BlairWitch Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Despite having previously established my feelings about this weekend's Quarantine, I must confess a new willingness to give it a fair shot later tonight. Regardless, this week's Cinematical Seven is all about first-person horror movies, with a couple of oh-so-subjective stipulations:

• We're leaving The Blair Witch Project (1999) out of this. It might not have been the first of these movies, but it was undeniably the most successful and influential. There are only seven slots here, and I feel like everyone has already made clear whether they find this scary or just stupid (I fall in the former grouping, though I say this having not seen the flick since my teens). If you still feel the need to take BWP to task, comment away.
• Also omitted will be The Last Broadcast (1998), which drew mild controversy at the time of its release for its similarity to Blair Witch. I'm only not writing about it because the copy of it sitting just over on my shelf here has remained unwatched. My bad.
• The previous film by the guys behind Quarantine is The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007), which -- being in the hands of the Weinsteins -- has not yet seen the light of day beyond a couple of festivals. Having not attended any of said festivals myself, I'll just sit here and guess that it'll get dumped to DVD (probably under the Dimension Extreme label), and not any earlier than next year at that.

Now, on with the list...

There doesn't seem to be any middle of the road for people who have seen The Blair Witch Project; either you love it or hate it. Personally, it was one of the scariest movie-going experiences of my life, and I have seen a lot of allegedly scary movies. I recall an e-mail to my brother saying I had found the <bleep>ing Holy Grail of horror films. The pseudo documentary style drew me into the film in a way a dramatic narrative couldn't, and a packed opening weekend audience filled with similarly riveted people made for a highly memorable experience.

As reported back in October right here on Cinematical, Blair Witch co-director Eduardo Sanchez's new film Altered is heading directly to DVD on December 19 thanks to Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Dread Central reports (by way of Fangoria.com) that the trailer for Altered is up and running on Youtube. I'm inclined to think the second directorial effort from one of the guys behind Blair Witch would be worth a look, but the trailer doesn't do much to inspire me. The film is about four men who were abducted by aliens several years ago. A fifth person who was abducted at the same time has never returned. Now the four survivors have captured one of the aliens and it's payback time. It's a premise with some merit, even if it does remind me of Fire in the Sky, but if I hadn't read the synopsis I would have been totally lost, as the trailer does nothing to explain what the film is about. On the strength of Sanchez's first film, I'll still be checking out Altered, but I don't see this trailer convincing anyone to watch the movie.

[Via Fangoria]

Sure, you'd like to audition for a movie. Heck, you watch lots of movies, and you know you could act better than half those losers they cast in them anyhow. But you don't live in New York or Los Angeles. Maybe you live in Duluth, or Oklahoma City, or Juneau, or Addis Ababa, and it's not so easy for you to get to an audition. Now's your big chance.

Daniel Myrick, one of the creators of the hugely successful The Blair Witch Project (which, I swear, still creeps me out even to this day), is casting for his new film, a supernatural thriller called The Objective -- and he's doing his casting online, all the better to find "real people," hopefully with real talent. They're casting for the following roles:

• Warrant Office Wallace "Wally" Hamer (age 45)
• Captain Matt McCarthy (age 34)
• Peter Sadler (age 36)
• Corporal Timothy Cole (age 25)
• Master Sergeant Ben Kitch (age 33)

Interested? Go check out the official casting site for the film. Sounds like the parts they're casting are all for men but hey, if you're a woman and you want to give it a shot, it's no skin off our nose. And hey, if you end up getting cast in the film, drop us a line and let us know.

The reason that many film festivals have a "midnight" category is that they need somewhere to throw the horror films, and they're sure not going to include them in the competitive sections. And yet, horror earns a place at most FIlm Festivals. The genre is a big part of independent filmmaking, partially because horror films can cost so little to make, and partially because they are so easy to write. No other kind of film allows for nearly as much suspension of logic and belief, and many errors, inconsistencies and far-fetched twists can be excused by either paranormal subject matter or by just plain pardoning of horror in general.

The annoying thing is that with so many films being made, so few have anything to offer. The horror genre, primarily divided into either the slasher or the haunting variety, basically only has one plot: characters run from something frightening and try to stay alive. As long as there are shocks and scares, there is no need for surprises. As your typical ghost story, The Gravedancers is pretty straightforward and predictable, but it has something that I -- a longtime enthusiast of paranormal true-crime but never a fan of horror fiction -- could appreciate and enjoy. It gives its ghosts their own back stories.

Even though Ed Sanchez has gone from a Blair witch to a captured alien in his newest film Altered, the writer/director is still itching to produce a prequel to the 1999 blockbuster that warned cameramen everywhere: You can do without the extreme close-up of snot out the nose. Please. Screw the witch, that snot haunts me to this day. It's been almost six years since Blair Witch 2: The Curse of the Big Budget failed to do anything but disappoint audiences, yet Sanchez hopes his latest scares Lion's Gate back into "we'll do anything you say" mode.

Speaking to readers on Haxan, he says "I'm really hoping ALTERED does well enough so that LION'S GATE steps up and takes our PREQUEL idea seriously." Immediately following this (coded?) message, thousands of hardcore fans began a marathon mission to decipher the super secret hidden meaning behind those mysterious CAPITALIZED words. Here's wishing them good luck on that journey.