Another Blair Witch

Once in a while, a film comes along that shakes everything up. By everything, I mean the marketing strategy, the distribution, the technique, the story execution, the viewing experience… and almost everything else that makes a movie what it is as a complete product. The Blair Witch Project was like that.

At a time when the Internet was merely a site for the official websites of movies, this little independent film used it as a marketing tool to spread the rumor that the film was really recovered footage. Their website had a complete back story supporting the film—there were photos of police investigating the scene, notes from the investigation, more interviews with the locals, and all that jazz. Interest in the film spread like wildfire and the film, which cost a total of $750,000 to make, grossed over $248,000,000 worldwide.

It helped that there really was a legend about a woman accused of being witch in Burkittsville, Maryland, the site of the film, from when it was still called Blair. There was more for word-of-mouth to spring from. Later on, of course, when all the buzz had died down, we learned without a doubt that the film was just that, a film, and that it would soon be followed by a rather ordinary, blah, big fail of a sequel.

I’m talking about The Blair Witch project now because I believe that it’s one film that can’t be replicated. All efforts to do so would never attain the same success. Paranormal Activity, which also employed the found footage gimmick, knew that, and to harvest the rewards of word-of-mouth marketing, they took their strategy a step higher: they scared a small group of people, filmed their reactions, and waited for this small group of people to tell their friends, and so on and so forth until it got Steven Spielberg’s attention and found international distribution with Paramount.

The Fourth Kind, directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi and starring Mila Jovovich, goes far beyond what The Blairwitch Project and Paranormal Activity did: it claims that the film was based on actual case studies of alien encounters and alien abductions and even goes to the point of claiming the names of the main characters had been changed to protect their identities. I don’t know about you, but in my book, that’s already selling an outright lie.

At the beginning of the film, Jovovich introduces herself, warns us that what we are about to see is very disturbing, and tells us to choose what to believe. Her reenactment of “Dr. Abigail Tyler’s” story is woven together with clips from Osunsanmi’s “interview” with the “real” Dr. Tyler, who looks every bit the person who’s just been abducted by aliens: she’s pale, paralyzed, gaunt, and looks like she’s just one foot away from insanity. Of course, the title before her name still gives her a semblance of credibility.

Then, the disturbing reenactments, again, interspersed with “actual investigative footage”: a person trashing about as he encounters an alien “in his mind,” a UFO flying towards Dr. Tyler’s house to abduct her daughter, an alien voice conversing in what they have discovered to be Sumerian claiming to be God… What you see is disturbing, alright. And if you had bought into the lie at the beginning, you’d find yourself believing every single bit of it as the film comes across more as a documentary than a movie.

This is not to say that The Fourth Kind is a bad film as horror films go. It is captivating from start to finish, and the alien encounter scenes stick with you so much that even after you find out that everything that you’d just seen is fake, you’re more open to believing.

Osunsanmi wields his strategy expertly. If you wanted to, say, wag the dog in politics, he’s the man. 

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