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Heritage Noire: truth, history,and colonial anxiety in The BlairWitch ProjectSally J. MorganPublished online: 12 Dec 2010.

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ISSN 1352-7258 print; ISSN 1470-3610 online/01/020137-12 � 2001 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/13527250120060178

International Journal of Heritage Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pp. 137± 148

Heritage Noire: truth, history, andcolonial anxiety in The Blair WitchProjectSally J. Morgan

Abstract

When watching the film The Blair Witch Project we seem to be witnessing through its

clumsy, apparently uncrafted footage the unmediated documentation of reality’ as it occurs.

This article argues that the carefully crafted deceit of The Blair Witch Project may be

understood as part of a subversive `public history’ project that uses modern history’s own

scientific motifs and methodologies against itself and challenges its basic tenets. If positive

myths of the past are structured into what we tend to call heritage, i.e. shared narratives

affirming a positive sense of self and region or nation, then this paper argues thatThe BlairWitch Project takes the same notion and subverts it, giving its chosen audience a dark and

unsettling sense of its own history.

Key Words: Heritage; Public History; Blair Witch; Historiography; Historical

Methodologies; Film Studies

Prelude: the fact of a factI once worked with a newly qualified archaeologist who knew what a fact was. Heinformed us all about it, loudly, one night when we were drinking beer under the

ascending stars and waiting for the rain to come in off the Irish Sea.

What he found when he `dug’ , he said, were facts’ , and when you put facts

together you got stories, simple, common-sense stories Ð the kind Joe Public’

wanted.

I heard a deep sigh next to me, and my friend Eleanor, who has never been a

woman to take a hostage when a well-aimed bullet through the head would suffice,

stirred in her fold-away deck chair, put her small bottle of Alsace beer on the grass

beside her, and leaned towards him

`And what’ , she said with slow clarity, `is a ª factº ? What, in God’s name, is ª common

senseº , and who, exactly is ª Joe Publicº ?’

Perhaps this was a rather cruel thing to do to a drunkenly passionate man in the

throes of his first professional dig. He looked as though he’d been slapped in the

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138 Sally J. Morgan

mouth and after a pause that conveyed both bewilderment and betrayal he gathered

himself into action:

`I don’t give a toss about all of that’ , he said, so emphatically that everyone turned to

look and then turned away again quickly, `People are people, a story’s a story, a fact’s a

fact. Our stories as archaeologists should be understandable, based on the facts Ð the

scientific facts Ð the ones we find in the ground!’

`Facts in the ground’ . I liked the thought of it, but I didn’t believe it. More like

enigmas in the ground, half-spoken sentences and incomplete pictures. For some

reason, beer in hand and light fading, I felt the need to alert him to the impossibilityof a simple story. I began as though I was being helpful,

Okay, so we find a collection of large stones in a particular configuration like we did

today, that’s a reality. So we know they exist and we know that we found them. But

anything else we say about them as to their significance is interpretation, based on

typology and probability. To make those stones into a story we have to interpret them.

Interpretation is an act of the imagination. We make cultural choices in the way we

define the facts’ and then in the way that we put them together.

He swayed momentarily in a haze of indignant, drunken confusion, `Fuck off for

fucksake! I hate fucking theory, what do you need fucking theory for? You just dig

and then tell it like it is Ð scientifically Ð you tell the truth.’

Whether we’re archaeologists or historians, telling the truth sounds as though it

should be as simple as just `not lying’ . `Showing the facts’ seems as straightforward

as pointing at the view out of the window. But of course this isn’t the case. Notions

of truth’ and `narrative’ are at the heart of historiography; von Ranke, the 19th-

century father of modern history’ defined historical truth as the presentation of the

facts as they actually happened’ , and insisted that to do so was the historian’s duty.His position arose from his shocked discovery that the historical novels of Sir Walter

Scott were not true. He was horrified to realise that Scott’s depictions of the past

were wilful distortions, crafted to suit the author’s own ends. From that time

onward the problem of facts’ has been at the centre of historical enquiry and

exposition. Not least, in historical endeavour, has been the quest for pure, scientific

facts that somehow stand free of the pollution of imagination.

