Author Archives: Chris R. Morgan

Punk and Pain

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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“I honestly thought we were like Joy Division, or early Pink Floyd, and if we took enough drugs and went dark enough we’d hit the pinnacle of art damage and that the world would stop.” So wrote Sean Madigan Hoen in 2006 in the liner notes for The Scar is Our Watermark, a compilation album for Thoughts of Ionesco, a Dearborn, MI-based noise/metal/whatever band he fronted from 1996 to 1999. Even for those readers who don’t immediately know what he is talking about, the arrogance of that sentence, both in style and sentiment, is practically suffocating. This was a band that started when he was barely out of high school and ended when his peers were barely out of college, a band whose notoriety was at once on a practically need-to-know basis up until very recently and often tangentially related to their actual creative output. Even Hoen himself is humbled by this. “How naïve,” he follows. And yet through it all, I can’t help but excuse him, not so much out of empathy as a creative person, but as someone who has tried anything in hopes of overcoming something worse.

That art is about struggle can seem rather meaningless when parroted as pure rhetoric or mantra, particularly by those who offer little evidence that they themselves have surffered. The artistic struggle is something that has to be presented as an example in order to be appreciated, if not understood; and audience as much as artist must be culpable in it in some way, whether as willing partners or as spiteful antagonists. This perhaps goes some way in assessing Thoughts of Ionesco and the rather unusual circumstances of their obscurity.
 

 
Rock fans often view the latter half of the 1990s to be the nadir of the genre, a cesspool even. Somewhere in between Weezer’s release of Pinkerton and Deftones’ release of White Pony, the metric of artistic quality in rock somehow got centered on The Goo Goo Dolls, or Matchbox 20. Soon enough one could hear the likes of Marilyn Manson and Billy Corgan declaring their wheelhouse all but dead. For a while it was difficult to tell which type of person was more annoying: the rich Chicken Littles or the fatalists who decided to stop worrying and love the backwards-capped bomb. In my old age, however, I should probably thank them. This idea that culture is a kind of Schrödinger’s cat, existing only when it is seen, will live as long as brute capitalism is the order of the day, and thank goodness for it, it may very well save lives.

Perhaps for a clever few, rock can be reinvented, but for most others it can at least be toyed with, leading to a free and natural flow of ideas almost flood-like in its power. This was never truer than it was in the American punk scene at the time. Whether out of sheer ambition or sheer boredom (both, I suspect), young musicians in basements and VFW halls were rekindling what was thought to have been conclusively extinguished with the advent of Bush. Subgenres that are now more or less commonplace took root in this activity; for a more detailed look at this period I recommend Jason Heller’s AV Club essay series Fear of a Punk Decade, for my purposes here I’ll be focusing on what is, for better or worse, the “metalcore” branch of the era, a melee in which Thoughts of Ionesco moved but neither thrived nor survived.

As an underground band, Thoughts of Ionesco clearly had the best possible timing to exist. Its lifespan coincided with Coalesce, Cave In, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Drowningman, Converge, Botch, Kiss It Goodbye, etc., bands that have shared venues with Thoughts of Ionesco, and bands that have gone on to become influential in their own rights, even classic. Their skills were not lacking in comparison. Though a three-piece, Thoughts of Ionesco had clear technical prowess that matched its primal power. Like Dillinger they had an ear for free jazz-influenced acrobatics, like Botch they could sustain a groove when the feeling caught them, and like Converge they had a scorched earth intensity. Their four albums were made quickly and cheaply (under $500 by Hoen’s estimation), but whereas most of their peers have one signature album regardless of longevity, Thoughts of Ionesco have two, thanks in part to their drummers: the aggressive founding member Brian Repa and the more virtuosic Derek Grant, who briefly substituted when Repa “lost his mind.” They play on For Detroit, From Addiction and A Skin Historic respectively.
 

