The Blair Witch Project or: An Electrifying Achievement in Terror and Realism (Film Analysis)

In 1993, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez began development on what would eventually be a low-budget horror film told entirely through handheld cameras from a first-person perspective.  The concept came from how both men found documentaries on the paranormal scarier than traditional horror films.  The end result was a sixty-thousand-dollar indie film called The Blair Witch Project.  The tiny film would end up grossing over two-hundred and forty-eight million dollars at the box office, a ratio of one dollar for every ten-thousand, nine-hundred, and thirty-one made.  The Blair Witch Project would end up in the Guinness Book of World Records for "top budget box office ratio" for a mainstream feature film, becoming one of the most financially successful, well-recognized, and influential indie films from the 20th century.  It spawned a sequel, a remake, multiple video games, books, comic books, and even a real documentary on the film’s production.  The film revived the found-footage genre as well as popularizing the idea of telling stories using the first-person perspective.

The Blair Witch Project is also one of, if not The Scariest Film I have ever seen and remains such to this very day.  I was, quite literally, crying in fear while recently revisiting the film with my wife Heather (which, coincidentally, happens to be the name of the film’s protagonist and her actor).  Yet the film isn’t just haunting, but electrifyingly so.  This is an exhilarating terror, the kind that puts you right next to the tiger’s cage but far enough that you won’t get hurt.  My wife, however, finds the film to be quite lackluster in scares, calling it unrealistic.  Meanwhile, I’m getting goosebumps from watching clips of the film on YouTube while trying to write this review—finding it to be one of the most terrifyingly realistic horrors around.

Going by my wife and I’s very polarizing opinions, it’s clear The Blair Witch Project is not universally scary.  Yet I know I’m not alone—there are certainly others who share my opinion, possibly one of you reading this review.  So, what exactly makes the film so damn effective at being terrifying?  H.P. Lovecraft was once quoted as having said: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."  What we don't understand frightens us.  The future can be terrifying because we never know what it will bring, the ocean can be terrifying because we never know what's lurking beneath, and The Blair Witch Project is terrifying because we never truly see what is after the documentary crew.  Yet that's just the core piece of what makes this film so exuberantly unsettling.

Right from the start, The Blair Witch Project is eerily unsettling.  The film’s commitment to its documentary-style approach begins even with the opening logos and title screen—giving them a low-budget look while shaking ever-so-slightly.  In complete silence, the film opens with text explaining how three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary—their footage of what occurred found a year later.  The footage begins and the audience is introduced to the filmmakers’s director Heather Donahue.  Heather has recruited her friend Josh and equipment guy Mike (all three actors use their real names for their characters) to make a documentary on The Blair Witch—a fabled legend involving an evil being that has cursed the woods of Burkittsville with all sorts of misfortune.

Heather is constantly using her Hi-8 home video camera to film the documentary’s behind the scenes. It serves as one of the two windows for the audience to observe the film’s story.  For now, its purpose is giving insight into the filmmakers’s personalities in a less professional setting—scenes like Heather, Josh, and Mike goofing around and taking swigs of Scotch in their motel.  The audience’s second window comes from Josh’s more high-tech CP-16 film camera, used (initially) to film the documentary itself.  The film never breaks away from its self-restricted found-footage rule—if neither camera is on, the audience doesn’t get to see what's happening.  This allows the film to jarringly cut away from scenes, or cut to them, in a way that feels natural to the filming process.  The film can take large jumps forward in time without any need for traditional transitions.  At times, a cut will start halfway through a conversation that will be incoherent for the audience, yet gives the film’s style a very realistic feel.

As such, the film’s style feels a blended mix between college-grade documentary and 90s home videos.  It’s the latter that really gets me as it reminds of my family’s own home videos made when I was growing up in the 90s.  Usually, no matter how engrossed I become watching a film, I’m still aware that it’s a fictional piece of work or—in the case of documentaries—something compiled by professionals.  Even later found footage films like Paranormal Activity have a professional air surrounding them.  The Blair Witch Project feels genuinely amateurish, like those GoPro videos of people exploring abandoned tunnels and asylums.  I mean this as a compliment when I say The Blair Witch Project looks cheap—and I believe the directors would take it as such, seeing as they deliberately degraded the camera’s resolution in post-production to make it look even more authentic.  The look was so convincing, in fact, that multiple people believed the film to be genuine—sending Heather Donahue's mother sympathy cards because they actually believed her to be dead or missing (the first thing Heather actually asked the directors upon arriving on set was if they were planning on making a snuff film).

