Thoughts That Go Nowhere: Predictability

 Hello there! This is an instalment of a section of this blog that I'm calling 'Thoughts That Go Nowhere', which is basically what is says on the tin. I've been having little internalised debates and analysis sessions with myself about numerous aspects of numerous films so why not finally put some of them down in black and white for no one to really care about! A heads up, these discussions will very rarely have any fixed or final conclusion to them and are lacking in any great epiphanies or revelations, they just simply are- thoughts that go nowhere. 

Recently I have noticed that a common point of comment or critique in regards to films is how predictable the story turned out to be- "oh yeah it was okay, I kinda guessed the ending though", "I knew what was going to happen like five minutes in so it was so boring"- and those opinions are completely valid and justified, the sense of discovery and surprise is snatched away from a viewer when a movie makes itself too predictable.

But does predictability always have to be such a bad thing?

I'm going to kick this particular thought of by using a personal favourite film as an example and reference point: The Blair Witch Project. 

Now it's not by any means unknown that every genre will have a set of narrative traits and cliches that make a movie exactly that- a genre movie. When looking at the horror genre we know that the conflict will be created from good vs evil and humans vs monsters and that disaster and terror is going to strike our main characters at some point in the story- often used as the inciting incident of the piece. Numerous pop culture jokes can be made about the stock characters in a horror movie- 'the nerdy nice guy that dies first', 'the pretty girl that walks into the room where the monster is'.

However, I'm not going to look into the traits of the horror genre in general that cause a film to be predictable just yet- I'm going to look into things that this film does uniquely to pretty much spoil it's story but in a very effective way. As a heads up, I'm going to be breaking my analysis of this movie down into what are essentially lengthy bullet points, since my skills in putting my point across in paragraphs aren't the best.

1. Opening Scene- To begin at the beginning, the text card that appears to essentially introduce us to the movie and it's concept reads: 'In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.'. This small line of text has immediately indicated the outcome of this movie- our main characters will meet the worst of outcomes, what we assume to be death- but it also fills us in on the minor details of what we are seeing on screen, such as the students are going to film a documentary. This means no screen-time is wasted by dialogue or actions to explain this to us, all that's left to know is what the documentary is about and this leads me smoothly into my next point.

2. With the outcome of the story pretty much 'spoiled' by the opening text, the amazing affect that this creative choice has can be seen executed perfectly in the scenes directly following the title sequence through a technique called Dramatic Irony. The basics of dramatic irony is that the audience knows something that the characters don't- simple yet powerful. So in this scenario we know that our main characters meet an unhappy end somehow, due to the context of it being a found footage movie and with text reading that they have disappeared, and this turns lines of dialogue such as "So, essential reading- 'How to Stay Alive in the Woods'- because you never know what's gonna happen" from light teenage humour to morbid foreshadowing. I believe that dramatic irony is one of the main driving forces of making dialogue scenes in this movie have a much greater impact, to the extent that the dialogue in very early scenes begins to paint a picture of the forthcoming story for the audience. 

3. When our main characters first begin shooting some of their documentary scenes in Burkittsville, we have a series of interviews that the students are gathering to try and use in their documentary. Again we see the use of dramatic irony here when the students discredit and mock some of those who take the stories of the Blair Witch seriously. But we also see the interviews being used to present us with the potential climax of the movie. One man on interview describes how the deaths of the missing children- whom inspire the whole story of their being a Blair Witch- were carried out. So now barely 15 minutes into the movie, we know not only that the characters are going to die, we have a good sense of how they are going to die. Since we have an idea of what will become of the characters at the end of the story, we are enticed to see elements of truth and take actual warning from the legends in which the locals talk about, The suspense of the story now lies in waiting for the characters to believe the stories, and to acknowledge that there is real danger.