 

1998’s A Skin Historic is an indulgent, blackly hedonistic album, born of a diet of The Birthday Party, King Crimson, Swans, Kyuss, John Coltrane, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller among others; its most apparent centerpiece is the contorted, relentless seven-minute opus “Upward, Inward, and Under.” Repa’s return brought them back to basics with 1999’s For Detroit, From Addiction, which came out of listening to Funhouse and driving “around the darkest parts of the city at night drinking Mickey’s and beating on [Repa’s] dashboard with our fists.” For Detroit does not necessarily boast any standouts compared to its predecessor, its uniformly hard-charging dynamic runs throughout the tracks basically demanding a complete listen, which is now made possible via iTunes or Grooveshark. The opening track “Learning an Enemy” is every bit as ferocious as its closing track “For an End.” “Waiting on Their War” backs off somewhat with a reflective first half before it, too, is riveted in frenzy.

Less approachable, however, are Thoughts of Ionesco’s lyrics, what Hoen describes as “very personal diatribes about self-violence.” With physical CDs of theirs hard to come by, and nothing much available online, we are left at the mercy of Hoen’s pained screams which evolved from guttural growls on A Skin Historic to the harried shrieks of For Detroit. Through that voice we are given utterances of sparing clarity, glimpses of an impulsive sort of vulnerability that we’re not supposed to know but that can’t really be helped in captivity. “I love the sickness that I am/I love the weakness that I am/The weight of your world can’t cut the skin I’ve made/I’m not alone/I am the sum of all pain,” he says on “The Scar is Our Watermark,” as far as I’m able to determine.
 

 
Then in 1999, Thoughts of Ionesco quit, just as The Dillinger Escape Plan released its game changing Calculating Infinity, and two years before Converge redrew For Detroit’s blueprint with Jane Doe and basically all their releases since. Nothing was heard of Thoughts of Ionesco for the next seven years, which seems to have been fine with the Hoen. “I spent many years disowning my involvement with that band,” Hoen told Revolver earlier this year. Hoen continued to pursue music of a more consciously mainstream kind before delving into writing. The winter of 2014 saw the publication of Songs Only You Know, a memoir detailing the tragic personal circumstances that propelled him into art as much about the art itself. What could not be said before is now coming out clearer than ever. “The band was an outlet for rage and sorrow, and there were moments of truly primal release,” he said in Revolver, “[I]f it’s only darkness you’re seeking, it will chew up your soul with unbelievable speed.” ;

“We weren’t scenesters, we weren’t punk,” the liner notes go on, “we were a small band of Detroit area rejects and depressives who meant every moment of it.” To put it with less bluster, however justified, Thoughts of Ionesco were artists, at least when compared to the artist-entrepreneurs that Dillinger, Converge, Coalesce and others became. “We didn’t want friends or lovers or regular jobs, just the music.” They showed a marked indifference to economics, choosing to work with small, local, barely solvent record labels. They toured under abject conditions with property damages as much a part of their expenses as gas or food. Pure art of Thoughts of Ionesco’s kind is expensive, as much emotionally and physically as it is financially. The specter of mental illness followed the band throughout their existence. Having not yet read Hoen’s memoir I can only irresponsibly speculate; I can say more certainly that they were one of the least inhibited bands to have existed in that era and not always to their advantage. Videos online show a band putting every bit of energy they have into exhibiting their damage, most notably Repa who became their Chuck Dukowski figure. This often led to literally causing damage, making them more of a spectacle than a performance unit. Destruction of instruments and other property is a contentious subject for musicians as a matter of vanity and practicality, yet in Thoughts of Ionesco’s case it’s an act fraught with anxiety.
 

 
Perhaps most expensive was the cost of sharing the art with others, a notion that the band approached with ambivalence at best, outright contempt at worst. In the course of its existence the band grew tired of its scene. The best known non-local bands they thank in The Scar is Our Watermark are the grindcore staple Brutal Truth and Coalesce, Thoughts of Ionesco’s more intellectual counterpart. For their later live shows they employed a saxophonist and played less frequently with hardcore bands. “Like their namesake … the band’s disconnect with the audience was a source of frustration,” wrote a reviewer for Lambgoat.com in 2006. When they finally stopped it seemed a moment of relief for everyone.