However, the difficulty of defining a fact can, of course, never be underestimated.

My drunkenly optimistic archaeologist was wrong. Facts do not lie in the ground

waiting to be found and recognised. To find an object in the earth, or a text in anarchive, is not to find a fact. As Wittgenstein contends, a thing is not a fact.1 In terms

of historical enquiry, a thing remains, stubbornly, a thing, whereas an historical, or

1. L. Wittgenstein, `Tractatus logico-philosophicus’ , in Anthony Kenny (ed.) The Wittgenstein reader,

Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p. 3.

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Heritage Noire 139

archaeological, fact is a decision about the significance of a thing or things. Facts are

described through propositions, but propositions are not, in themselves, facts.2 In

short, an historical fact is elusive and worrying. An historical fact can’t be proved,

like a scientific fact, through a repeatable experiment; it can only be agreed, like the

legal guilt or innocence of the accused by a jury in a courtroom. History, like guilt,

only appears to be the untainted sum of the evidence; history, like a fact, is a

proposition that we agree to agree to.

This article has at its heart issues about facts’ , stories’ and `Joe Public’ . The

crucial starting points being which facts’ , which stories, and which `public’ . Can

you, as an archaeologist or historian, just `dig and tell it like it is’ ? Will scientificmethod save you? Is truth the same thing as reality? Where we used to believe in

stories, we now believe in methodologies. We hold that as long as a method is

rational then the story it produces will be true. As Ranke insisted, it is the evidence

that builds your story. Your evidence, your facts, in speaking for themselves, will,

according to Ranke’s proposition, innocently tell the story. However, I would

contend that our faith in methodology leaves us just as vulnerable to delusion as our

old belief in narrative unless we understand how method and narrative are linked

and, indeed, how method is, in itself, narrative.

IntroductionOn Halloween in 1999 a film called The Blair Witch Project opened in the UK. It had

caused a great stir in America during the preceding year and had reached Britain

billed as the scariest movie ever made’ . The film was an unlikely blockbuster, a low-

budget production made by a very small company called Haxan films. It had been

a success at the `art-house’ Sundance Film Festival and, as a result of this small

exposure, enthusiasts had spread the word about it on the Web. So, in America, its

box office success had come about not by studio hype but by the turn-of-the-

century’s version of word-of-mouth, the Internet.The basic conceit of The Blair Witch Project is that it is true’ . We are told through

a written, on-screen preface that in 1994 three student film-makers disappeared

whilst making a documentary in the Maryland Woods of the USA and that three

years later their footage was found and pieced together by Haxan Films. From that

point onward we seem to be witnessing, through this edited, apparently uncrafted

footage, the unmediated documentation of reality as it occurs. The truth of the

situation is, however, that this is a carefully constructed conceit.

At the time of writing, The Blair Witch Project has had four phases, the film, a Web

site, a book and a DVD recording. I intend to argue that these four elements (andthere may yet be more) may all be understood as part of a subversive public history’

projectÐ a heritage noire that uses modern history’s own scientific motifs and

methodologies against itself and challenges its basic tenets. When examining The

2. Ibid., p. 12.

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140 Sally J. Morgan

Blair Witch Project in this paper I will pay special attention to three areas of interest.

First is its subversive relationship to `history’ , through its references to oral, local

and national histories, its construction or `collection’ of evidence and its knowing

allusions to historical and archaeological methodologies. Second is its form, which

plays with our expectations of truth in relation to certain cinematic conventions and

to ways of constructing narrative. Third is the particularity of the project’s audience,

or the Joe Public’ it wishes to address. The film-makers have understood, and

played on, the particular fears and anxieties arising from shared histories, myths,

and cultural relationships peculiar to the descendants of the European colonists of

North America.

