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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.
I hadn’t seen the movie since just after it came out on VHS around Halloween of 1999. But in those 25 years, I feel like the general sentiment to the film has shifted from appreciating the film’s inventiveness to writing it off as “boring,” “bad” and “not scary.” And I understand that. The film is just over 80 minutes of people wandering in the woods, screaming at each other, and occasionally accounting something that might be spooky but is just out of our view. I understand why some complained that nothing happened or why audiences that expect their horror to come laced with jump scares and gory punchlines, as well as a denouement that reveals what it all means, might find it a tad dull.
All I can say is that those things are what give it a ring of authenticity and make it work for me.
Watching it again, the spasmodic, confusing camera work feels like the work of amateur documentarians, something the film backs up by suggesting that the three filmmakers are quite possibly not great at their work (watch how Heather Donahue pushes her voice when she’s recording narration meant for her very serious documentary; the film also suggest the equipment they’re using was taken spur of the moment. This isn’t a professional crew). In an age where our phones allow us to record every single minute of our existence – and many people keep them running at all times – the question of why Heather keeps her camera rolling even when they’re lost and scared in the woods isn’t as distracting. I’ve never been much of a found-footage fan; I think the genre’s attempts to stage scares usually feel as authentic as stepping into a Halloween haunted house, and the insertion of CGI trickery shatters any illusion of authenticity. But by using homemade props – piles of rocks, wooden sculptures, what appear to be teeth – Blair Witch feels plausible, and keeping its most overt supernatural scares – the most effective of it being children’s laughter in the middle of the night – faint and offscreen enough for us to question what we really saw, the movie plays effective tricks on our imagination and burrows further under our skin.
I don’t think the supernatural elements are Blair Witch’s scariest aspect, and I actually think there’s a reading of the film in which there is no supernatural dimension at all and is, instead, the result of people harassing the filmmakers offscreen or the characters’ paranoia running amok. What’s scariest and feels real is the desperation of the three leads as they get lost further and deeper in the woods, begin assigning blame and try to keep their despair at bay. Michael Williams, Heather Donahue and Joshua Leonard are really good; directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick largely kept them in the dark about what was going to happen next and created a production that favored improvisation. The ebbs and flows of discord among the three feels genuine; when Michael or Josh scream at Heather because she’s gotten them lost in the woods, it’s harsh and abrasive. When Heather unloads on the camera about her fear and guilt, there’s real emotion there (and the staging of that famous selfie shot is effectively intense and uncomfortably intimate). Despite the fact that most of the film concerns the three walking in circles and yelling at each other, I became drawn into their plight. The sense of disorientation, panic and terror seeps in naturally. As the film approached the one-hour mark and headed into its final act, I was surprised to find that my heart rate was quickening and my mouth was dry. The film had gotten its claws in me again.
I think the final 10 minutes of The Blair Witch Project is one of the most masterful climaxes to any horror movie. It’s a terrifying, disorientating dash through a cabin. It moves so quickly that there’s only a quick second to take in the children’s handprints on the walls. The fact that the film’s audio is captured on a different device than the one Heather is using means we get watch her final run through the cabin while hearing her voice echoing distantly, creating an eerie, disembodied effect (I need to tip my hat to Josh Larsen of Filmspotting for directing me to that one; he brought it up when I saw him talk about his book Fear Not at U-M last spring). Everything the film captured in its man-on-the-streets segments at the beginning of the film comes to pass in those final moments, and that final shot of Michael standing in the corner right before Heather’s camera drops to the ground is still a heart-in-the-throat mic drop of a moment.
It’s easy to complain that The Blair Witch Project feels like the work of amateurs; it was. This wasn’t a studio-backed production but rather a scrappy experiment that worked precisely because of how slapdash it felt (when, in reality, that masterful final sequence shows that the filmmakers knew just what they were doing). It works completely in the moment, with just enough mythology to help us piece together what’s happening but never enough to suggest that this should be an ongoing thing. That’s why any attempts to sequel-ize or reboot it have failed; to approach it again requires a calculation that feels absent from this movie.
No, it’s not really found footage. But, in a way, it is. It’s found footage of people who went into the woods to try a new approach to horror, and dang if they didn’t pull it off. Can I break down any shots to show why they work so well, or can I explore in depth the psychology of the characters? No. But I can say that for 82 minutes, even 25 years later, I believed they were lost in the woods and came to a very bad end. The movie just works.
It is worth noting that, despite the immense popularity of the film, which had a sequel, a reboot and is being approached again via Blumhouse, the original actors saw little compensation and are largely left out of the royalty discussion. Their work is a big part of why this movie works, and I hope Lionsgate and Blumhouse can make things right.