Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 19, 2000, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Alfred Hitchcock once said that movies are like life with the boring parts cut out. If the boring parts cut out of The Blair Witch Project were pieced together, they might resemble The St. Francisville Experiment. This unbearably tedious exercise represents a new genre low for its combination of artistic incompetence and baldfaced aesthetic thievery.
Derivative product is nothing new in the horror field, but never in memory has there been a movie that so thoroughly poaches from a successful predecessor with such a lack of understanding of what made it work. Everything that Blair Witch’s detractors attacked about that film is true 10 times over in St. Francisville; it is deadeningly paced, uninteresting to look at, never scary and populated by characters who are so self-centered, annoying and uninteresting that you’ll be hankering for their deaths when you’re not praying for your own.
The setup is simple—and familiar: In Louisiana, a quartet of young people (none of whom have Southern accents) are sent into an allegedly haunted house with video cameras to record spooky phenomena; what we see is supposedly a conglomeration of their taped footage. But rather than allowing us to get to know these people as events progress, the movie introduces them as types: a self-confident “ghost hunter,” a cocky filmmaker (who disappears behind his camera for most of the movie), a New Age-y psychic who blathers about “white light” and a Valley Girl-esque history student who thinks it would be, like, cool to check out a real haunted place. Once inside, they tour the rooms, bicker, conduct seances, wonder where the funny noises are coming from and get on each other’s nerves without developing anything resembling convincing character conflict. And they spend forever talking about what they’re going to do instead of actually doing it.
One of the things that made Blair Witch so effective was how it taps into the universal fear of darkness and being lost in the middle of the woods. Here, the house’s lights are working and it’s made clear that anyone who wants to can leave through the front door. When the “paranormal events” finally begin—a good 40 minutes into this 80-minute movie—we’re treated to a chair that flies across a room, a bug in someone’s sandwich and rattling chains (ooooooh, scary!). And while Blair Witch broke with tradition by making its heroine the take-charge character, St. Francisville hews to the old standard of the two women becoming shrieking ditzes; yet when a chain falls mysteriously out of a fireplace, it’s the history major—the one most scared—who sticks her camera up the chimney to see what else might drop out of the darkness.
There are no writer, producer or director credits on the movie; the distributor would have viewers believe that this is actually real footage. Beyond the foolishness of trying to put such a stunt over on post-Blair Witch audiences, this approach only leads one to suspect that those actually involved had their names removed once they saw what they had wrought. Certainly whoever was responsible—filmmakers or actors—had no idea how to use point-of-view to enhance the tension or how to improvise believable or compelling dialogue. As one sits through a ripoff of Blair Witch’s “confessional scene,” the resolutely underwhelming climax and a final title card that negates any emotional investment one might have made in the proceedings, it is hard to recall a movie with so little to recommend it.
The sad thing is that in an age when many imaginative and innovative indie horror films are being consigned to the direct-to-video route, this one is guaranteed theatrical play by crassly jumping on a bandwagon. Trimark may squeeze one good weekend’s worth of business out of St. Francisville, but they might be advised to make sure the theaters are equipped with reinforced seats and puncture-proof screens.