The Blair Witch Project uses and manipulates public history continually and

cleverly throughout. By `public history’ I mean, in this context, the sense of history(as first described by Raphael Samuel)3 that a community develops, not through a

conscious, adult study of academic history, but through exposure to films,

television, primary-school history lessons, popular literature and folklore. In this

sort of public history, fact is mixed with myth and communal identities are affirmed

through an agreed set of stories. This manifests as a kind of residual knowledge; a

bit like common sense, it is composed of informal information that powerfully

shapes our ideas of the past and the cultural assumptions arising from them. Forinstance, just as every Briton from a particular background and of a certain age

would know who Robin Hood was and what his identity meant, without, perhaps,

being sure why or how they know this, likewise every American of a certain

background would know about the Wild West and what that meant culturally. The

makers of The Blair Witch Project make knowing and careful use of this residual

knowledge and subvert it into heritage noire. Instead of comforting the public

through a celebration of shared myths of the past, the project produces unease, like

a dark-mirror image, a doppelg Èanger. It redirects the historical imagination to less

comfortable ends.

An Historical EnquiryThe Blair Witch Project presents itself as an historical enquiry that attempts to

disaggregate myth from fact. In the film we accompany the students in their quest

for the truth about the legendary Blair Witch. One of the students, the `director’ ,

Heather Donahue, has, it appears, already done some work in the archives and has

come up with information from a series of sources. In the third episode of the

project, the book or dossier, there appears a facsimile of Heather’s `proposal for a

student film thesis’ . She sets the scene by reminding’ us of the legend of the BlairWitch, and telling us that, since the late 1700s, there have been a number of

disturbing incidents involving the disappearance of children from the Burkittsville

area, all of which have been attributed to the Blair Witch. She goes on to say that her

3. See R. Samuel, Theatres of memory, London: Verso, 1994, p. 15.

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Heritage Noire 141

documentary will, separate the known facts from the legend that has grown up

around them’ .4

What we gradually deduce from Heather’s evidence is that just after the War of

Independence (thereby firmly placing it as an American story), in 1785, in a

Maryland town called Blair, a woman called Elly Kedward was accused of taking

children’s blood in order to perform magic. As a result the townspeople cast her out

into the woods to perish. Not long afterwards the town’s children began to

disappear and eventually the town itself was abandoned, to be replaced in 1823 by

the new town of Burkittsville. After this time there were regular sinister occurrences

in that area, usually involving disappearances and/or the violent death of children.We are also given fragments of evidence that imply that the whole area, known as the

Black Hills Forest, was taboo Indian land, and so was tainted in some way even

before the incidence of the witch.

In her documentary Heather recounts stories of the Blair Witch and the events

linked to her, citing documents such as The Blair Witch Cult (an apparently archaic

publication, which she reads from on screen), and press clippings from old

newspapers. She also interviews local people in the manner of an oral historian.

Some of the interviewees talk of the witch and the related incidents’ as legend;

others speak of them as fact. She herself makes no judgements or pronouncements;most of her comments are posed as questions, either to her interviewees, her

colleagues, or herself via the camera. The film presents itself as a piece of public/oral

history, a foray into one of the interesting by-ways of Maryland local heritage.

The Web site extends this further. As a sequel to the film it seems to be set up as

a real site about something that has really happened. It promises to tell us more

about the disappearance of the students and to show us the facts. The site displays

evidence in the form of digital pictures and recorded interviews with witnesses,

police and local historians and archaeologists. It also has a section given over to

evidence about the Blair Witch. As we scroll across the screen we find readable

fragments from old documents. These include a picture of a tattered leather book(described as the only surviving copy of The Blair Witch Cult); an 18th-century

woodcut depicting the banishment of the original witch, Elly Kedward, and

reproductions of 19th-century photographs of search parties and the like. Alongside

the pictures we find interviews with experts and with Bill Barnes, who is, we are

told, the Director of the Burkittsville Historical Society.

The third phase of the project, the book, extends the evidence, including a 17th-

century portrait, a snippet from an old-journal entry and even a 19th-century

folksong. Through all three stages of the project we are given a sense of a mass of

evidence going back through time. Like real evidence it is fragmentary, contra-dictory and doesn’t resolve into narrative certainty. But this is not real evidence. It

is a careful construction that seeks to be convincing history by mimicking the

material that history is constructed from. Much of the material is banal, even

4. D.A. Stern, The Blair Witch Project, London: Boxtree (Macmillan), 1999, p. 73.

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142 Sally J. Morgan

tedious, some of it is dramatic, but mostly it is cumulative. Its sheer quantity and

complexity begins to convince us that we might begin to believe in the unbelievable.