The crew interviews various residents in Burkittsville about the Blair Witch legend.  One elderly local tells the group about a Hermit named Rustin Parr who kidnapped several children in the 1940s and killed them all on orders of the Witch.  Parr would take the children down in pairs and have one stare at the wall in the corner as he was unable to murder while the child’s eyes were on him.  A mother with her child knows about the Witch from word-of-mouth and even once saw a documentary, stating the creepiest story she ever heard was how two men were out camping and came across a cabin that the Witch supposedly haunted never to be seen again.  The child becomes distressed over the story and humorously tries covering her mother's mouth.  A rather eccentric individual claimed she saw the Blair Witch in person, describing her having a wool shawl and being hairy from head to toe.

The interviewed people seem like genuine townsfolks from their speech, to mannerisms, to the various accounts told of the Witch.  The latter will prove vital in crafting the film’s horror, but for now the film is light-hearted with some good comedy—such as when the crew interview two fisherman with one trying to tell a story about the Blair Witch and the other continuously correcting him on information.  The realistic lowkey setting only serves to amplify the anticipation and suspense of what’s to come, especially when the crew start hiking into the woods in search of an old cemetery.  The cameras will often switch to a monochrome style—most likely the crew trying to add ambiance to their documentary—that really amps up the trepidation of shots of an eerie black and white forest.

Now, it's worth noting how shaky the camera action is in the Blair Witch Project.  It comes with the territory of handheld cameras that the screen will rarely stay still, and it only gets worse the further the story progresses and the characters’s sanity worsens.  While I’m not the biggest shaky cam fan, I appreciate it here for adding an extra sense of realism to the situation.  My wife found the shaking to be mildly nauseating at first, though she did eventually get used to it.  Not everybody will though, with known cases of the film causing people to vomit from queasiness.  Getting easily nauseous is certainly the best and most understandable reasoning for opting not to watch this film.

The crew stops to camp for the night, the first of seven nighttime scenes in the film.  The night passes by peacefully enough as the crew partakes in lighthearted banter:

Heather: Okay, who wouldn't let me have a cigarette in the tent but he's allowed to fart as much as he wants?

Josh: I never gave Mike any fart allowance.

Josh does note that he heard two strange noises in the distance but passes it off as owls and other birds cackling in the night.  In the morning, Heather admits that she may have gotten them slightly lost while looking for the cemetery.  The group laughs it off here, with the boys simply teasing Heather and making her promise to not get them lost again.  They continue deeper into the woods, with Heather continuously reassuring she knows where they're going.  The boys, however, begin to show doubt in her capability, stopping to double-check the map.  At times, the camera will focus on monochrome shots of the forest.  Being filmed in October, the leaves have begun to fall with sunbeams now shining through the cracks of the trees and branches.  The imagery has a beautiful yet foreboding look at the wood’s still isolation and increasing barrenness.

Tensions begin to rise before the crew finally comes upon the supposed cemetery.  The cemetery contains a circle of small cairns surrounding a tree with a cairn in its branches.  The group remain unalarmed by the strange find, excitedly recording it for their documentary.  Their second-night camping is spent happily cooking sausages by a fire while singing the tune to Gilligan's Island:

Heather: Yeah, but this ship has a good captain, not a fat beer-guzzling captain.

Mike: He wasn't beer guzzling.

Josh: There was no beer on the island man, if they had beer they would've had like, big ass orgies.

(All laugh)

Heather: You're kinda like the Captain and Mikes kinda like your Gilligan. No offense, I mean that as a compliment. Gilligan was a funny guy.

Josh: But the Captain was fat.

Heather: Okay, Let's call it a thin Captain.

Mike: Let's not call it the Captain anymore you illiterate TV people!  It's the Skipper.

Yet not all is peaceful as the group hears twigs snapping all around them during the night.  The crew tries passing it off once again as an animal, but the worry on their faces speaks otherwise.  Josh even considers the idea of it being locals trying to mess with them, making a disturbing comparison to the film Deliverance, which infers to some very disturbing implications on what the stalkers might want.

