(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* So much unfiction on my mind recently. I'd been meaning to look up stuff about the Sci Fi channel getting in trouble for promoting The Blair Witch project as a real documentary. They ran Curse of The Blair Witch, a mockumentary about the upcoming film, with no disclaimer and a lot of work to make it seem real. There was a weird split when the movie come out. A lot of people thought it was real, or was supposed to be real. Some people had no idea it was meant to be real and were confused by people saying it was. That 'found footage' style it was shot in was really rare at the time. My take at the time was that it was a hoax, but I thought it was a hoax in a different way. I thought the Sci Fi channel had been so overeager for 'real paranormal' stuff that they'd been duped, as opposed to being very much in on it.

I will someday make some sort of longpost about all unfiction, because I like it but some things definitely crossed a line like Blair Witch, Ghostwatch, and that one long running twitter unfiction series that I can't quite find the name of right now. People who think Gonchposting crosses a line sort of worry me.

By the time I do get my thoughts together people will be tired of me rambling about it.

* Jamie Campbell Bower finally has his twitter back.

* Musk continues to be a case study in how strongly the deck is stacked in favor of the rich and connected, and in favor of those who control companies other rich people are invested in.

* I am over 200 posts into my photo-a-day blog and it's going... okay. I need to get a better icon for that blog and find some ways to tweak it a little, theme it a bit more.

Comments

[brigid]

(saw this via Latest Things)

I remember Blair Witch being promoted as real complete with the actors actually hiding out for quite a while so they couldn't be found. It was a whole THING and it kicked off Found Footage as a viable form of horror media. Fake documentaries, a sound track "based on a mix tape found in the car," etc. are fun additions to that mythos and one I wish more found footage stuff really leaned in to.

And Musk absolutely was born on third and thinks he hit a triple.

[olivermoss]

Hi!

Blair Witch is one of those things where some people still believed it a decade later, and other people don't believe that it was a whole hoax that people really fell for it. There's such a weird split! I love found footage, unfiction, pretending certain canons are real, etc.

I really want to write some fiction involving found footage someday. I have some ideas, maybe I'll get to it!

[mistressofmuses]

I remember the sort of "debate" around Blair Witch, and the people who thought it was real vs. the people who were sure it was fake. I didn't see a lot of the marketing at the time, but I remember the SHOCK for some people when it was revealed to definitely be fake.

I think it managed to tread that "plausible" line a lot better than later imitators, which leaned too heavily on the scares to the point it was OBVIOUSLY not real.

While I didn't know him at the time, and wouldn't for a long time yet, a lot of Blair Witch was filmed in a park right down the road from where Alex lived, and so the people who insisted it was real (bafflingly, including some locals who "suddenly remembered" all the Blair Witch stories from when they were kids) drove him NUTS, haha.

I really could do without the ~discourse~ around Goncharov, damn. (Not you. The people who are insisting it "crossed a line", and is "actively perpetuating harm" and such.)

While I feel like we should all have known (and in many cases did) that wealthy men will always be shielded from consequence REGARDLESS OF WHAT THEY DO, it's still depressing to see it play out. Again.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it depending on where you got your info from. The Sci Fi channel went hard on trying to present it as real for a marketing stunt and people trusted TV channels a lot more back then. This was before The History Channel became the ancient alien conspiracy nut job o rama. Everything I saw presented it as real and they got into legal trouble for not having a disclaimer. The supplementary materials were 100% presented as documentary. But people who just saw the trailer had no reason to think it wasn't a standard horror film. Paranormal Activity didn't have actual TV networks trying to convince people it was real and showing interviews with police officers carefully produced to see like real news footage they were cutting to. If any found footage project did anything like Blair Witch I haven't heard about it.

Well, sort of. Someone locally tried to do an urban legends film along those lines and I fucked it up for him. Last I heard he still angry with me.

That must be weird, dealing with people who 'remember' it and true believers tromping through. There's a new blameitonjorge video about an actual true crime case that got called 'the real blair witch' by the media and when I saw it the comments were full of people talking about when they found out the movie was fake.

[mistressofmuses]

I did do a... medium dive - not a truly deep dive, lol - into the advertising at the time a few years back. (I think when I was in college, maybe? That was one of the films we watched in my horror films class.) It definitely provided a really interesting sort of meta story around it, where all these other things were filmed - like the supplemental interviews, missing posters for the kids and things - providing the framework to make the movie convincingly "real." I actually find that stuff really interesting and cool as a sort of meta storytelling, epistolary thing... except that I can also understand why that's still LYING when you use it to drum up publicity, and mislead your audience, ha.