It uses scientific historical methodologies to convince us that what we are witnessing

actually happened, is historically true.

Truth and FormCertain forms seem truer to us than others. As Hayden White has proposed, form

itself is a kind of content.5 The casual photograph, the shopping list, or the home

movie, all give the appearance of unmediated reality. The less crafted the material,

the more likely we are to believe in it as evidenceÐ as something factual’ . Themakers of The Blair Witch Project have exploited this propensity of ours to great effect

in all three of their documents (film, Web site, book). The film is apparently shot on

two hand-held cameras, one a video and the other a 16 mm black-and-white cine

camera. The form is that of the home movie, interspersed with clumsily convincing

documentary. The Web site utilises what are declared to be `genuine’ radio

interviews, family albums, old books and newspaper cuttings. The book is presented

as a facsimile of `actual documents’ , it is subtitled `A Dossier’ and it has not been

authored, but rather, we are told, `compiled’ by D.A. Stern.

None of these documents has an explicit narrative, or, when they appear to have,then we are never given the whole of the story. No explanatory voice is present. No

author assigns meaning. Rather, evidence is presented and we are, apparently, asked

to come to our own conclusions, to play the detective or historian and to let the facts

speak for themselves’ . At their simplest, and at face value, these documents (as I shall

continue to call them) are collections of evidence. At their most complex they

function like the `chronicles’ that White would say `do not conclude but simply

terminate’ .6 The chronicle’ , he says, Lacks [. . .] that summing up of the ª meaningº

of a chain of events [. . .] that we normally expect from a well-made story. The

chronicle typically promises closure but does not provide it.’ 7 As a form, the chronicle

presents us with an apparently disconnected set of occurrences in which we may findno imposed pattern, or meaning, owing to the lack of a clear authorial map.

A dispassionate, removed’ relationship to evidence has been a common

aspiration for historians and archaeologists through most of the 20th century.

Indeed, from the time of Von Ranke until very recently, most historians and

archaeologists, to a greater or lesser extent, shared the belief that `methodologically

controlled research makes objective knowledge possible’ ,8 and believed in their

5. H. White, The content of the form: narrative, discourse and historical representation, Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. xi.

6. Ibid., p. 16.

7. Ibid., p. 16.

8. G.G. Iggers, Historiography in the twentieth century, Hanover, USA: Wesleyan University Press,

1997, p. 3.

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Heritage Noire 143

disciplines as rigorous science[s]’ .9 Some mid-20th-century schools, such as the

Processualists of British Archaeology, or the French Annales school put scientific

analysis at the heart of their approach Ð almost to the point of ideology. White has

suggested that, along with this scientific orientation, most notably amongst the

French Annales school, went a rejection of narrative `as a non-scientific, even

ideological representational strategy’ .10 John Tosh sees this scientific turn as having

produced a general climate where narrative has been generally discredited, the

multiple nature of causation in history demands that the narrative be suspended’ .11

Narrative, it would seem, has become suspect because of its close relationship to

literary fiction, because of its association with interpretation, and with thepotentially polluting influence of personality, and because of the way that it tidies an

untidy reality.

Leon J. Goldstein, in his essay The sociological historiography of Charles Tilley’ ,

denies that history is, as Hayden White and others have proposed, a discourse. On

the contrary, it is, he says:

A way of knowing, which is the only way it makes sense to speak of historical truth and

falsity, historical objectivity, factuality and reference. The manner in which a historian

presents his conclusions cannot be essential to the nature of the discipline.12

He proposes, then, that form does not affect meaning; that content does indeed

stand free of its mode of expression. What I would contend, however, is that, at the

very least, form influences our predisposition towards the content. The Blair Witch

Project knowingly exploits this to its own ends. In all the project’s three phases

conventional narrative and authorship are studiously avoided or denied. The form,

that of the compiled dossier of evidence, the visual archive/digital data base, and

home movie/documentary, is one of distanced enquiry rather than narrative. It is

processual rather than declamatory. It asks us to believe in its impartiality anddisinterested rationality. The form, then, conveys meaning as much as the content.