If there’s anything to be gotten out of Thoughts of Ionesco, aside from some notably wrenching music, it’s probably a lesson in costs, in art but also in authenticity. Authenticity is something that’s cherished by punk audiences—and Americans generally. The point, it seems, of each generation is to be more authentic than the last. Often these generations can or choose to do little more than to identify what is authentic and mimic it to the best of its collective abilities. We see as much thoughtful sincerity as we do righteous antagonism and blind nihilism from our heroes on stage. To a certain extent they believe, or at least they want to in a bad way. But things have a way of reining them in; commerce perhaps, or just classic good sense and propriety. Occasionally, though, if one believes deeply enough and asks repeatedly enough, one just might get what was asked for, provided the people who deliver it are the ones who pay.

Out from the Wilderness: The Blair Witch Project at 15

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I first saw The Blair Witch Project when it came out, in the summer of 1999, in Summit, New Jersey, with my dad and one of my brothers in tow. The theater was sparsely filled, with no more than two other spectators. Of the three of us, I was the most eager to see it, being at once an avid fan of horror and a teenager all too easily susceptible to clever marketing, the unprecedentedly dedicated publicity rollout of this film’s benefactors being no exception. It was a short film, 77 minutes excluding the end credits. When it was over one of the spectators turned to my dad and said, “Now to go figure out what that was all about.” My dad shrugged in agreement. Genre films did nothing for him; he had fulfilled a parental obligation and quickly forgot what had happened.

I, on the other hand, could not forget. Quite frankly I was dazed and a bit shaken trying to piece together what I had just seen. I’ve had dreams like this, I thought, ones in which I found no exit no matter how far I ran, no shelter no matter how loudly I screamed, and cut off at the abrupt insistence of someone I could not see coming, though somehow knew was always there.

Eyes tend to roll to revelations like that, whether it’s the eyes of my dad towards me, of philistines towards snobs, or of film students towards everyone, and I can’t say I blame them. But it’s not an experience that anyone willfully avoids if it’s presented to them. Indeed, movie theaters and their unceasingly inflating admission charges have little other justification today. Some films enrapture us by their very nature and without proper consent. They have a way of upending logic and sense as viewers know them, and they don’t care to look away and don’t mind that they just dropped their last Sour Patch Kid. People who have seen, say, The Night of the Hunter, Blue Velvet, The Shining or The Room might be more inclined to agree with me. I have viewed The Blair Witch Project many times since it came out on VHS and cable, and now on instant streaming services. Whether it is the second viewing or the thirtieth, it is never quite like the first, but even so, the film’s initial hold has not let me go after all this time.

The Blair Witch Project is a film about a legend that has itself ascended into legend, its story and that of its creation and arrival are well-known even to those who haven’t seen it. In the mid-1990s, two young directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, had a clever idea of taking three unknown actors into the middle of the Maryland woods with two cameras, camping gear, and a loose script partly improvised by the actors, partly left for them piecemeal each day, while also rationing their food and depriving them of sleep. It told of three film students who went off to film a documentary about a local folktale only to disappear, leaving their unfinished film behind. Filming took eight days with an initial shooting budget of somewhere between $25,000 and $50,000.

It was not a new idea to anyone who has seen Cannibal Holocaust or the BBC’s War of the Worlds-style mockumentary Ghostwatch, but the film resonated, and profited. In its July 30 wide release it grossed nearly $30 million, placing it second in box office grosses that weekend, right behind Runaway Bride, and grossed $249 million worldwide. The film also polarized, and continues to do so. The Blair Witch Project currently holds a 6.4 rating on IMDB from 153,093 users and an average three out of five stars based on 1,921 reviews on Amazon. It is not hard to see why.

