The invisible monstrous-feminine: the Blair Witch and her heterotopic woods

What is absent in the pseudo found-footage film of Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's The Blair Witch Project (1999), is the visual depiction of the Blair witch. The nontraditional tactic of leaving the witch in the woods without form stands in contrast to other folklore and fairytales that perpetuated the mythic figure of the crone, an old woman whose decaying body represents the blurred line between life and death. The crone- witch corresponds to Barbara Creed's notion of the monstrous-feminine and her analysis of Julia Kristeva's abject. As her polluted, filthy old mark her a phobic referent, the crone-witch becomes the non-object that draws the subject to the regenerative womb. However, what draws a parallel in the BWP between the monstrous-feminine crone and abjection is the witch's invisibility. Her woods, in fact, share an affinity to what Michel Foucault calls heterotopias, which are counter-sites, adjacent to real spaces, but are outside of all places. As heterotopias mark the virtual point between the real standpoint of the subject and the non-real space, the geographical woods are represented as the virtual gate between the real woods and the invisible ones. As she eludes the cameras of the characters and their effort to submit her to the controlling documentary gaze, the Blair Witch maneuvers between both spaces, never relinquishes her commanding visual perspective and subsumes the students in her abject realm.