THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT THE SIXTH SENSE: There's nothing more edifying than a good scare.
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva SPOOKY, REALLY SPOOKY 'The Blair Witch Project' & 'The Sixth Sense' It was supposed to be the summer of The Phantom Menace and Eyes Wide Shut. Instead, two horror...
...A woman gets to be Captain Queeg while the males quiver and equivocate...
...Though I wish he'd get his hair (or hairpiece) under control, Bruce Willis displays the insinuating power he's capable of whenever he's cast against type...
...The other drawback was inevitable since it's merely the flip side of Project's originality...
...If this makes Project sound delicately shuddersome, be advised that the movie's style is deliberately roughhewn...
...If so, this would make the movie akin to such ambiguous ghost stories as The Turn of the Screw and many works by Walter De La Mare...
...But hang on until the final scene, a truly nightmarish run through (surprise...
...Is the supernatural force that is supposedly tracking them just a projection of their own psyches...
...The performers delivered the goods both technically and emotionally...
...On the other handFourth, there is no ambiguity about the protagonists' physical suffering as they wander in the woods...
...The cameraman, Tak Fujimoto, has sentenced the story's locale, Philadelphia, to an autumn of perpetual mourning, while the director uses the public statues of the City of Brotherly Love as mute witnesses to the boy's fear...
...After interviewing townspeople, the kids trooped into the woods to locate the murder site, and their surviving video reveals that they got lost, crumbled psychologically, were (perhaps) stalked by murderous locals and/or supernatural forces, and (perhaps) met their doom in the same place and in the same way that the victims of half a century ago did...
...This is accomplished not through psychiatric treatment but concrete action when Cole becomes the conduit for a little girl seeking justice from beyond the grave...
...First, Dr...
...I don't know if a ten-year-old can be called a great actor with any certainty, but there's no way so many subtle and precise gradations of emotion could have been evoked strictly by directorial manipulation and clever editing...
...Hhe Sixth Sense has no innovations...
...Crowe, haunted by his failure to save an earlier patient similar to Cole, must accept an astonishing fact about his own existence and his relationship to his wife...
...The oddest thing about this horror film is that it doesn't admit its genre Commonweal 20 September 24,1999 until it's half over...
...It's as if uncanny forces were watching these mortals snarling at each other under conditions demanding coolness, stoicism, and compassion...
...Third, there is no overt bloodshed and the only violence in view is the psychological torture that the characters inflict on each other...
...This leads to a surprise ending so radical that it may prompt you to see the movie again...
...Innovations always end up honoring and freshening the hoariest of traditions...
...Though he desperately wants to be rid of his visitations, he tries to shield his mother from knowledge of them out of concern for her...
...ButSecond, the young documentarians are stalked, terrorized, and, apparently, destroyed...
...The actual writers-directors, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, kept to the sidelines, sometimes even out of sight, in order to promote an atmosphere of harrowing solitude...
...it scares the oldfashioned way: You are drawn close to its characters and you jump when they jump...
...The movie's prologue tells us we're watching 16mm...
...But if a child pianist can be credited with great technique and emotional insight, why can't an acting prodigy...
...It is frightening because it is moving...
...Later, standing in front of his school while all the other children run in for morning classes, Cole might as well be a visitor from another planet...
...The documentary texture was reinforced by the method of filming...
...And because the characters are worth coming close to, their frights stay with you long after you leave the theater...
...As for Haley Joel Osment as Cole, he's...well, preternatural...
...This is Henry James meets "60 Minutes...
...a haunted house...
...Heather, Josh, and Mike were making a documentary about some crypto-supernatural slaughters that occurred fifty-five years ago...
...D Commonweal 21 September 24,1999...
...Once the actors, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams (lending their real first names to their roles), were filled in on their characterizations and storyline, they were given two cameras and told to shoot the movie themselves...
...This is a flaw in the scenario, not in the acting...
...However...
...The last half of the story is a journey toward two acts of acceptance...
...The movie has two big flaws, one avoidable, the other not...
...The Sixth Sense has precisely that feeling of inwardness, of the world being soaked in a character's consciousness, that was so ruinously absent from Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut...
...In fact, we're drawn close enough to Cole to understand that he is a hero as well as a victim...
...Yet, the movie is unsettling long before...
...footage and video tape discovered in the Black Hills of Maryland where three student filmmakers utterly and mysteriously disappeared...
...The Sixth Sense is both frightening and moving...
...The eye rebels at more than half an hour of hand-held, shaky, bobbing camera work...
...I speak from experience: To see The Sixth Sense twice is to see two different movies...
...Cole's mother (wonderful portrait by Toni Collette of an earthy woman nonplussed by unearthliness) leaves Cole at the breakfast table so that she can rinse a bit of spilled food off his tie and turns back ten seconds later to find every cabinet door in the kitchen open and every drawer pulled out while her son still sits quietly munching his cereal...
...Crowe (Bruce Willis) must persuade the child that what seems to be a curse may turn out to be a gift...
...We see dead people, too...
...This eerie and luminous sequence is compounded of equal measures of dread and compassion...
...So this puts The Blair Witch Project close to such movies as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Sands of the Kalahari, and An Eye for an Eye, which show human inadequacy writhing in the coils of pitiless nature...
...Or is this a sociological comment on the emotional inroads of feminism...
...No ghosts appear until the child confesses to his doctor that "I see dead people...
...He doesn't want his oddity to ruin her life...
...Ah, they're ripe," the uncanny whispers, then moves in...
...So Project also belongs in the disreputable category of Teen-age Stalker-Slasher Bloodfests, a la Friday the Thirteenth and Halloween...
...Though the movie runs only seventy-five minutes, it soon begins to grate on your nerves instead of playing upon them...
...The Blair Witch Project is a stunt that succeeds in being something more than that, but its genre-straddling freakishness would set it apart from all other movies even if it were an artistic failure...
...Vertigo begins to replace dread...
...While Heather is a sharply defined egotist, Mike and Josh seem merely to be taking turns playing loyal follower versus brooding psychopath...
...Yet all this naturalistic suffering is encircled by a larger, supernatural menace...
...Four genres are here aligned, if not fused: First, cinema verite, for, after all, this is supposed to be a documentary shot by a small crew utilizing lightweight equipment...
...If atmospheric visuals are out of the question here, the terror of the woods nevertheless reaches us through the despair in the actors' voices...
...From that point on, the film slides right into the depths of Cole's mind and into his terrors...
...The first was the failure to distinguish the two male characters...
...Till then, the writerdirector M. Night Shyamalan seems to be recounting a psychiatric case study of a disturbed boy named Cole, who can surely be cured by his wise psychologist...
...Which it isn't...
...Second, Dr...
...Instead, two horror films reigned...
Vol. 126 • September 1999 • No. 16
