In an exclusive arrangement with the filmakers' families, noted journalist D.A. Stern and private investigator Buck Buchanan have unsealed the official police reports to compile the first fully detailed and illustrated investigative report on one of the most disturbing cases in Maryland history.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but slim read does little to add to BWP Legend,
This review is from: The Blair Witch Project (Tpb) (Paperback)
To add to all of the tie-in books and dead-serious "mockumentaries" comes this - "The Dossier", a scrapbook of the private investigation surrounding the disappearance of Heather, Josh and Mike in October of 1994 and the recovery of their footage. By now, everybody knows that our victims vanished while shooting a documentary about a witch who has haunted generations of citizens of Burkitsville (nee Blair), Maryland. Despite an exhaustive search, the footage and Josh's car remained the only evidence that our heroes were even in the forest. The recovered footage - the film and the videotapes meant to document its creation - depict Heather, Josh and Mike being stalked by an unseen presence, desperate to escape a seemingly endless forest.
Ofcourse, the real fun is how the film blurred the lines between fact and fiction on both sides of the camera (film students go into the forest, believing the witch to be a legend, until the legend comes for them; ads for the flick hinted that the story of the missing students was true when it wasn't). "Dossier" follows tradition - picking up the story from the perspective of private investigators hired by Heather's mother to solve the mystery. Like the film, "Dossier" keeps the tension high by masking its subject well - the "narrative" consists of memos, letters and transcripted phone calls compiled by the Buck Buchanan detective agency. It's obvious that nobody attached to that project believes in the witch legend - unlike Heather & Co., they're not trapped inm any real forest - though their memos only detail weirder findings, and an enigma whose solution becomes more elusive. While "Dossier" knows the tricks of the film, it brings less to the legend than the film did. It's a short, thin read, one giving us bits without fleshing much out. We learn of the origins of Blair and of Elly Kedward, the future witch, but her story never goes beyond one we can label as man's cruelty to man. (A mysterious, if otherwise decent figure, Kedward is driven into the woods, presumably to her death; successive generations are haunted by her.) We also learn more about Rustin Parr who murdered a group of Burkittsville children in 1941. (Parr's story is an oddball footnote to the legend - he's obviously a nut, but devotees of Blair Witch can't divorce him from the legend. More on Parr, later.) Unfortunately, maybe to stay subtle or to avoid going beyond the contours established in BWP, "Dossier" has a patchwork narrative missing details or at least fails to highlight them - including some of the details inexplicably glossed when you'd expect them to be as much an interest to us as to Buck Buchanan. We learn for example that Heather's camera and film were found inside of a wall of a ruined house by a group of students, the implication being that the ruin dated to civil war times, and the sections in which the camera was found looks to have been undisturbed since then. At this point, having only caught the flick on cable, and missed both the "Curse of the Blair Witch" and any of the special editions of the original (and having read none of the books) I naturally assumed at first that the ruin was the abandoned house in which Heather and Josh enter at the end of BWP - one which is apparently that of Rustin Parr (the walls are stained with the fingerprints of his child-victims). However, it's soon apparent that the ruin nothing like that house, and that Parr's house no longer exists. Nevertheless, "Dossier" passes the house by entirely, and does little more with the footage itself, even though it's the only tangible evidence of mystery. I thought "Dossier" and BWP consciously decided on keeping Parr conspicuously nearby but separate, only adding to the sense of mystery - until Parr became the subject of a "Blair Witch" - licensed video game. Two things kill the fun offered by "Dossier" - it's a slim read, and it lacks any of the tension suffered by the heroes of the film. Though the heroes of "Dossier" raise and then eliminate various possible solutions, they miss entirely the possibility they're victims of an elaborate con perpetrated by Heather and crew (sure they're working for Heather's mom, but even so they're still investigators). The "con" idea would have given "Dossier" a severely needed shot of tension, and is only one idea that could have really fleshed the book out. It's clear from "Dossier" that both it and the movie drew from the same inspiration that led to the novel "A House of Leaves" - a huge, dense mystery composed of overlapping narratives (with their own fonts and piles of footnotes) centered around a mysterious documentary about a house whose interiors rebel against laws of time and space. With a bit more effort and time, "Dossier" could have done much to enliven the mystery of "Blair Witch" while providing a great alternative to readers intimidated by the insurmountable size and narrative of "House". Instead, it does neither.
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