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Heather Donahue in a scene from the film 'The Blair Witch Project', 1999.
Heather Donahue in a scene from the film 'The Blair Witch Project', 1999. (Photo: Lauren Film/Getty Images)

What Horror Films Teach Us About Staying Alive in the Wilderness

Listen to your primal fear or die trying

Published: 
Heather Donahue in a scene from the film 'The Blair Witch Project', 1999.
(Photo: Lauren Film/Getty Images)

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In the 1999 horror flick The Blair Witch Project, three college students hike deep into the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland, a bleak forest allegedly haunted by a witch. On the sixth morning, two of the group members wake to find the other missing鈥擩osh, the alpha male of the group. You'll probably remember this part: the last we see of Josh is a bloody collection of body parts鈥攈air, teeth, tongue鈥攖ied to a bundle of sticks and wrapped inside scraps of his flannel shirt.

Common sense says we should learn from the Joshes of the genre, but more than that, we should pay attention to the tactics of anyone who makes it out alive. Horrors visited upon victims in the wilderness tell us to be wary of something less obvious than just bears and tent slashers. So what is it?

In America, we have a thing for glorifying those who charge聽God-like聽into the chaos of the wilderness and erect order. The 19th-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in his Frontier Thesis, described this enterprising attitude as 鈥渄ominant individualism.鈥 Teddy Roosevelt called it 鈥渞ugged individualism.鈥 The kids of The Blair Witch Project (and its two sequels, one of which premiered in September) are cast in this mold. They plunge into a wilderness with their cameras, hoping to map, plot, and make sense of the space.

Whether nature is cast as the unforgiving setting or actively evil, it is hubris that gets people killed here.

There's an underlying dynamic present in a lot of horror films set in the outdoors: a group of ignorant city folk returns to nature (intentionally, for a trip, or unintentionally, as moored passersby), and nature responds in kind, upending our concept of the fearless individual. Sometimes, it adopts a more disinterested role: “You abandoned me for civilization, now I don't really care what happens to you.” Take the well-known 2006 film The Hills Have Eyes: a road-tripping family becomes stranded in the New Mexico desert, a landscape that serves as a neutral (albeit barren and unforgiving) host to the torture the family endures from the hills鈥 mutant-like inhabitants.

Other times, nature adopts an attitude of entitled retribution toward those who left it for modern luxuries. Look no further than one of the most well-trod plot points in the genre: when technology fails as salvation. In The Ruins, a movie about carnivorous vines that mark victims for death and tear them apart, the doomed group enters an ancient temple hoping to find a working cell phone. (Turns out those sneaky vines are harmonizing to make the sound of a ringtone.) In Blair Witch, the kids try to use a hovering camera to find a way out of the woods. Guess how that turns out.

鈥淣ature is already a terrifying force,鈥 says Jonathan Barkan, horror aficionado and managing editor of the blog . 鈥淚t鈥檚 not that people have shunned nature鈥攊t鈥檚 that they forgot or grew up from the stories that scared them as children. They don鈥檛 respect it.鈥 Whether nature is cast as the unforgiving setting or actively evil, it is hubris that gets people killed here.听Those who are rewarded in outdoor horror (by not dying, ideally, or by dying last, something of a Pyrrhic victory) are those who abide by their 鈥済ut instinct from millions of years of evolution.鈥澛燭hat gut instinct is the fear that says,聽Nature has bested you, so wise up while you still can.听

Think Alan Grant, the paleontologist in Jurassic Park who's rightfully terrified of velociraptors. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1987鈥檚 Predator. He survives (sans-gun!) being stalked by a creature with thermal imaging capabilities after crawling through mud. The alien, he comes to realize, cannot see him because he鈥檚 so well camouflaged, holding Christ-like onto branches in the dirt. He is unarmed, dirtied, and primitive, the picture of surrender in the face of his enemy. But he makes it out alive.

This is what outdoor horror teaches us about how to approach the wilderness: surrender. To the idea that your fancy gear can save you, that you鈥檒l create order in the chaos, that you know better than nature. Do that, and maybe you鈥檒l survive.

Lead Photo: Lauren Film/Getty Images

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