It appeals to our belief in scientific methodology, to our distrust of the `mediated

reality’ of narrative, to our instinct that seeing is believing’ . It appears to be

balanced, with many sides of the story presented and no single viewpoint or voice

representing the true’ . The content of Blair Witch is not very special, not very

frightening, nor very believable, but its form, its apparent methodological approach,

is convincing. The form unsettles us and produces ambivalence. The form and the

content become inseparable.

9. Ibid., p. 25.

10. White, 1987, p. 31.

11. J. Tosh, The pursuit of history, 2nd edn, Harlow: Longman, 1991, p. 119.

12. In Henry Kozicki (ed.) Developments in modern historiography, London: Macmillan, 1993, p. 83.

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144 Sally J. Morgan

A Particular PublicWhen the film opened in the UK it arrived promising to scare audiences more thanany film had ever done before. The first time I saw it, on Halloween at the Ritzy

Cinema in Brixton, South London, I was intrigued rather than frightened and the

restlessness in the audience seemed more like boredom than terror. This was not

what I expected and so I decided to go and see it again in Bristol, and this time to

spend more time listening to the audience during and after the showing. Of course,

this isn’t exactly an experiment under controlled conditions, but the responses of

the two audiences were similar enough to suggest a pattern. The audiences that I sat

with didn’t respond as American audiences apparently had. They were politely

interested but unmoved. When I came out of the Bristol showing I overheard twoyoung men behind me:

Were you scared?

No, not really. It was like watching some people getting lost in a park.

If you were being supercilious, you might say that this was because British audiences

are more sophisticated and less easily fooled than their American counterparts, butpossibly you would be wrong.

The reasons for the different responses between the two audiences, I would

contend, are very deep, and are historically and culturally based. The elements that

make up the film, especially in relationship to reality, landscape and ideas of good

and evil, are particularly American. They are perhaps not just American, but of

Americans with a particular ancestry and historical sense of themselves. In other

writings I have referred to the descendants of the early white settlers of America,

Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa as being post-colonial in

outlook.13 In retrospect I think I was wrong. Post-colonial, as an epithet, would be

more appropriately applied to those ex-colonies in India and Africa where there wasno significant European settlement. The descendants of the white settlers of the

major ex-British dominions, mentioned above, may not be politically linked with

Britain anymore, but they remain, culturally and temperamentally, European

colonists. They perceive their history in European terms, and they see a clear

cultural difference between themselves and the native people of whichever continent

they have colonised. They are undoubtedly post-imperial but, as yet, they are not

post-colonial societies. I don’t know if they ever can be, for, unlike India, the

colonisers have never left, and are not likely to.

The public of this film are (actually and metaphorically) the descendants of thefirst European colonists of North America. This film plays on a shared public sense

of history which underpins what I will call colonial anxiety’ , i.e. a relationship to a

13. See S.J. Morgan, `The ghost in the luggage: Wallace and Braveheart: post-colonial pioneer

identities’ , European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1999, pp. 375± 392.

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Heritage Noire 145

landscape that remains alien and threatening, irredeemably foreign and hostile even

200 years after its settlement. Whilst it may be argued that a contemporary British

conception of landscape is rooted in the post-Enlightenment Arcadian-ism of the

18th century, one might equally argue, as Marx indeed did, that an earlier, post-

Reformation idea of landscape as wilderness underpins a particular American view

of the land.14 The American landscape held a particular dread for its English settlers

from their earliest contact with it. The woods, and the terrible things within them,

consumed the colonists from the days of the very first plantations, as the early

colonies were called. When John Smith, the Governor of the first English settlement,

Roanoke, returned to it after three years’ absence in England, he found that thesettlement was overgrown and deserted and, although there were no signs of

violence, the settlers had completely disappeared:

