“How Do You Know It Was People?”: Mediating Plant Epistemologies in the Blair Witch Franchise

This paper explores the ways in which film and videogame horror produce vegetal remainders in the
process of mediating non-human senses of time and memory. Taking the Blair Witch franchise as a
case study, inclusive of Bloober Team’s (2019) videogame, I argue that these texts emphasise
inhuman qualities of space, time and ‘nature,’ using the frame of the found-footage aesthetics to tap
into post-industrial anxieties concerning climate and our planet’s huge, alien ‘plantscape’ (Hall,
2011:3).
Radical ontologies rejecting the primacy of the human subject, from Thing Theory (Brown, 2001) to
the Vegetal Turn, ask that we consider the implications of plant life as a mode of being which poses a
radical alterity to human subjectivity (Irigary & Marder, 2016). In this case study trees subvert
traditional hierarchies and epistemologies to suggest alien modes of causality and time, utilising
what philosopher Michael Marder identifies as Western society’s fear of plants (2014). In the original
Blair Witch (1999) and its sequel (2000) a mass of plant matter traps its occupants in loops of space,
time and forgetfulness. In the vast, undifferentiated forest of grey bark and branches, we are forced
to reflect on the plant world which predates us, and, eventually, will consume us (Keetley et al.,
2016:1). In more recent transmedia instalments, slippages between first-person subjective camera,
‘shaky cam’ and the nostalgia for 1990s VHS/Camcorder visual artefacts combine with narrative
thematics of familial trauma (2016) and PTSD (2019) to problematise our relationship to memory
and the indexicality of the apparatus. The deep time of the forest and its endless, repeating spaces
here frustrate attempts to tame the vast and irrational feedback loops of the biosphere and flatten
time into a linear narrative (Morton, 2016).
As horror concerned with memory, archive and the camera apparatus, rebooted and re-adapted as
self-referential film (2016) and game (2019), Blair Witch combines the extraordinariness of cosmic
horror with the banality of metonymic horror (Carroll, 2001) to reveal deep-seated insecurities
surrounding deep time and the revenge of our environment. Here nostalgia and memory are caught
in what Morton calls the dark, ‘looping’ time of ecological awareness.
Bibliography (Indicative):
Bogost, I. 2012. Alien phenomenology, or, What it's like to be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. (Posthumanities, 20).
Brown, B. 2001. 'Thing Theory', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 1-22
Carroll, N., 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, Routledge, New York.
Hall, M., 2011. Plants as Persons: a philosophical botany. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Harman, G., 2018. Object-oriented ontology: a new theory of everything, UK: Pelican
Haraway D. 1985. ‘Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s.’
Socialist Review, no. 80: 65–108
Irigaray, L. & Marder, M., 2016. Through Vegetal Being: two philosophical perspectives. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Keetley, D., Tenga, A. & Springer, L., 2016. Plant Horror Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction
and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK: Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kristeva, J., 1982. Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press.
Marder, M. 2014. The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Morton, T. 2016. Dark Ecology: for a logic of future coexistence, New York: Columbia University Press.
Wandersee, J. H. and Schussler, E. E. 1999. “Preventing Plant Blindness,” The American Biology Teacher
61, no. 2: 82, 84, 86,
The Blair Witch Project. (1999). Film. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), Film. Directed by Joe Berlinger.
Blair Witch (2016). Film. Directed by Adam Wingard.
Bloober Team. (2019) Blair Witch. PC game. Lionsgate.