Ever since The Blair Witch Project (1999), I have been fascinated by the so called
“found footage” style horror films. In the present essay I would like to examine in detail a similar example of “found footage” films, a recent series called The River (2012), created by Oren Peli and Michael R. Perry. As an introduction to this topic, I believe it is essential to position The River within cinematic history to tease out the insights it gives into the transformation of the “found footage” thriller/horror genre.
Once this is done, I will establish a link between these generic assumptions and the series by using the vocabulary of postcolonial studies and the so called “spatial turn”
in cultural studies elaborating on the poetics of space and place.
The Blair Witch Project and Beyond: A Possible Genealogy of the Genre
If we take The Blair Witch Project as a founding moment in our genealogy, it becomes clear that the film—as well as the genre itself—weaves together different cinematic traditions into a unique whole. The film portrays how a group of students set out to the Maryland woods to create a documentary about the local witchcraft legends, to disappear a few days later; the only thing they leave behind is their footage of the project. The movie thus relies heavily on the generic devices of horror films, while imitating the style of the documentary tradition, so it is best to approach it with these two different generic and ideological frameworks in mind.
In The Philosophy of Horror Noël Carroll argues that horror is “a genre that crosses numerous artforms and media” (Carroll 12), and all the “narratives and/or images” belonging to this category are “predicated on raising the affect of horror in audiences” (Carroll 15). Drawing upon a set of thematic elements and representational conventions, the horror genre in the second half of the 20th century has “flourished as a major source of mass aesthetic stimulation” (Carroll 1), creating a long tradition of films that The Blair Witch Project draws its inspiration from. Despite the fact that horror movies are inevitably fictive, the media campaign of The Blair Witch Project tried to position it as a documentary exposing “the raw footage of three filmmakers who tragically disappeared” (Nichols xii). In this way, the movie blended the horror genre with the stylistic elements of the documentary tradition, a genre connected to objectivity, truth, realism and verisimilitude. As Bill Nichols claims, documentaries use “a style that seems to provide unproblematic access to the world; it takes form as This conference paper was written as part of the TÁMOP-4.2.2/B-10/1-2010-0008 project in the framework of the New Hungarian Development Plan. The realization of this project is supported by the European Union, co-financed by the European Social Fund.
physical, psychological, and emotional realism through techniques of evidentiary or continuity editing, character development, and narrative structure” (126). Such an
“unproblematic” or unmediated access to the world provided by the documentary becomes dubious when a basically fictitious work of art mimics essentially non-fictive forms. Blending the horror genre with the documentary thus inevitably results in a “mock” or a “fake” documentary, because in order to elicit the desired response from audiences—in this case, the affect of horror—, “they control some aspects of the profilmic with scripting, performance, direction of actors, manipulation of mise-en-scène, and the like” (Juhasz and Lerner 8), subverting the ideological underpinnings of the documentary genre. Still, Jamie Sexton’s categorization of The Blair Witch Project as an “independent realist American horror” shows a close affiliation with these documentarist ideologies:
Within independent cinema, realism tends to be connected with particular production techniques, such as the use of low-budget cameras, which produce grainy, less glossy images and which can therefore convey a certain sense of “authenticity.” This needs to be accompanied, however, either by a particularly low key, observational style (in which self-conscious, authorial intrusions are kept to a minimum) or by techniques that mimic documentary codes (probably the best known being the use of the handheld camera), which are sometimes incorporated into the fiction, as when the images are produced by a fictional character. In addition, within horror, the use of more realistic—as opposed to supernatural—
content can also be an important component contributing to an overall
impression of realism. (Sexton 78)
If we apply these general observations to The Blair Witch Project, one feature seems to make it impossible to easily categorize the movie into Sexton’s category: self-reflexivity (the movie is, after all, about the making of a movie). While Sexton argues that such moments need to be kept to a minimum, one of the main elements of Charles Derry’s praise for the film is its self-reflexivity and experimental nature (Derry 228–229). Therefore, one more generic tradition needs to be taken into consideration when we are pursuing the unique aesthetic effect provoked by this film:
that of experimental cinema and the “found footage” film.
As Michael Zryd argues, “The found footage film is a specific subgenre of experimental (or avant-garde) cinema that integrates previously shot film material into new productions.” (Zryd 41) This means that these independent movies, like Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99 (1992), recycle pictures and movie fragments taken from other sources as objet trouvés either to subvert the original mainstream artwork they came from (Wees 4), or to self-reflexively tease out their hidden meanings (Zryd 41), and in such a way providing an alternative discourse to counter commercial cinema made for mass audiences (Wees 5). I believe that The Blair Witch Project can be regarded as an heir to this avant-garde tradition as well, though with certain restrictions. On the one hand, it belongs to this tradition based on the fact that it was
an independent movie made from a relatively low budget (Derry 230). With its rough look and seemingly amateurish camera handling, it took the horror genre back to its roots, only hinting at the demonic forces terrorizing the protagonists (Derry 228;
Prendergast and Prendergast 148), so it proved to be an intriguing counterpoint to Hollywood slashers and teen horrors of the late 1990s period (like the Scream or the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise), when the genre was already showing signs of depletion. With such a low budget it could not compete with the marketing campaigns of blockbusters, so it fully exploited the possibilities offered by other media—mainly the internet—to supplement the viewing experience (Daly 86;
Prendergast and Prendergast 148). The movie created a fictive documentary of its own by playing upon the uncanny constellations of representation and reality that proved to be such a haunting experience for many viewers (Egginton 208–209). In fact it was one of the first films to use the internet in such a comprehensive way and it became an example to follow for the marketing campaigns of today’s films (Telotte 32). On the other hand, the film clearly differs from the avant-garde tradition in that it does not recycle footage taken from other films and it does not (directly, at least) aim at the subversion of the whole genre it belongs to: after all, genre movies usually reinforce received ideologies by compulsively repeating a certain set of characteristics and themes (Banash 10), and The Blair Witch Project is no exception.
