In Blair Witch, the horror sequel that thudded at the box office with all the grace of a terrified camper falling out of a tree, a group of doomed twentysomethings once again venture into the Maryland woods in search of a mythical evil. They’re kitted out with all manner of modern gadgetry, from GPS units to drone cameras, but after the witch starts doing them not-so-mythical harm, they’re unable to make their way out of the forest. Even traveling in a straight line brings them right back to the campsite where they started, and the world seems to fold in on itself; the sun stops coming up altogether, and the local guides they’d abandoned the previous day crop up again to say they’ve been wandering for nearly a week. Everyone is wandering around in the dark, and they’re getting nowhere.
It’s an irresistible way of looking at Blair Witch, which dutifully replicates and even directly quotes from the original Blair Witch Project but runs roughshod over its ingenious minimalism. What makes The Blair Witch Project and the best of its faux found-footage ilk work isn’t just their verisimilitude but their formal restraint. The subgenre deprives filmmakers of the tools they typically use to get under our skin, from carefully composed shots to intricate editing to ominous music—or, more precisely, it forces them to use those tools in new, less apparent ways. For instance, instead of constructing elaborate set pieces, the Paranormal Activity franchise builds tension by not moving the camera; its signature is a static shot of an empty room, which the audience’s eyes nervously scan for a hint of supernatural presence. Blair Witch plays along at first, but director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett can’t resist the impulse to outdo the original, which proves catastrophic; there are flying tents, broken bodies, even a glimpse of the Blair Witch herself, but nothing as purely terrifying as the sight of a young man standing in the corner of an abandoned cabin, shielding his eyes from horrors that we can only imagine. Blair Witch’s anemic box office performance suggests that no one was crying out for a follow-up. (It did so badly that Joe Berlinger, the director of the generally-despised but comparatively successful Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, suggested he might be due a belated apology.)
But if there’s one thing we needed less than another found-footage horror movie, it’s Ryan Murphy’s take on the form. Where found footage movies draw strength from their rigorous simplicity, Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story revels in lurid maximalism: two-headed women, ghosts in bondage gear—this show has everything. So when it was revealed that the anthology series’ sixth season, whose theme was kept secret up until the moment of its premiere, would take the shape of a reality TV show about a couple haunted by 16th-century ghosts, it seemed like a potentially profound mismatch.
My Roanoke Nightmare, as AHS’s show-within-the-season is called, starts off as the story of Shelby (Lily Rabe) and Matt (André Holland), an interracial married couple who relocate to rural North Carolina after Matt is assaulted on the streets of Los Angeles. The locals, who look like they’re on a break from shooting a sequel to Deliverance, take an instant dislike to the out-of-towners, even though Matt grew up not far from the ancient mansion he and Shelby purchase as a means of starting over. While he’s out of town for work, she starts imagining things (or is she?): a freak hailstorm of human teeth, figures in colonial garb trying to drown her in an outdoor hot tub. Eventually, she and Matt’s sister, Lee (Adina Porter), are lured into the basement by a creepy videotape, and when they emerge, the house has been festooned with hundreds of strange symbols made from sticks and twine—symbols that bear a strong resemblance to the ones the Blair Witch likes to hang in the trees.
Although it’s clearly riffing on The Blair Witch Project, My Roanoke Nightmare isn’t framed as found footage but as a series of re-enactments, narrated by the characters through talking-head interviews. As is its wont, American Horror Story underlines the artifice by having different actors play the “real” people: Sarah Paulson steps in for Lily Rabe, Cuba Gooding Jr. for André Holland, Angela Bassett for Adina Porter. Logically, that kills any hint of tension, since we know that whatever happens, the characters are still alive to tell the story, and in any case, nothing we’re watching is actually happening, but the show’s grasp of horror techniques is solid enough that it manages to stimulate a fair amount of reflexive dread. (I’m not ashamed to admit I hit the pause button several times.) FX isn’t releasing episodes of the new season to critics in advance, but at this point, it’s at least worth holding onto the possibility that the apparently self-defeating format is a setup for some future twist: Maybe it’ll turn out all the interview subjects are dead, or they’ll be gruesomely murdered while calmly addressing the camera.
It’s certainly an excuse for leading viewers into a hall of mirrors: In the second episode, which aired last week, Shelby and Matt discover a video diary left by a half-mad college professor (Denis O’Hare) who reveals that their house was once the site of a nursing home where two sisters murdered several patients—a story that, further blurring the lines between fiction and reality, is clearly based on the case of real-life serial killers Gwendolyn Graham and Cathy Wood. The house’s present-day inhabitants begin seeing visions of its murderous former occupants, but the show also dramatizes the professor’s stories as he’s telling them: a re-enactment inside a found-footage video diary inside another re-enactment.
The season’s real issue, at least thus far, is that American Horror Story’s penchant for stacking one freaky thing on top of another clashes with even the constructed reality of (fake) reality TV. By the end of the second episode, we’ve seen a man with a pig’s head on his shoulders being roasted alive and a wall festooned with what appear to be twitching severed baby’s arms, and there have been hints that the season is building up to an explanation of what happened at Roanoke, the early American colony whose 117 residents disappeared in 1590 without leaving a trace. (AHS already alluded to the centuries-old mystery in its first season.) That’s too much to pile on the “reality TV” form, whose effectiveness rests on feeling like what we’re seeing really happened, or at least could have. On American Horror Story, we can barely believe our eyes, and for My Roanoke Nightmare, that might be a fatal flaw.
