Nine years after the American Declaration of Independence, a woman called Elly Kedward was hunted out of the small town of Blair, Maryland, for crimes against children. In October 1994, three film-makers tried to document her legend. A year later, their footage was found buried in the woods. No trace of them remained.
Such is the mythology of The Blair Witch Project. It's the most profitable film ever made - but not because it scares you. The terror it provokes isn't that of Alfred Hitchcock, John Carpenter or Stephen King. This is primal energy restored as primal fear: folklore, fairytale, what John Updike so wrongly interpreted as "the life-lightening trash of pre-literate peoples".
It's happening to millions of literate people in a cinema and on a worldwide web near you.
The Blair Witch Project is a fairytale for the video-game generation - Hansel and Gretel, Babes in the Wood, mixed with a Red Riding Hood where Peter never gets to kill the wolf. It is cautionary, not true. Targeted at the 15-24 age group, it does for them what narratives such as the burning of Bridget Cleary did to recalcitrant young women a hundred years ago.
Mention the word "fairytale" and you think of Hollywood: a fairytale ending means Richard Gere marrying that Pretty Woman Julia Roberts in a contemporary Cinderella myth. But that's not how fairytales used to be. Before the Grimm Brothers, Walt Disney and mainstream Hollywood sanitised them, fairytales and folklore terrified people precisely because of their cruelty, and their explicit gaze at the randomness of a threatening world. Children were abused, murdered, abandoned. Women who talked too much had their tongues cut out. Men who disobeyed their fathers lost a limb.
SUCH wonder stories were strictly pedagogical: they taught younger, inexperienced people the boundaries of social convention by using terror as a primary tool. Terror set the limits of exploration and of choice - you didn't feel the fear and do it anyway, you fearfully decided not to do it at all. Central to their working was a belief in magic, be it the amulet that protects you from evil or the cloak you don to shelter you from the chaos reigning outside. Far better to understand the world as a place occasionally disrupted by a malign external force than to integrate that evil within the community you knew. This very clever movie-in-a-movie pretends to be too tough to spook. Would-be documentary-makers Heather, Josh and Michael don't believe in a Blair Witch: it's incompatible with the idea of America, Heather believes. Washington DC is in the next state; with neighbours like that, nature and superstition must be firmly under control. But in the process of making their story, the film-makers invent a new American tale. This tale not only replaces the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the chat rooms of the worldwide web, it offers young American viewers a spin within which they can fit all the high-school shootings and the drive-by killings that cannot be integrated with the American dream. This is not us, it is someone or something somewhere else and more powerful than us: classic folklore, debated in the new format of the web.
So, in the best oral traditions, the film's reputation spread by word of mouth long before it was released to the 27 screens that initially agreed to show it. Web users debated its fantastic "mythology" (check out the official site) and credited its fantasy as something many were more than ready to believe in.
Before they enter the woods, the film-makers interview local people about the legend of the witch and eyewitnesses testify to the authenticity of the tale. But what starts as a clever attempt to document an age-old legend becomes a lesson in what happens when a civilisation forgets its primal fears.
The woods they enter are age-old locations for quest fables: the wilderness is a traditional site of quest and discovery. Bruno Bettelheim called forests "the place in which inner darkness is confronted and worked through; where uncertainty is resolved about who one is; and where one begins to understand who one wants to be".
Classic film conventions are broken as jerky shots affirm authenticity in the style of home movies, art school essays and those endless amateur clips on TV shows from true crime to missing persons series.
Fairytale formats are rearranged, too. In this marriage of film and fairytale, technology becomes the new talisman: whoever holds the camera or the DAT machine carries an amulet with real magic force.
As long as the mysterious woods are mediated by the film lens, the explorers are given magic protection and their safety seems guaranteed. (This emblematic transfer updates mobile phones as the miraculous medals of the present.) Lose your technology and you are damned because even technological magic isn't strong enough to combat the greater powers outside. Red Riding Hood's cloak becomes a hi-8 camera. The scraps of bread left as a trail by the thoughtless babes in the woods becomes a map destroyed in a fit of pique. A tent is the magic cloak which will protect them. It does not.
No American has feared the wilderness before now. Hemingway thrived on it; Cormac McCarthy uses it as the key site of confrontation. Road movies and cowboy tales showed us deserts, canyons and forests as places where you test your manhood and find yourself. Here, a woman enters the buddy bunch on equal terms, although she starts off in control because she holds the camera. Gender loses its place in face of the primal fears. Shifting relationships of power and self-discipline hold out a promise of redemption that is not kept. Road movies and cowboy genres always conquered the wilderness by licking it into shape, controlling it as a means of buying into the great American myth that nothing can stop the advance of the American dream. But this dream is fundamentalist. The dream is a nightmare. Its lessons are the parables told by preachers in circus tents to masses of migrant workers - believe in evil, respect its power, fear the threat of damnation for those who lose their way and know it is outside. The computer generation is lost in the woods. They can't find their way home.
Medbh Ruane is at mruane@irish-times.ie