Nowadays this motif of the found footage is in the process of being appropriated by mainstream Hollywood horror movies and series as well. There is a whole tradition of films now which all employ the stylistic device of the mock documentary and their fictitious frames include the motif of footage found by either the protagonists or the makers of the movie. Probably the first horror movie that applied this motif was Ruggero Deodato’s notorious Cannibal Holocaust as early as in 1980. The genre now includes, for example, Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2006); Tod Williams’s Paranormal Activity 2 (2010); Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s Paranormal Activity 3 (2011); George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2008); Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s [Rec] (2007) and [Rec]2 (2009); Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield (2008); John Erick Dowdle’s Quarantine (2008), which was a shot by shot Hollywood remake of Balagueró and Plaza’s original [Rec]; John Pogue’s Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011); and The Vicious Brothers’s Grave Encounters (2011).1
If we are trying to document this process of appropriation, it is essential to devote a few lines to the sequel to The Blair Witch Project, Joe Berlinger’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000). While it tried to capitalize on the tremendous success of its prequel, Berlinger’s film became a total failure in the end. It is interesting to note that Berlinger was an established documentary filmmaker when he directed the sequel and he returned to his home ground and never looked back to fiction film since the box office flop of Book of Shadows. Regardless of the low critical esteem, I believe the film was an important step towards the complex narrative method
1 One of the most comprehensive lists of these films can be found in the Wikipedia entry devoted to the genre: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_footage_(genre)>.
employed by The River as it takes the self-reflexivity of the first part a step further.
Berlinger portrays the misadventures of a group of young people fueled by the hysteria of the first movie: Jeff runs a site for the Blair Witch franchise selling accessories and trips; Kim is part of a goth subculture interested in the supernatural;
Erica claims to be a Wicca “white witch”; while Tristen and Stephen are working on a scientific research project about the whole phenomenon. Thus all of these characters, in one way or another, take part in disseminating The Blair Witch Project into mass culture and various subcultures (Jeff, Kim and Erica), or “translating” it for high culture (Tristen and Stephen). During their trip to the key locations of the first movie, they experience a total blackout and the only way to recover their memories is by watching the footage they recorded throughout the night.
Most of Book of Shadows uses the stylistic devices of mainstream Hollywood horror movies, that is, we have a third person camera eye directed by Berlinger that stands in for the audience’s gaze, whereas in the first movie such an objective perspective did not exist. This outsider’s view is juxtaposed to the camcorders recording within the movie, which seem to reveal “the true events” as opposed to the fiction and delusion of the “objective” perspective experienced by the characters as well as the audience. This distance between the two types of cameras thus defamiliarizes the “objective” point of view, self-reflexively pointing out questions and instabilities of representation that arise in all films, documentaries or fictive films alike. In this sense, this movie can be regarded as a true postmodernist meta -film questioning the borders of reality and fiction, truth and representation. From the critical reception and the audience’s response to the film, it seems that the appropriation of the “found footage” genre for mainstream Hollywood horror cinema was quite unsuccessful in the second part of The Blair Witch Project. No wonder the
“found footage” horror genre only gained new momentum with Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity six years later, which returned to the example of the 1999 film.
However, The River is sailing on similar waters like Book of Shadows, so we can wonder whether it will achieve what Berlinger’s movie could not.
The Camera and the Gaze in The River
The official poster for The River depicting an ominous eye looking out of the jungle vegetation hints at two very important motifs that govern the series: the fascination with watching and being watched, and the fear of the unknown dangers or hostile forces that might lurk within an unknown and alien landscape. The following pages will elaborate on these two motifs exemplifying two perspectives: a cinematic and a thematic one.
The episodes of The River tell a story about a rescue mission in South America near the Amazon river. Dr. Emmet Cole, the mastermind behind a fictitious documentary series The Undiscovered Country disappeared and the protagonists lead an expedition into the jungle to find him. The channel running the successful documentary decides to fund the mission on one condition: the entire quest has to be recorded to provide material for a new show. The crew includes Dr. Cole’s son
Lincoln and his wife Tess; their bodyguard, Kurt; Lincoln’s childhood friend, Lena;
Emilio, the ship’s mechanic and his daughter, Jahel; Clark, the producer of the show and his cameramen.