The film’s release was preceded by a hype effort that was an art unto itself. It included in-depth television documentaries and, most memorably at the time, a website, airing the possibility that the story was not fictional. They played on the film’s atmosphere, detailed the extensive background of the legend itself (the documentaries Curse of the Blair Witch and The Burkittsville 7 were so extensive they faked newsreel footage and other documentaries), while showing little of the actual film. But those looking for escapist schlock along the lines of The Haunting and Deep Blue Sea, both released earlier that summer, were doubtless disappointed by the film’s stark minimalism, its meandering pace, the grating agitation of the characters, scares that were at once too far apart and too subtle to be effective, and most of all the abrupt, ambiguous ending. “Where is the suspense? Where is the involvement? Where is the identification?” writes one IMDB reviewer. “The spectacle of three film-student types traipsing off cluelessly (sic) into an unfamiliar forest with a reported history of gruesome violence is just plain stupid.”

I would not put it past Artisan to have thought that they were releasing a gimmick film at the very least, one that would pay dividends either way, whether as a hyped flash-in-the pan or a low-simmering cult hit like Memento would be two years later. On the surface it would seem to have managed both. But the film’s unlikely lifespan past its own zeitgeist seems more than merely cultic.

The Blair Witch Project is one of those films to which simple appreciation is unsuited. It is a film designed for obsession. The obsession, however, is less about loving it or hating it profusely than it is about filling in its blanks or confronting what it already has to say head-on. The former is more prevalent, at least while it continues to be good business.

As the catalyst for the continuous deluge of “found footage” films, The Blair Witch Project is less an influence than it is a blank design template. Whether it is the big-budget disaster movie like Cloverfield, the real time noir of Catfish or Amber Alert, or the steady stream of low-budget indie horrors, which vary in quality from the clever Grave Encounters to the clumsy The Ridges, the objective is the same: to perfect its ancestor’s flaws while conceivably reaping its commercial success.

This is not to say that these films are bad, at least in isolation. Grave Encounters boasts a hackneyed asylum exploitation plot and scares that seem more artificial with successive viewings, but as a satire on paranormal reality shows—specifically Paranormal State—it is spot on. (Credit where it’s due, the very meta sequel is actually successful as a send-up to the abortive Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.) The V/H/S omnibus series offers the form in much shorter bursts, downplaying the tension and dead air with head-spinning—but no less self-aware—ridiculousness. Skew was made just as cheaply as Blair Witch, if not more so, but works its way to deeply troubling self-portrait of psychological tailspin. Perhaps the most complimentary Blair Witch descendent is Noroi (The Curse), a Japanese film released in 2005. Running at just under two hours, Noroi is perhaps the most overstuffed out of any of these films, and yet it is every bit as strange and engrossing as its predecessor, assuming the dimensions of a conspiracy film as much as a horror film, but defined every bit by its own world than by replicating and adding to a preexisting model. Amassed as one phenomenon, however, one gets a collective missing of the forest of the trees. Quite literally in this case.

The overriding complaint, whether from fans or filmmakers, is that the film simply didn’t work, let alone live up to its hype. The “less is more” approach to horror is nothing new, one need only recall producer Val Lewton, who helped turn a budgetary necessity into high art with films like Cat People. But in a period when gore effects were no longer much of a challenge or financial strain, Blair Witch seemed regressive. In truth, however, it was propulsive; in other words the film may just as easily have worked too well.

“If you’ve ever been camping in the woods,” Matthew Doberman wrote in his review of the film on AllMovie.com, “you know that a campfire’s light doesn’t reach more than a few feet into the darkness, but someone in that darkness can see you for a mile.” Ideally viewers are expected to relate to protagonists, otherwise what’s the point of horror? Yet that relation is often undercut by our remote viewpoint, sometimes voyeuristic, sometimes godlike. Indeed, Halloween literally opens with our view through Michael Myers’s eyes. Blair Witch forced that issue, putting us in the center of that darkness right alongside its doomed characters. How their experience is seen is changed; indeed, it is limited only to what they’re own senses detect, from the distant laughter of children to the directionless frenzy of the final minutes. That ending is important. Though bloodless and abrupt, its violence outstrips more gratuitous and iconic scenes of the decade—the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs, for instance—in stark brutality of purpose. The pointlessness of times spent yelling at people who don’t exist to “Just look behind you, shithead!” is laid conclusively bare. The film invites hate for ending without answers, but also for coldly reminding the audience that lives can end the same way.

