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A silver celebration of The Blair Witch Project
Friday, October 25, 2024
Click here to listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of this film, conducted last week.
This is one of the first examples of the found footage subgenre in which would-be documentary material, supposedly later discovered, is presented, often shot by the actual actors and featuring a shaky handheld camera style. The presumption is that whoever discovered this footage edited it together and released it as a record of what happened to the people who were originally involved.
What’s astounding about The Blair Witch Project is how much it achieves with so few ingredients. There is no graphic violence, blood/gore (except for the contents of a small parcel), physical manifestation of a monster, witch, or entity, cheap shocks or jump scares, or special effects/CGI. Instead, this is a psychological horror movie in which the heavy lifting is done by what’s left to your imagination.
For that matter, there is no real plot or attention-grabbing action. The picture consists early of relatively unexceptional talking head interviews of townsfolk followed by strung-together shots of the principals walking and camping in the woods. The film is carried by three young unknown performers; two of them (Donahue and Williams) had never acted in a movie before. We aren’t given a score to musically punctuate the tone or atmosphere. The ending is abrupt, and there is no resolution: All we know is that these three young adults were never found again. We don’t learn if they were killed or who/what is responsible for their disappearance. The remnants they discover (the twig men, the eerie bundle, the rock piles) remain unexplained, and the legend of the Blair Witch is not demystified in any way.
The film's massive success can be attributed to its groundbreaking marketing campaign, which blurred the distinction between reality and fiction by presenting the footage as genuine and the actors as missing persons. The use of shaky handheld cameras and improvised dialogue added to its raw, unsettling tone, heightening the psychological tension. The Blair Witch Project proved that low-budget, independent films could achieve massive success, and it paved a profitable path forward for future found footage movies. Its emphasis on suspense and the unseen breathed new life into the horror genre in the late 1990s and created a significant cultural legacy.
Of course, this film also frustrated many watchers, many of whom resented the ambiguous ending and expressed serious dislike of Donahue’s character, whom they found to be grating and irksome. Plenty of people were told word-of-mouth that this was a terrifying motion picture yet felt cheated or duped by the end credits, often expressing that they didn’t find it nearly frightening enough. Others resented that The Blair Witch Project was, in their estimation, an art film disguised as mainstream entertainment.
But for the Blair Witch faithful, the picture still works quite effectively, with a verisimilitude that persists as palpable. They admire that the footage looks genuine and amateurish—consistently appearing too shaky, shoddy, and off-the-cuff to be counterfeit, choreographed, or contrived. That realism is a testament to the design of the directors, who relied on the actors to shoot the scenes themselves, without much direction; Myrick and Sánchez mostly remained distant from Donahue, Williams, and Leonard to allow the performances and dialogue to unfold naturally. That’s right: a group of novice filmmakers put blind faith in their three thespians to conjure up the bulk of what constitutes The Blair Witch Project, trusting in them to improvise their scenes and learn how to work the cameras without much guidance.
The actors weren’t faking it, either. They truly were sleeping in the woods for days, utterly exhausted, cold, and aggravated with each other, not privy to the script, and unaware of what the filmmakers were going to unleash upon them.
The film builds tension and fright via the simplest of techniques: eerie off-screen sounds, strange things happening out of the frame but nearby, brief but effective night scenes that are almost completely dark except for the camcorder light, and friction/infighting between the three characters, which puts each of them on edge.
Consider how the concept of being hunted and lost, especially in the woods, is a chilling premise for a horror film. Psycho caused countless viewers to be scared to take a shower. Jaws resulted in millions being afraid to go in the water. The Blair Witch Project made camping and wood-walking a terrifying notion for modern audiences.
The Dissolve essayist Mike D’Angelo summed it up effectively. “The Blair Witch Project is one of the goriest movies ever made," he wrote. "It’s 81 minutes of nerves being slowly shredded before your eyes. The real horror lies in watching Heather, Josh, and Mike gradually turn on each other as their circumstances grow bleaker, until there’s arguably no longer any need for a witch or other bogeyman to torment them. By night, the film is an unconventional horror flick... By day, on the other hand, it’s a harrowing collegiate gloss on Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, in which three dead souls discover that their eternal punishment consists of being locked in a room with each other. The woods here are just a big, empty room, and the screaming, bickering, and blame-tossing isn’t a grating distraction from the main story. It is the main story.”
“At a time when digital techniques can show us almost anything, The Blair Witch Project is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can’t see. The noise is the dark is almost always scarier than what makes the noise in the dark,” Roger Ebert penned in his 4-star review of the movie.
Similar works
- Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
- The Last Broadcast (1998)
- The St. Francisville Experiment (2000)
- REC (2007)
- Cloverfield (2008)
- The Paranormal Activity movies
