So, after many years I finally rented and watched the Blair Witch Project. I am sick with some kind of throat infection right now and I am lying in bed and bored and just watching movies.

I didn't really understand why it is a horror movie. Simply getting lost in the woods and/or not having adequate equipment and supplies while in a wilderness setting is in and of itself much more scary than weird noises at night or kindergarten art projects hung up in the trees.

Just from having played this game, all kinds of questions were running through my mind about the protagonists of the movie.

*Upon losing the map and appearing to walk in circles while using the compas, why didn't the film students attempt to navigate by stars and walk in a chosen compas direction? Even people who played the original Operation Flashpoint would think of this...remember the level where you actually have to look at the sky and navigate using the stars in order to escape from the Soviet camp and return to NATO-controlled territory?

*Why did the film students not bring enough food for their excusion, but they apparently brought enough film, batteries, and light bulbs to be filming and running 2 cameras 24/7 for days after running out of food?

*Why are they shown running out of food but not water? For that matter, why didn't they bring some iodine tablets along for a situation where they needed to drink river water?

*Why didn't they bring any firearms? Getting lost in the woods, getting bitten by a rabid dog, and then dying a screaming madman is far, far scarier than any of the supernatural elements portrayed in that film.According to a report I found Maryland veterninary labs reported 431 confirmed cases of rabies in 2007. You know what else would be a lot worse than what is portrayed in that film? Accidentally stumbling upon a meth lab and being murdered (or worse) by the meth maker(s). That right there would be getting into Devil's Rejects or Hills Have Eyes territory. According to this website the students could have brought rifles or shotguns with them legally on their expedition. Handguns are probably legal to carry around in the woods in the middle of nowhere but apparently transporting the handguns in their car would have technically been illegal, but that's only if none of the students had a CCW. Even the "Wilderness" DOS game would sometimes spawn you with a Ruger Security Six revolver which you could use to shoot dangerous wildlife such as rattlesnakes or what have you.

The list goes on and on the more you think about it. Radios, MREs, wool clothing (as opposed to cotton blue jeans), a first aid kit, etc. would have been perfectly reasonable and in-character things for people to take if they were planning to navigate off trail in the woods for a couple of days. As a gamer, you think of all this stuff the moment you imagine a trip like that through the woods because you're thinking about your character sheet and all these EQ lists full of camping and survival items.

I think it would have been scarier if the film had just been about a bunch of retarded film students getting lost in the woods and slowly dying of starvation and exposure it would have been a lot more harrowing and disturbing than it was when they tried to include the supernatural elements.

You're over thinking things again. The answer to almost every one of your questions is "because not everyone knows what they're doing outside of the big city." As a Scout and a gamer, I gave up on trying to understand how most people act in the woods (and what they do or don't bring with them) a long, long, time ago.

Critias is 100% right. The long answer though...



Because most people wouldn't recognize the Big Dipper if they were launched at relativistic speeds directly into Polaris. If the movie were filmed 10 years later, they'd have run out of batteries for their ipads and would be wondering what to do next. People learn as much as they need to operate, and generally not an iota more.



They had to toss out the food in order to store more batteries.



Maryland generally isn't too short on water. That at least is sensible. Never in my camping in the area have I been more than a few miles from water (and water is generally easy to find - down).



Because it's Maryland, one of the most liberal states in the union. It would have been problematic. Plus, their film students, not generally known for their love for killing things.

But yeah, the movie is goofy. I laughed through it. At the time, most of what made the movie interesting was the huge ad campaign which genuinely had people believing it was real. The internet was young, and people were so trusting...

Yeah... Attempting to apply logic to 95% of all horror movies is a failing proposition. You end up with a 5-minute story about how someone heard something strange, called the police and/or drove away to a far-away location and didn't interact with the plot.