I haven't heard of anything else that went that hard on it, not when it came to constructing a meta story around it. Paranormal Activity sort of waded into the super shallow end of it at first, but never committed or really tried to convince anyone, especially after it got popular.

Ooh, if you ever want to share the urban legends film thing, you should, haha. Not sorry you fucked up the plan, lmao.

Though yeah, sounds like it was definitely a weird experience having people who suddenly bought in completely, despite being locals who should have known better. People are weird, lol.

[olivermoss]

I think supplemental materials can be cool, and I do enjoy pretending canons are real. That was a thing in The Black Tapes fandom before it fell apart.

I think I've mentioned it before, but the urban legends film was someone trying to build on the Polybius urban legend and treat it as real. They were transparently using Blair Witch as a template and pretending to be a researcher. There was a group of 3 and they were trying to do a kickstarter presenting stuff as real investigations on various online forums and saying the kickstarter was to make a proper documentary. But they stole a lot of art, including from artists I was familiar with. So, I went around posting the actual source of their 'photos' and other things. I *think* what happened is that the two reasonable guys of the bunch went into to do a long running Polybius podcast using the plotline they developed, but being open about it being fiction. But the third guy just kept raging out over someone sabotaging his dreams and years later was still raging about 'that bitter, horrible LJ mod' who destroyed his project.

It's like... don't lie and don't steal art, it's not hard. Also, don't use communities I run to promote hoaxes.

[mistressofmuses]

I do enjoy the "pretending the thing is real". (I'm very sad The Black Tapes fell apart, because it sounds like it started so strong!) I do understand the fun of pretending something is real, because it IS fun to believe in something unexplainable or more-than-real...

Unfortunately, there IS a line between people doing that deliberately/choosing to suspend their disbelief/buying in because they want to... and a hoax.

But OH YES, the Polybius stuff. A fun urban legend... and something that would certainly lend itself as an excellent starting place for works of horror or creepy fiction.

But uh... stealing other people's art ain't it. I am VERY glad that you called them out on that and gave the proper credit to the actual sources.

I hope the jackass guy dies mad, lmao.

[olivermoss]

With The Black Tapes and Goncharov, it's clear from a google search that it's fake and people are generally open about it being fake. There is a frame around the fakery. A nice, clear boundary. ACD Sherlock Fandom and Buckaroo Banzai fandom also pretend it's real in some spaces. But, again, clear lines. We aren't trying to convince people that Buckaroo Banzai is a dramatization of real events.

I know some paranormal unfiction has crossed some lines. I need to track down which those were at a point. There are people desperate to believe.

[mistressofmuses]

I can definitely understand the need for that sort of boundary (and when that boundary DOES exist quite firmly and is easy to find, that's when it gets frustrating that people want to wank about it.)
Sometimes it's just FUN to pretend that a thing is real, even when you know it isn't. Pretending that you live in a world where it is real, or creating meta or fanworks or things from the perspective of it being real is a fun thing to do! I enjoy that sort of epistolary storytelling, the same way a "found-footage" film or story told through fictional letters works.
That doesn't have to be everyone's idea of fun, and I know some people hate it.

Unfortunately, especially for people with poor discernment or issues with reality, there can be that desperation to believe, and there can be people who will be dicks about trying to cross that line and draw those people in. Cult and conspiracy tactics on a small scale.

Intent is a tricky thing to measure, but this is one of the cases where I think it really does matter - someone INTENDING to trick people is perpetuating a hoax, where people having fun playing with a concept like the Goncharov stuff aren't.

[mxcatmoon]

Did people think it was real when the movie first came out in the theater too? If so, I don't remember that, I always knew Blair Witch was fiction. I remember awhile back there was a show on one of the channels supposedly about a discovered mermaid. The way it was shot (and advertised), it looked like a real documentary. I dislike it when they try to make fiction look real. The lines are blurry enough for many people.

I'll say it again, things were much better when everyone wasn't on the internet. LOL. I mean, I remember some people in my family believing everything they saw on TV, even believing the National Enquirer - but they didn't have the internet to spread it around on.

[olivermoss]

Oh yeah, some people saw the film and still thought it was found footage like 10 years later. The Sci Fi Channel got into legal trouble for how they misrepresented marketing material as a real documentary. It was a whole thing for a long time.

I like unfiction, but the Blair Witch was a project that crossed the lines.

[mxcatmoon]

Good, they deserved to get in trouble.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>Musk continues to be a case study in how strongly the deck is stacked in favor of the rich and connected, and in favor of those who control companies other rich people are invested in.<<

Don't forget he's also white and male. That helps.

I've been doing what I can over on twitter_refugees to help folks get established on Dreamwidth.

What we really need is for somegeek to launch the same kind of social network as Twitter and provide a real replacement.