The narrative frame is similar to The Blair Witch Project in two respects. On the one hand, the series is partly about the making of a documentary, though this time it is anything but an amateur project: it is a well-funded professional TV show. On the other hand, The River runs with the same premise: the failure of the project. For this expedition also disappeared, the only thing they left behind was the footage, the edited version of which we are watching as the series. This moment of watching the footage left behind by someone is prefigured in The River when the protagonists find the tapes of Dr. Cole and watch them, looking for clues about what might have happened to him, and trying to find leads about where to look for him next. However, there is a crucial difference between the audience watching the series and the protagonists watching the tapes: Dr. Cole’s tapes are unedited so first they have to undergo a process of selection and interpretation before they start to make sense. They lack a timestamp, so to make sense of them requires the protagonists to put them in the correct order first. But what we, as the audience of The River get is a carefully edited show, a finished product that qualitatively and quantitatively differs from the footage left behind by the rescue mission. The footage must have already undergone a process of heavy editing with certain moments erased,2 other footage added (scenes from The Undiscovered Country, news reports about Dr. Cole’s disappearance and his funeral service, recordings of family life, etc.). What is not clear at this moment (the end of the first season) is how the footage was transmitted to us in the end, for that it gives a crucial role to the camera on the screen and we also witness “the return of the cameraman”: The River thus bares the artifice of filmmaking by showing the cameraman, who acts as a key member in creating a show, who needs to be there to allow us to see things through the lens of the camera, but who usually remains invisible.
2 In the third episode, Tess explicitly asks Clark to erase the records of them embracing: “[Tess] I want you to erase these tapes. I don't want anyone to— [Clark] Yeah, of course. Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”
3 In one of the concluding interviews of the season finale Clark talks about his plan to edit the material:
“The final voyage of the Magus. Yeah, it’s a good title. Oh, I will, uh, I will get home. I will get to work, and I will cut together, what, eight episodes? I’ll give everyone their happy ending. And I will move past what needs ignoring. And I will make this expedition look every bit the adventure it was...
Or maybe a bit more.” Interestingly enough, there are exactly eight episodes in the first season, but no happy end. The fictional frame of the series declares that the whole expedition disappeared with only the footage being found, so the case is either that Clark edited the episodes on the boat (after all he had all the equipment for it), or someone else edited them and found it a good idea to follow Clark’s suggestion.
While The Blair Witch Project basically presented the camera as a technological device providing an unmediated vision of the events (Banash 1), as I have argued, its sequel, Book of Shadows introduced certain ambiguities within this scheme: by itself, the camera cannot act as a medium of truth. The River plays with both styles. First, it consciously evokes the notion of the documentary gaze: Jonas, Dr. Cole’s recovered cameraman, points out the fact that he is just archiving what he sees and as a newcomer to the crew, he has no deeper understanding of the motivation or the relationship between the people he is filming. However, the series also emphasizes the fact that the camera and the cameraman is far from being a neutral, invisible presence. On the one hand, the behavior of both A.J. and Jonas hint at the ethical problems involved in such “observer’s neutrality”: for both of them, recording becomes more important than ethical norms.4 On the other hand, Dr. Cole also admits in the sixth episode that talking to a camera provided a way for him to rebuild his identity again after the tragedy of their first daughter, and this experience also became the founding moment, or the “primal scene” of the original show, The Undiscovered Country.
Many reviewers and critics praised The Blair Witch Project for “returning us to an authentic psychological (think Hitchcock) rather than technical horror (Wes Craven)” (Banash 1) and as Banash convincingly argues, in the movie we witness the failure of mimetic camera technology in representing the demonic presence stalking the protagonists (Banash 2). As opposed to the first part, Book of Shadows trusted the audience’s imagination a lot less and partly reinserted the story within the representational context of “technical horror,” which might have been one reason for its lack of success. The River seems to stand somewhere between the two approaches:
it relies more on our imagination, but sometimes we get to see partial shots of the menace stalking the characters. Thus as opposed to The Blair Witch Project, the camera seems to be able to capture something of the demonic presence: the intrusion of the supernatural is usually signified by a sudden blur or an interference on the camera screens, and sometimes the camera can even represent the true nature of the opponents the protagonists have to face, for example in episode five.
We have seen that in Book of Shadows, what the camera showed could not be interpreted as a direct representation of real events, so this might be a question that we need to ponder while interpreting The River. Is the camera footage we are watching
“objective” all throughout the series? In most of the episodes, yes, but judging by the season finale, the answer is no: the demonic presence can alter what the characters see on the screens.5 This seems to be a moment in The River where it subverts its own fiction of being filmed from only the perspective of the cameras of the crew or the boat, whose picture can be altered by the spirits: the viewers should not be able to see
4 For example in the first episode, instead of helping Lena who was wounded by the malignant spirit they unleash, A.J. continues to film. In episode four, Jonas is punished by the spirits inhabiting the place because he filmed an elder funeral, which is considered taboo.
4 For example in the first episode, instead of helping Lena who was wounded by the malignant spirit they unleash, A.J. continues to film. In episode four, Jonas is punished by the spirits inhabiting the place because he filmed an elder funeral, which is considered taboo.