We went along by the waterside, towards the point of the creek to see if we could find

any of their boats or pinnace, but we could perceive no sign of them . . . this could be

no other than the deed of the savages our enemies.15

The next settlement, Sagadahoc, was quickly abandoned and Jamestown, the third

settlement, fared little better; in 1610, only three years after having been founded,its inhabitants were in the process of deserting it when they met the English supply

boat sent to relieve them. They obviously had settled in a hostile environment and

they were an unhappy group of people. They tried to abandon the settlement on at

least three more occasions and were only with great difficulty dissuaded from doing

so, sometimes at gunpoint, by their Governor, John Smith.16 Beset by disease,

hunger and hostile native people, they often lapsed into melancholia. Brogan quotes

an early settler as complaining that `more do die here of the disease of their mind

than of their body.’ 17

The next wave of colonists, the first successful North American settlers, were

what we would now term Puritans, people who found themselves out of place in theEngland of their day, but more terrifyingly out of place in the land they arrived to

colonise. For the most part, they were drawn from a particular urban sector of

society and were what Christopher Hill terms (in a phrase borrowed from Slingesby

Bethal, the 17th-century anti-papist), the industrious sort of people’ .18 If they

14. K. Marx, cited in L. Buell, The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing and the formation

of American culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 60.

15. J. White, `The lost colony’ (extract from journal entry of 17 August 1590), in David Colbert (ed.)

Eyewitness to America, New York: Vintage, 1998, p. 17.

16. H. Brogan, The Penguin history of the United States of America, London: Penguin, 1990, p. 20.

17. Ibid., p. 21.

18. C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in pre-revolutionary England, London: Secker & Warburg, 1964, p.

107.

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146 Sally J. Morgan

weren’t farmers when they arrived in America, and most of them weren’t, they

certainly felt that that was what was required of themÐ that taming the land was a

moral imperative required by God. Andrew McRae has written about an agrarian

revolution occurring during the same period as the rise of Puritanism. This is the

culture of agricultural improvement in which men were `propelled by a sense of

moral duty to exploit more efficiently the riches of the natural world’ .19 John

Norden, author of an influential manual on husbandry, wrote in 1610:

Land is given to man, to the end that he should till it, manure it, and dresse it: namely,

he should set, sow and plant upon it, and in due discretion to convert every place to his

fittest fruite.20

The Pilgrims who began the serious colonisation of Northern America, then, were

urban householders who were confronted with the wild, pre-agrarian landscape of

New England and a Protestant God’s command to set, sow and plant upon it. An

additional ingredient in this mindset, according to K.V. Thomas, is that where

Catholicism tolerated and incorporated magic, Protestantism did not21 and so, in a

sense, invented it as a problem. As a consequence, in addition to the fear of the

woods that a mainly urban people had brought with them to the colonies, they had,

as Protestants, also imported a new and very potent paranoia, fear of witches and

magic. In the settlers’ imagination, it may be argued, there was an elision of a

number of very potent fears, all of which came together in the location of the woods;fear manifested as `Place’ .

The 18th century settler Crevecoeur, in his 1782 book, Letters from an American

farmer, lists a number of reasons for fearing the woods. To begin with its very

proximity is seen as polluting:

By living in or near the woods, their actions are regulated by the wildness of the

neighbourhood . . . This surrounding hostility immediately puts the gun into their

hands: they . . . soon become professed hunters. This is the progress. Once hunters,

farewell to the plough. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy and unsocial. A

hunter wants no neighbour; he rather hates them, because he dreads the competition.22

According to Crevecoeur, proximity to the woods caused moral degeneracy,

idleness and a general godlessness. In the wilderness there were `no temples or

19. J. Thirsk, cited in A. McRae, `Husbandry manuals and the language of agrarian improvement’ , in

M. Leslie & T. Raylor (eds) Culture and cultivation in Early Modern England, Leicester: Leicester

University Press, 1992, p. 36.

