1999Dirs. Ed Sanchez and Daniel Myrick
In a film peppered with spine-tinglingly creepy moments, it still wasn’t difficult to select the very creepiest. Just the thought of it sends shivers down my spine as I type this.
Josh, Heather and Mike travel to Burkittsville (formerly Blair), Maryland, to interview locals about the legend of the Blair Witch for a documentary Heather is making. The locals tell them of a hermit named Rustin Parr who lived in the woods surrounding the town. He kidnapped local children and brought them to his house. It is said Parr brought the children into his basement in twos - he could apparently feel their eyes staring into his soul, so he would kill one child while making the other face a corner. He would then kill the child – rooted to the spot in fear - in the corner. Parr eventually turned himself in to the police, claiming that the spirit of the Blair witch convinced him to kill the children.
After a couple of harrowing days and nights lost in the forest, Josh disappears and Heather and Mike come upon an old house in the middle of the forest. Searching frantically for their friend inside the house, they become separated and increasingly panicked. Eventually Heather follows screams into the basement where she is greeted by the sight of Mike standing stock still, facing a corner… Something attacks her from behind and she drops her camera.
The sight of Mike standing in the corner is so simple and uneventful, yet because of the story of Parr and his bloody exploits – and the fact that something so wilful and terrifying ensures he doesn’t move from his post in the corner – so incredibly affecting. We know what’s coming and its immense creepiness lingers long in the mind afterwards…
5 comments:
Yeah, this gave me the creeps for a long time. In fact, I just got a shiver.
I always was very freaked out by this entire sequence too. It is the scariest moment of the film and that house is so incredibly frightening to top it off. Great choice!
I love that scene and I agree that it's pretty fucking creepy.
james: Bingo! that was the scene, or perhaps the shot, that still gives me the Heebie Jeebies.
I still think that was the most frightening film I've ever seen. It was the only film I ever watched that actually frightened me. Most modern "horror" films I simply think of as gross and not frightening at all. The older films - the classics - like Whale's Frankenstein, I think of as beautiful. -- Mykal
Agreed, so simple yet so effective, I still stand behind BWP as being one of the most brilliant films of the 90s!!
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