The Blair Witch Project has not been immune to plaudits since its release, having been acknowledged as one of the best films of the ‘90s. Though its retrospective rankings—the 39th and 127th best film of its decade from The AV Club and Slant respectively—seem more obligatory than honorific. Horror films in general do seem sectioned off from greater zeitgeist acclaim, to be sure, but The Blair Witch Project seems more and more an odd film for its time regardless of genre. As we collectively struggle with ‘90s nostalgia, we are led to recall an aesthetically loud time. Tones were bright and warm, even if the working material was gruesome, attitudes were lightly ironic when they weren’t earnest but tended to give way to sort everything out neatly and calmly in the end. It was an endless summer at the End of History. Even Fargo, one of the coldest and most brutal films produced that decade, was a triumph of good over evil.

Standing in starkly athwart everything that preceded it, The Blair Witch Project was having none of it. Its tones were muted and damply autumnal when they weren’t entirely monochrome; and screen caps out of context make it barely distinguishable from a snuff film. Though it has a soundtrack, in the form of a character’s “mixtape,” filled with goth, industrial and post-punk jams, none of it was featured in the film. Hope gave way very quickly to confusion then to frenzy and then it ended. Cinematically, the film seemed poorly timed, coinciding with indie upstart fatigue wrought by films like Boondock Saints and Go. More broadly, however, it came just in time as the decade’s fatigue with itself was cresting. A period of economic optimism gave way to Y2K panic, school shooting panic, and a whole host of uncertainty waiting in the next decade. Just as Clueless, or even genre peer Scream, is the best film of the mid-‘90s, The Blair Witch Project was the best film of the end of the ‘90s.

The legacy of The Blair Witch Project is not altogether bereft of bright spots, however. For if it was too late for the 1990s, then it was too early for the 2000s.

The internet of the late-1990s was very much the internet of marketing gurus, who perhaps saw Haxan’s and Artisan’s online rollout for The Blair Witch Project as the final frontier in taming the newfangled medium for their own purposes. Though it’s an early example of viral marketing, the website, relaunched on the film’s tenth anniversary, is less impressive now, especially in comparison to the revolution the film itself set in place.

Though the found footage trend as we know it wouldn’t come out for another decade with the release of Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch had an immediate effect on amateur filmmakers who wasted no time filming their own parodies. Three parodies I was able to find, the clever Wizard of Oz-inspired The Oz Witch Project and The Wicked Witch Project and the absurd Blair Warner Project, were all released in 1999 and can be viewed, appropriately enough, on YouTube. Perhaps its most fascinating, if indirect, descendent is the Slender Man, a uniquely 21st century folklore figure, a kind of urban legend as meme, incubated on message boards, crowdsourced and appropriated for fan fiction, visual art and film, and causing great controversy along the way.

This is not to say that The Blair Witch Project was a prophetic film; rather it was transitional, taking resources and measures already available and reapplying them wherever its makers’ limits and imaginations found agreement. What we have 15 years later is film that remains strikingly contemporary, especially compared to a film like The Cable Guy, released only three years before Blair Witch, which now looks hopelessly antique. To be sure, the film’s success hasn’t done its makers any substantial favors. Myrick and Sánchez have gone on to work separately, making mostly direct-to-DVD fare. Sánchez has recently taken up the found footage approach again with a contribution to V/H/S 2 and Exists, a Bigfoot movie seeing release this year. Its stars have been similarly low-profile since the film’s release, popping up in TV roles and other independent films. Heather Donahue, who won a Razzie for her performance, has since retired from acting to grow and advocate for medical marijuana.

The Blair Witch Project in the end is a one-hit wonder of sorts, though fitting to its other strange attributes it is a very rare kind that retains and acquires relevance over time rather than instantly depleting it.
 
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Chris Morgan is editor and co-publisher of Biopsy magazine. He has previously written for The Los Angeles Review of Books and The American Conservative, among other publications .