The setting of the forest plays a key role in creating the Gothic quality in the film "The Blair Witch Project" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown." In the forest, the characters in both works confront nocturnal landscapes and hallucinations, eerie voices, fires and haunted housesùconventional features of a Gothic work (Sedgwick). Far away from the familiar environment and civilization, these characters are plunged into a netherworld of existence. According to Walpole, in Gothic texts, "a god, or at least a ghost, [is] absolutely necessary to frighten us out of too much sense" (in Morris). In these two works, fear serves to be a powerful force that unleashes the suppressed and hidden emotions of the characters. Heather, Josh and Michael, the protagonists of the film, erupt in anger towards one another as they discover that they are lost in the forest. Disoriented in a world where the virtuous people he knows are engaged in evil deeds, Young Goodman Brown is seized with demoniac rage. In spite of the basic similarities between these two works, they also differ in their utilization of the forest as a Gothic space and the depiction of the characters.
In "The Blair Witch Project," the reason why the protagonists enter the forest seems to be an innocuous one. Heather is filming a documentary based on a legend about witches killing people in the woods. Although they do not intentionally wander into the forest in search of evil, they lack an inner awareness about the implications of the project. Even after interviewing the local people who reveal frightening stories, the protagonists remain unperturbed about these tales. In fact, when Josh asks Heather about her feelings about the existence of witches, she confesses that she does not know how she feels. Because they lack a moral awareness of the gravity of their undertaking, they place themselves in an extremely vulnerable position when they enter an unfamiliar f...