20. J. Norden, cited in ibid., p. 51.

21. K.V. Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, cited in C.S.L.

Davies, Peace, print and Protestantism 1450± 1558, London: Paladin 1977, p. 325.

22. J. Hector St John De Crevecoeur, S. Manning (ed.) Letters from an American farmer, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1997 (original unedited version 1782), p. 53.

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Heritage Noire 147

ministers’ , indeed, the very name of religion . . . would be lost in the immensity of

these woods’ .23 The woods are godless, then, a place where even the best of people

could lose their souls, their minds and their lives.

The `Woods’ became the thing that Americans battled against on a number of

accounts. They struggled against it as the actual wilderness that God had required

that they turn to cultivation and profit; and as the wilderness of the soul, the dark

place where God would not find them and where all sorts of terrors could prey on

them. It is in these New World woods that the makers of The Blair Witch Project set

their film Ð the godless, pagan woods of an irredeemably and perpetually foreign

country. The woods in which, according to the Puritan New England villagers ofHawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, the Devil walks abroad as a dark man. The

woods, where in 1970s’ films like Southern Comfort and Deliverance (referred to by

name in The Blair Witch Project) city folk are hunted, raped and killed by the

wilderness’s degenerate inhabitants. These are the backwoods of the American

psyche where, in David Lynch’s late 1980s’ TV series, and 1992 film Twin Peaks, the

depths are filled with depravity, violence and magic. People disappear, people are

murdered, people return after a long disappearance with no memory of what has

happened to them. The woods of The Blair Witch Project are the quintessential,

Godless, American wilderness, peopled with phantoms, devils and savages.

23. Ibid.

24. Newsnight, BBC2, Thursday 18 May 2000.

ConclusionCritics have seen The Blair Witch Project as an important milestone in the history of

cinema because of its use of cheap, accessible technology and its place outside the

studio system.24 I would agree with this view, but, as I have shown, its greater

importance lies in the ways that it challenges the fundamental precepts of discourses

such as history and archaeology, and makes us question the ways that we come to

believe. The project causes us to interrogate our assumptions around the

relationship of Truth to narrative and to scientific methodology. It does this

through its subversive and subtle re-figuring of familiar historical stories, wherebythe evidence it shows to the target audience seems familiar and convincing because

it borrows from histories and myths that they already half know. The narrative in The

Blair Witch Project is implicit rather than explicit. The audience is not given a story,

it is given evidence, and out of that evidence the audience itself makes the narrative;

the facts seem to speak for themselves. However, in this case, the facts, or rather the

methodology, manipulates us into mistaking fiction for reality, as does its form,

which plays on our expectation that some forms of filmic representation are more

real or truthful than others.

The Blair Witch Project makes unashamed use of a plethora of references thatindicate Settler America’s uneasy and fearful relationship to that continent’s natural,

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148 Sally J. Morgan

pre-agrarian landscape and its apparent ability to `un-civilise’ . It makes knowing

reference to the Salem Witch Trials, to settlements that disappear, to sacred Indian

grounds, to European witchcraft being practised in the deep woods. It does this by

clever allusion rather than by direct quotation and draws on an assumed body of

shared knowledge, knowledge that exists somewhere between fact and myth.25 This

knowledge, as I have said earlier, is part of a kind of public history, an idea of the

past that affects our understanding of the present, and which is arrived at, almost

unconsciously, through the informal accumulation and clutter of myth and history

which is part and parcel of our everyday culture. If positive myths of the past are

structured into what we tend to call heritage, i.e. shared narratives affirming apositive sense of self and region or nation, then The Blair Witch Project takes the same

notion and turns it on its head. It gives us, or rather its targeted audience, a dark

sense of history, a heritage noire, which in turn unsettles its confidence in the

present.

AcknowledgementsThis paper is a version of that given at `Public History Now: First National Public

History Conference’ , Ruskin College Oxford, 20 May 2000. My thanks go to Hilda

Kean and to the conference participants for their contribution to the developmentof the paper.

25. For further discussion on this point see R. Samuel & P. Thompson, The myths we live by, London:

Routledge, 1990, pp. 1± 21.

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