I had to pee about halfway through The Blair Witch Project, which is nothing to write home about really—I rarely make it all the way through any movie these days because I’m OLD—but at that point in that particular movie, I was really glad to have an excuse to excuse myself, because all that camera jiggling was making me really nauseous and really motion-sick.

Damned camera.

When I came back from the ladies room, the theater was really dark (lots of scenes in The Blair Witch Project are shot in the dark with a shaky little handheld camera and bad green lighting). I couldn’t see very well, but I made it back to the balcony by kind of feeling my way along and counting my steps, plopped myself down in my aisle seat, and rested my hand back on husband’s thigh.

Then the snickering started. And it wasn’t coming from the screen.

So I looked around to find the source, and when I looked to my right at the man sitting next to me, I realized I was resting my hand on the thigh of a total stranger. His kids, my actual husband and my stepdaughter—all of whom were sitting in the next row back, just above us—all of these people were watching me and giggling.

“You’re not Gary!” I shrieked. To which the stranger replied kind of creepily,

“No… but I could be.”

I took my hand off his thigh and moved back to my assigned family fast, while everyone had a good laugh at my expense and the teenagers on screen screamed in the woods and disappeared one by one, courtesy of the Blair Witch, whoever the hell she is. The movie never tells you, really.  You get nauseous. They get lost.
The end. That’ll be $8 please. Have a nice day.

Since The Blair Witch Project was first released in 1999, pretend-reality-based flicks shot with handheld mini-cams or cell phones or whatever—have become a hot new trend in horror. I missed the cell phone monster extravaganza Cloverfield on purpose, since all the shaking in the promo clips brought back traumatic memories of fondling the wrong guy during the Blair Witch Project, but I was surprised by how good Paranormal Activity was, and The Fourth Kind filled my head with interesting thoughts, even though the film itself was every bit as awful as I expected it to be.

The managing editor here at Eye on Life asked me (after reading my Fourth Kind review) if I thought that there was some kind of connection between the nonsensical ending of The Blair Witch Project and the alien abduction insanity depicted in The Fourth Kind.

My kneejerk reaction was something along the lines of, “Yeah, they both suck and cheaply too!” but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that yes, a connection really does exist, and it’s actually way more intriguing than the bad camera work, cheesy plots, relentless hype, and bogus supernaturalism that ties these movies together superficially.

The Unblinking Eye

After watching The Fourth Kind I checked out Indiana University professor David Jacob’s alien abduction ICAR website (ICAR stands for International Center for Abduction Research). Jacobs is one of a crop of abduction researchers who believes (or says he believes) that the phenomenon is pretty much exactly what it seems to be on the surface: That is, that aliens have been abducting humans for many generations and are trying to create some kind of alien-human hybrid.

His latest idea is that aliens are taking over people’s brains in psychic fashion a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers. First they get in your head. Then they take over your head. Then they are you, or you are human on the outside and alien on the inside, or somebody else is in your body—or something or the Other. Let’s just say some kind of major switcheroo takes place, and it’s all very bad and menacing.

Jacobs and other researchers of the same ilk (like Budd Hopkins, for example) get most of their evidence from hypnotic regression. They know this is problematic. They give a nod to the dangers of psychological contagion (as in, they may be leading or even coaching their subjects to say stuff they want to hear) and then dismiss that danger as if just mentioning it absolves them of any methodological error.

The truth is, they don’t really care about contagion. Why should they care? Do you know how hard it is to get ANY book published these days? I’ll tell you how hard it is: It’s really, really hard. Their subjects know full well what they are expected to say under hypnotic regression. In fact, both men use advance questionnaires to weed out subjects who might not say what they need them to say in order to support their hypotheses (and keep their books in print).

Anyway, getting back to Jacobs’ abduction site:

At the website, David Jacobs talks about what he calls the alien ‘mind scan’ and its role in the abduction scenario. The aliens have huge black hypnotic eyes. Early in the abduction, one of them stares directly into the eyes of the human subject from a distance of only about six inches. There they are, human abductee and alien abductor, eyeball to eyeball: The alien gaze locks onto the human gaze and actually enters the human mind, thereby achieving total control over the abductee totally once that lock is accomplished.

I couldn’t help but think of how similar those alien eyes are (both in how they look and what they do) to the lens on a movie camera, and how similar the alien/human interaction is to the stereotypical “Look into my eyes!” interaction of the hypnotist/subject—a ritualized interaction that puts the willing hypnotic subject under the control of the hypnotist for as long as the session lasts. 

