I dont believe in no stinking witches!

• March
• 23

7:40 pm

Friday, October 20, 2006

I dont believe in no stinking witches!
Current mood: satisfied

Blair Witch

This story begins many years back as some of you may or may not recall. This phenomenon for a short while at least took the world by storm, but for a couple of guys from Clinton, it was more like the storm had come to us! It was just around this time in 1999′ when the Blair Witch came into my life. No, I didn’t date her or anything it was more like the devil had came to me in the form of a VHS tape. A girl I was dating at the time brought the movie over one night to my place with the idea that it might be a good “stay at home movie weekend” and many were generating a lot of buzz about the flick that no one really knew much about, just that it was suppose to be “Scary as Hell” as the cover so boldly suggested. She had known someone who worked at the local video store and was able to get a pre-release copy of it before it was in the movie theater!… let alone on video tape! She pop’s it in and for the next hour and a half I don’t think we said one word to each other at all. Our minds both racing to try and grasp what this movie was all about and if it was real or not. You have to understand that this movie was a low budget independent film and at this point absolutely no one was really paying any attention to it. All I remember from that first encounter with the Blair Witch was that I didn’t see any credits or actors at the end, the movie just stopped cold and there was just blackness as the VCR rewound the tape all the way back to the beginning. I looked at her, walked over to the TV, took the tape out and in my most paranoid yet stern voice told her “please! Never,… ever, …ever, ever, ever bring this devil back into this house! Please! Thanks! We argued back and forth as to who was going to take the tape. She wanted nothing to do with it as I who didn’t even want to even look at it! This thing made me feel creepy just sitting on my living room coffee table. I thought to myself “I need to find out more” I promptly went online as I do for most things I feel are bogus or full of crap and searched for what other people thought about it. To my surprise everything I read about this mysterious Blair Witch was right inline with the movie down to the tiniest creepy detail. Even the fan sights had these forums which talked about people who had gone to visits the supposed witch sites and others who showed a cult following to something that before this night I knew absolutely nothing about! I thought to myself this is pretty weird.. there was nothing I could find that even suggested that this movie was anything other than what it seemed to be… A documentary of true events. I told a friend of mine about it and we agreed to go see it a couple of weeks later when it came out in the theaters. Him and I don’t usually go to the movies together unless its a really big deal something that absolutely had to be seen. At this time there was still not a lot of talk about this movie in my town and this was the first night of its release. There was a little local theater near us no more than ten minutes away from home and we thought that that was the night we’d muster up the courage to check it out. For days I was hyping up the movie like I was working for the public relations firm for the movie studio or something. When I really like something I’m one hundred percent passionate about it! I got us both so anxious about going to see this movie you would think they were paying us to go and watch it! Well the theater started us off with a spooky vibe right off the bat as it was practically empty that night and we sat way up in the front so we can feel the radiation of the screen as it so brightly blinded us. The movie gave me the same creepy feelings it did that very first time I laid eyes on it. I don’t think either of us had before seen anything quite like it. We were skeptical and cynical about the whole thing but we were in no way prepared for the movie that was going to begin out in the parking lot. As we walked to my car still a little shaken up and traumatized from the experience we just witness. We begin driving and soon noticed that all the traffic lights on the street were out! Actually ALL the lights in the town were out. “That’s weird”, I thought. We drive though town and by the time we get to my road we realized that while in the theater there must have been some kind of freak storm that took out all the power. Driving down my dark forests looking road we can see all the branches and tree limbs on the road and the fall leaves completely covering the street. We get to my house and realize that there isn’t any electricity there either! I have always lived by myself so there was no one home, no one in the building, it was dark and black and windy and we just came back from the freakiest movie we’ve both ever seen! “This can’t really be happening” I kept thinking to myself, this is something that happens IN the movie! Not after you leave the movies! I found some flashlights and ironically found ourselves subconsciously re-living the movie as we point these candles and flashlights at each other and it seemed like the entire world was silent at that moment. We spent a whole five minutes there before deciding that it was too spooky of a coincidence even for two grown men it was just too scary to stay there and wait for the lights to come back on if ever. We jumped back in the car speeding off.. looking for some lights and civilization that would make us feel a little normal again as this night seem to be getting worse by the minute. We realized that the local outlet mall was open and operational! No one from our town would actually GO to the outlets to hang out, not unless it was absolutely necessary. Trust me though, this was a night that keeping our cool was the last thing on our minds. I get out of the car just appreciating the lights and the cars and the people. Sometime later that night the lights finally came back on and things looked like they had gone back to normal, however this was a night I’m not ashamed to say I had to sleep with the lights on for once.

For those who don’t know or haven’t yet witnessed this Halloween phenomenon, the movie the Blair Witch was for me a very cleaver once in a lifetime experience. Soon after, the movie was all over the news and TV and soon the mystery had faded and the fear had passed. What made this movie unique was that it played on people’s own personal fears and uncertainties. There were no witches or ghouls in the movie, it got its power from letting you make up the evils in your own mind! The witch symbolizes everything you’ve ever been afraid of!

When you leave that theater you will either succumb to your fears or you can embrace them and reflect on why your even afraid at all? Man is always afraid of what he does not know. I feel the key to being in control of your life is to attempt to face those fears! Watch them on the big screen if you will and think about why it was that you were ever afraid in the first place. From then on I was able to face many uncertainties in my life head-on with a better understanding of what it means to really be scared. Fear is nothing more that your confrontation with the unfamiliar or unknown. If you learn to embrace life and its infinite knowledge you will find your fears soon take a back seat to your happiness and confidence.

As always,

thanks for reading.

T.