Revisiting 'The Blair Witch Project'

At 25 years old, the film still causes goosebumps.

From time to time, I want to start pulling thoughts together on movie news or things I’ve been watching/reading/thinking about that might not merit a full essay or fit into my usual ongoing series. I want to start doing this more on the regular, and I think I’m going to make these exclusive for paid supporters. As I’ve said from the start, I’m adamant about making sure that there is always free content here. But keeping this newsletter consistent does take quite a bit of time, so if you’re willing and able to support it with a few dollars each month, that would be greatly appreciated.

Today marks 25 years since the nationwide release of The Blair Witch Project, a movie made for $60,000 that ultimately grossed nearly $250 million worldwide and became a phenomenon. It wasn’t the first found-footage movie, but it was the first to garner mainstream appeal, and it’s not only one of the most profitable independent movies ever made, it’s also one of the most influential. We’re still talking about its impact more than two decades later; I doubt we’ll have the same conversations about Paranormal Activity in a decade¹. 

I saw The Blair Witch Project when it opened at our local art theater in Royal Oak, Michigan; I’m not sure, but I think it was a week or two prior to its July 30 nationwide rollout. I waited in line outside the theater for an hour to get in. The movie crawled so deeply under my skin that I called a friend to go see it with me again the very next night. 

Much of the talk about The Blair Witch Project centers on its very savvy marketing. Leveraging the internet, which was still in its infancy, Artisan created a campaign that posited the film as being real found footage, the last known evidence of a group of filmmakers lost in the Maryland woods. The actors were largely kept out of interviews in order to heighten the mystery of what was real and what was make believe; a website detailed the search for the missing filmmakers, and a TV special – The Curse of the Blair Witch — was released on cable a few weeks before the movie debuted to whet appetites and further suggest that the story was the real deal. 

I’d followed the hype on the film since its debut at Sundance earlier in the year, and I don’t know that I ever truly bought the claims about the film’s authenticity. I can say, however, that many people in my theater seemed to truly believe they’d watch something adjacent to a snuff film. I have a vivid memory of a group of girls crying on their boyfriends’ shoulders as the final credits rolled, shaking and saying they felt so bad for the three filmmakers. I didn’t laugh at them. Even though I knew the film was fictional, I couldn’t deny that something about it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and kept me awake that night, staring at the trees in the backyard and wondering what might be out there. 

I decided to revisit Blair Witch a few weeks back. And while I don’t know that I have a ton to say about its filmmaking merits or mythology, I can confidently say that it still creeps me the hell out.