Of all the flavors of horror, few are as dreadful as that of being lost in the wilderness. In this episode, JF and Phil revisit The Blair Witch Project, the classic 1999 found-footage film that inspired a thousand imitators. What makes this film so gripping, they argue, is the way it lingers over the subtle stages of disorientation in a hostile place, from blithe denial to devastating gnosis. The Blair Witch Project isn't a ghost story so much as a work of cosmic horror. Ultimately, the woods themselves—vast, indifferent, inescapable—are the monster.
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References
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez (dirs.), The Blair Witch Project
Gus Van Sant (dir.), Gerry
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Weird Studies, Episode 195 on John Keel
Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention
Georgio De Chirico, Italian artist
Arthur Machen, The White People
Jack Zipes, literary scholar
Weird Studies, Episode 150 on Arthur Machen's “A Fragment of Life”
“Schizophonia”
Stanislav Lem, Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Solaris
Beyond Yacht Rock Podcast
Shirley Clarke (dir.), The Connection
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image
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