followed their student
cinematographers, leaving food at designated points, and ratcheting up
the level of tension at night. But is THIS true, or so much publicity
fluff? Questions plague us...
Burkittsville, Maryland does indeed exist, and is a venue for civil
war re-enactors commemorating the Battle of Antietam. That event
stimulated at least one folk legend that puts the area on the list of
authentic "spooky places" which are the delight of roadside Americana
junkies. Drive out Gapland Road and you come to Spook Hill, one of
dozens of "geographical anomalies" where, it is said, objects like
cars seem to roll uphill in defiance of gravity. Spook Hill is
similar to its namesake in Lake Wales, Florida, or other colorfully
named spots like Gravity Hill (Indiana), Anti-Gravity Hill (this one
down under in Australia), or Mystery Spot Road in Santa Cruz, CA.
"Spooky Houses" make similar claims, seducing tourists with their
delightful, colorful claims of haunting apparitions and disorienting
construction.
A combination of optical perspective and our human physiology is
likely the real explanation behind the claims made by roadside guides
and "spooky house" proprietors who embellish the tourist experience by
referring to "mysterious forces" or "gravitational anomalies." The
visual cues which we rely on -- walls, trees, stairs -- may be leaning
at an angle. Dark rooms or night can amplify the sense of
disorientation. Water or cars indeed may appear to be rolling uphill
in seeming defiance of physical laws.
The Burkittsville "Spook Hill" legend holds that it is haunted by
Confederate troops from the Civil War who were ambushed by federals as
they were pushing a cannon up the hill. Along with inspiring this
nugget of local folklore, the story has also been commemorated in a
short "Spooky Symphony" composed and performed by students from the
Smithsburg High School Orchestra.
But beyond this, the claims which surround "The Blair Witch Project"
rapidly vanish into a gossamer, flickering reality of neither fact nor
fiction. The book detailing this demonic history, "The Blair Witch
Cult," appears nowhere in the catalogue of the Library of Congress,
the British Museum, or other authoritative repositories, nor is it
listed in any standard bibliographic sources we examined. Like the
jerking black and white imagery of the movie, it appears as a device
to goad us into suspending our sense of disbelief -- a necessary
prerequisite in the craft of the horror genre. Myrick and Sanchez
take us one step further, though, than the typical fright flick or
creature feature; a sensible viewer knows that The Exorcist, Night of
the Living Dead or any other bone-chiller which defines this cinematic
sensibility is a work of fiction. (There was the claim, though, that
William Peter Blatty based his novel "The Exorcist" on a "true" case
of ritual exorcism). What renders "The Blair Witch Project" so
compelling is the imagery itself, though, which looks "so real" and
authentic. It lacks the polished edge of even a grade-B production
where a mediocre director can labor through repetitive takes until the
shot is just right. The footage is rough, unrehearsed, and
spontaneous; it provides us with the illusion of what we might have
seen had we, too, ventured into the woods with the three students.
"The Blair Witch Project" is the latest salute to postmodernism and
the further blurring of cognitive lines separating the popular sense
of reality from fantasy. It parallels the media slurry of "unsolved
mystery" programs which claim to objectively probe the depths of
pop-culture pseudoscience, from UFOs and Bigfoot sightings to claims
of ESP and ghosts. The fringe subject matter is offset by sheer
production values; the absurd content seems more real and credible
since these programs often incorporate the visual imagery of the
working news room and state-of-the-art computer graphics. A coifed
narrator may be talking about intergalactic alien rapists, but the
show -- sans subject matter -- could well be the evening news. In the
background, people are sitting at computer terminals, or walking
around with stacks of files. Is this Dan Rather's stage set?
"The Blair Witch Project" borrows the same strategy, but in a
different way. This all seems so real because it looks like a home
movie. The subtext informs us that this was not rehearsed (indeed, it
becomes a monument to the art of method film making since the actors
wandered in the woods for days, not quite sure of what was going on),
and thus must be "real." It reminds us of a recent pseudo-documentary
which purported to be the home video record of a family that happened
to film an alien encounter at dinner time. It also borrows on the
perplexing anxieties in "Alien Autopsy." It's so cheesy, so wonderful
a fake -- could it be the real thing?
No doubt, "The Blair Witch Project" may find a cult following not only
of those who admit that it is a new classic in the genre, but is
either real or based on a pervasive substratum of fact. It may turn
out to be the film equivalent of those "Spooky Houses" and hills where
people do believe that something strange and bizarre is going on, that
the water is indeed running uphill, but with a higher degree of
sophistication. We live in a credulous age, one in seeming conflict
between the contemplative imagery of Rodin's thinker, and the poster
hanging in Fox Mulder's office which declares, "I want to believe."
**
Note: The Sci-Fi Channel will again air "Curse of the Blair Witch"
this evening at 8:00 p.m. ET. Check local listings for details.
**
THE WORLD CHURCH OF THE CREATOR: IS IT AN ATHEIST GROUP?
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Taking the lead from a story last week in the Washington Post, several
news sources now describe the World Church of the Creator as an
"atheist group." The Church, headed by Matthew Hale, espouses a
racialist ideology and has been linked to several individuals involved
in violent hate crimes. American Atheists charged that the Post was
irresponsible in using the phrase "atheist group" to describe this
organization. Ellen Johnson, President of American Atheists, argues
that the atheist label is inappropriate, and that the WCC does not
explicitly labor for the advancement of atheism or the separation of
church and state.
Others aren't quite so sure.
Yesterday's AANEWS dispatch carried an the article, "Our Identity As
Atheist Organizations," by Cliff Walker, editor of Positive Atheist
magazine. Mr. Walker asked: "Are they (WCC) atheists? Only they know
for sure, and only they have the right to use this word to describe
themselves..."
What do you think? The American Atheist Magazine web site now has a
special comment area where you can read Cliff's article and other
related pieces about the World Church of the Creator and the use of
the "A-word." You can also post your thoughts for others to read.
Check it out -- we want to know what you think. Visit
http://www.americanatheist.org to comment on this important story.
**
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* If you are a current member of American Atheists, sign up for our
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