Structurally speaking, these alien abduction researchers mirror the aliens themselves in both their conduct and their methods. All of it is all about the total loss of control and the terror evoked when locked in the grasp of an unflinching gaze. And that specific drama is not that different from what happens when a movie camera ‘captures’ human action and in doing so defines and controls it.

The Camera as Alien Presence

The latest crop of cheesy home-camera horror films all cast the camera itself as a main character.

The conceit of film as an art form is that we agree to pretend for 90-120 minutes or so that the camera doesn’t exist. To the extent that any given director makes us believe this is so—that he isn’t there and neither is his camera crew—to the extent he can do that and do it well, we say he is a brilliant director.

Conversely, directors who constantly call attention to their own presence with fancy camera work, arty colors, and distracting set-ups are crappy directors. I have a special dark nasty room in my tiny movie-reviewing heart for directors like that; directors with severe art-ism who can’t stop kissing themselves in the mirror and declaring in their movies, “Look Ma! I’m filmin’ stuff! Look at me! Look at me!”

In Paranormal Activity Katie tells Micah repeatedly that he and his camera are the problem, not the paranormal activity occurring off-camera. As the movie opens, she chastises him for buying this camera and asks him again and again what he paid for it.

The camera starts to upstage Micah from the very start, and not just that: We know Micah is monster food early on. How do we know this? We know this because 1) he brought the camera into the house, and 2) the  character he plays is a smirking DAY TRADING dick with more money than a guy that age (or any age) should ever have.

Micah seals his own doom the minute he turns that camera on, and the movie makes this perfectly clear from frame one.

In all these handheld movies, the terror is created by the camera itself; not so much by what it sees, but by what it does not see. When the camera becomes a character instead of a conceit we acknowledge that its unblinking gaze distorts reality instead of clarifying it; that the camera makes us vulnerable, not safe. To make and watch these flicks we must break the social contract to pretend the camera doesn’t exist, and not just that, in breaking that contract we begin to see the camera as an elite, controlling, pain-in-the ass intruder.

The really scary stuff in Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project always happens off camera. This stuff is terrifying because it happens off-camera. We know the camera is trapping and controlling us, and that it reveals nothing except the menace we can’t see but now know about because of the presence of the damned camera.

In some sense the camera in all of these flicks literally is a damned camera.

Get that damned camera out of my face.

Get that alien gaze out of my face.

Get me out of hell.

Just Because I’m Paranoid Doesn’t Mean I Can’t Film Armageddon on My Phone

It’s hard to overstate how visual media have changed the world, and not always in a good way. Always watching, always being watched: These twin activities have transformed how we see our world and how we think about one another. When the world is defined by a lens, the out-of-frame moment will always be threatening, but so will the lens itself. This understanding lurks just beneath the surface of everything we do, and if you don’t think so, try teaching a film class sometime.

I taught such a class, briefy, in the early 1990s. I was offered the job by a generous department head who took pity on my pathetic dreams of the academy as a sort of Socratic paradise where people from all walks of life embrace the world of ideas and enthusiastically discuss them at length.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

OK, I ran out of good drugs. Now I write for the internets. Stuff happens.

But while I was teaching this film class (so I could have time to snap out of my blue collar delusions and get on with real life) I realized that the very act of thinking critically about film terrifies people.

Sure, a few black-sweatered imported-cigarette types (and geeks like me) get into that sort of chat big time. They drop names like Jacques Lacan and Derrida and Deconstruction and feel smarmy and warm inside. But most people totally freak out when you even sort of suggest that images can be used to influence and control others.

With film, we don’t just willingly suspend disbelief, we cling to wishful thinking and delusion as if they were life preservers—belief that the director is not there, that the lens does not exist, that if it does exist it does not lie, that film is an escape, not a prison. That’s what we wish and what we want. But part of us always knows that just isn’t true. And that part of us is always ready to be terrified.

The unblinking eye, the ominpresent lens is the common denominator that connects all these films to each other and all of them to the alien abduction cultural nightmare. Damned camera movies are like visual urban legends; they are our most visceral populist fears made film.

Culturally, we do have bad dreams from time to time. Aliens. The witchcraft trials. Satanist baby eaters. I happen to love dreams, all dreams—good, bad, quirky, surreal—but the most telling dreams of all are probably our nightmares. If I have a nightmare, I pay attention because something important is happening and I know I’m missing it. Until I ‘get it’ I’ll just keeping having the nightmare over and over again. When our culture has a nightmare I pay attention for the same reason.

Are people really being abducted by aliens?

Hard to say.

Now, look at the camera.

Smile.