I just finished watching The Mist. It wasn't bad for a low budget movie, but it didn't do very much besides for what H. P. Lovecraft and many others had done in the past. The basic premise was that a bunch of New Englanders got stuck in a grocery store when one day a giant mist enveloped the whole area. The mist is filled with giant killer insects who do horrible things to people who get caught out in the mist, but for some reason they can't break into a grocery store, or any place enclosed with windows and doors, such as a car. So, if the windows are broken or the doors were left open, they come in and eat everyone. But if the windows and doors are closed somehow they leave you alone. So the New Englanders are stuck in there improvising crappy weapons because none of them have guns and there's all the psychodrama and SAN loss and so on.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0884328/

I thought, only one person in the whole store had a firearm on them? LOL, in my house I have over 2,000 rounds of 7.62x39 WP, maybe 2,300 rounds of 5.56 NATO and .223 Rem, and I'm running low on .45 ACP with only 1,300 rounds or so. If that story took place at my house, I could get two assault rifles, a Mosin, and a mossberg 590 into play, along with 2 .45 caliber pistols, a .357 magnum revolver, and a TT-33. The best part about all this is the fact that I have made a point of having 7-10 magazines for each weapon, as well as couple high capacity mags for one of the .45s. The movie would have gotten a lot better by changing into Aliens instead of The Mist because I'd just give a weapon to each person, and then we'd fan out and concentrate firepower when we finally needed to leave in search of supplies of what have you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49OZ0M_0fhg

And of course when you think of it, which movie is better known? Aliens, of course.

This reminds me of the time I played a horror game at a Con. We played a bunch of people who had to stop for some reason at an old house for the night until we suddenly started to hear strange sounds and seeing strange things on the security cameras. The GM planned that we'd set up traps and try to hold the place. I just went to the car and drove away, expecting them to have that covered. They didn't, tried to find a way to make me die anyway. I don't remember if they did or not.

Up until the end I was wondering if the mist was a psychotropic hallucinogen and everyone was imagining the giant bugs. Would explain why sealed areas were "safe".




There are, in fact, tons of places where maybe only 1 in 20 people owns a firearm.




-k

You know, I'd be interested in seeing a geographical breakdown by state and city of the percentage of the population that actually walks around armed as a matter of course. Law-abiding citizens, I mean; I think we can sort of take it as read that gangbangers are armed.

@KarmaInferno: That would have been about a million times more awesome than the actual movie. I had some problems with The Mist. I thought it was okay, and in particular I'm a sucker for small scale sci-fi movies where it's really about the five or six people in the film and they aren't trying to save the world. I thought the ending was cheap but there's no real point in getting into spoilers.

I'm not a horror movie guy, although I like a lot of the movies that overlap horror movies in the Venn diagram of gamer geek interests. That said, the movies I have no interest in are the ones like The Strangers. I caught part of it on cable, maybe the last 2/3rds and it was (to quote a particularly savage review of the Wolverine movie) like "being called stupid by a stupid person for two hours." This isn't meant to take anything away from those who enjoyed the film, but for me movies like that aren't tense or scary or interesting, merely incredibly frustrating.

I guess it comes down to watching movies about stupid people doing dumb things. A lot of movies fall into this trap, but I guess horror movies are more prone to it because of the sheer number of people they have to get into harms way. It's lazy writing. There are horror movies that avoid this trap Silence of the Lambs leaps to mind, though I have little love for the sequels), but those seem like the exceptions rather than the rule. If I were to pick a bone with The Walking Dead, this would be it.

I much prefer movies where the characters are smart. My two favorite examples aren't from the horror genre, but are geek movies all the same. Sneakers and Serenity. Both these movies feature characters who don't make dumb mistakes, which isn't to say they don't screw up. But they generally are pretty clever, cover their bases, and still have to scramble like mad just to break even. That's a lot more exciting and engaging for me than watching someone bungling into harm's way because they're a moron.

Someone should remake Blair Witch with a laugh track.

The thing you need to remember about the Blair Witch Project is that it isn't a good movie.

It didn't have to be a good movie. It was made on an absurdly tiny budget.

Most of its popularity came from good advertising and the 'this really happened' recovered footage gimmick.

Apparently Heather Donahue claims that since starring in BWP she has encountered discrimination and therefore did not get any more roles.

Discrimination for what? Being a hot white chick?