by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
The Blair Witch Project (1999) remains a benchmark in found-footage horror, a film that channeled dread but also managed to use emerging technologies – i.e., the world wide web – to gather a wide viewership. Famous for its absence of music, an ancillary soundtrack, Josh’s Blair Witch Mix (1999), offered an additional layer of meaning for viewers and fans. In Josh’s Blair Witch Mix: A Lost Soundtrack Found, the premiere volume of Channel Academic’s Music and Cult Film/TV series, horror/feminist film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (1000 Women in Horror: 1895-2018) analyzes how the tracks of this release mirror of the goth-fueled times and help reassess the screams and silences of its associated film.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is an award-winning film critic, author, and filmmaker who specializes in cult, horror and exploitation cinema. Her books include The Cinema Coven: Witches, Witchcraft and Women's Filmmaking (2024), The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (2011/2021), Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria, Ms. 45, and The Hitcher, and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books: Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (2020). 1000 Women in Horror was named by Esquire Magazine as one of the best books ever written about Hollywood, and it was adapted in 2024 into a feature documentary of the same name by horror streaming service Shudder (directed by Donna Davies and written by Heller-Nicholas). She also appears in Alexandre O. Philippe's documentary Chain Reactions with marked the 50th anniversary of Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) alongside Stephen King, Karyn Kusama, Takashi Miike, and Patton Oswalt, which won the Best Documentary on Cinema Award at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
Praise
“Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is one of the most important and exciting scholars in film studies today. And this book, on an existent/non-existent soundtrack, ranks among her best.”
—Gary D. Rhodes, PhD, author of The Birth of the American Horror Film and co-editor of Becoming Nosferatu: Stories Inspired by Silent German Horror
“Heller-Nicholas has a brilliant sense of what makes a great horror film truly unforgettable. It’s about sound as much as sight, and our life with the film offscreen as well as onscreen. This book is not just about a fascinating mixtape; it is a masterful remix of The Blair Witch Project itself.”
—Adam Lowenstein, PhD, Founding Director of the Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Horror Film and Otherness
Table of Contents
$0.00
Tags:
genre film,
horror,
music,
women