 

Here’s where The Blair Witch Project puts to the test just how terrifying the unknown can be.  Unlike the film crew, the audience knows for certain that something is stalking them (the fourth wall advantage)—who or what it is, however, is where both audience and character are on the same playing field.  It’s a good guess to make that the Blair Witch is stalking them, but there lies the question: what exactly is the Blair Witch?  Is it a supernatural entity, an immortal witch, a demon, or perhaps a deranged stalker/killer who gets their sick kicks by impersonating the Witch’s lore to further torment and torture his prey?  Could Josh very well be right and it’s one or more of the locals they interviewed?  Could it very well be both?  And if so, what do both supernatural and natural look like?

The audience has no idea and will never find out.  Now, originally, this wasn’t the case as a reveal was planned and executed (something I’ll expand upon later on), but due to a mishap it never got filmed nor was the scene ever reshot.  The mistake ended up being an absolute blessing for the film.  Other pieces of The Blair Witch Project franchise opt to go the transparent supernatural route—crafting monsters or supernatural possessions as the cause of events.  There’s nothing wrong with those approaches, yet what makes the original Blair Witch Project so much more terrifying in comparison is how ambiguous the danger is.  There’s no way of defending against what cannot be defined and/or understood.  In fiction, a defined danger whether natural or supernatural almost always has some defining weakness.  A human killer can be conventionally injured and taken down; a demon can be taken out with holy devices and faith.  A supernatural entity is tougher, but usually when a story reveals the monster, they reveal a crippling weakness as well.  But here, it’s never revealed what’s after the crew—and the information given by the town folk is so varying in account that a safe hypothesis is near impossible.

Bad turns to worse when the group gets completely lost while trying to head back to the car.  They end up camping for a third night yet get no sleep as loud cracking sounds of branches snapping surround them in the utter blackness of the woods.  The morning reveals three cairns built around their tent, confirming their stalker is no wild animal.  Realizing someone is out there, the crew becomes more determined than ever to find their car and leave, but to their horror, it turns out that Heather no longer has the map on her.  They decide to continue following the creek as they believe it's their best way out, and there's a moment of levity between them when Heather ends up getting her feet soaked while trying to cross—causing Josh to laugh for the first time in a while.  The levity soon turns violent, however, when Mike reveals that he had kicked the map into the creek the other day in frustration, prompting an enraged Heather and Josh to attack him.

After calming down, the group continues on the supposed correct path, yet it ends up leading them into the most horrifying of situations yet.  The humanoid stick figures have become the symbol of The Blair Witch Project’s franchise, and it's this scene that solidifies just why that is.  Imagine being extremely on edge—lost in the middle of the woods, sleep-deprived, and being stalked by god knows what—only to then come across numerous voodoo-like stick figures of various shapes and sizes suspended throughout the trees.  By this point, I think I would try burning down the entire forest.

So, after that horrific incident of terror comes the most terrifying night so far.  The crew wisely decide not to light a fire in hopes it will not allow whatever stalking them to continue stalking them.  It doesn’t.  The lack of fire only seems to create more adverse effects as disturbingly inhuman and, even worse, human sounds spawn all around them in the woods including what sounds to be children laughing.  Suddenly, an unknown force outside begins shaking their tent, causing the three to flee like hell into the woods where they hide for the remaining night in absolute terror.  The scene was actually partially unscripted, with the crew being unaware that the tent was going to be shaken and the crew genuinely getting scared from the surprise. 

While sprinting away, Heather can be heard shouting “What the f*** is that!?”, yet nothing is seen on the camera.  Turns out it was actually the film’s art director Ricardo Moreno wearing all white clothing with pantyhose pulled over his head.  His appearance was supposed to be the aforementioned reveal of the Blair Witch, yet the cameraman forgot to pan left at Heather’s shout in time and the scene was never reshot.  Thank goodness!  If anything, having Heather get hysterical over something unseen by the audience makes it far more terrifying to the imagination.

It’s questionable by this point as to why Heather is still filming events, yet Josh offers a rather understandable reasoning:

Josh: I see why you like this video camera so much.

Heather: You do?

Josh: It's not quite reality…it’s totally like filtered reality man.  It's like you can pretend everything is not quite the way it is.

It’s Heather's defense mechanism against the unknown, trying to place herself outside of the Tiger's cage and with the audience.  To their horror, the group discovers the exact same log they had crossed the previous day, revealing that they have been going around in circles and made no progress in escaping the forest.  The group reacts accordingly to how you would expect them to, with Josh and Mike screaming and shouting obscenities all around and Heather breaking down in tears and disbelief.  The characters’s initial reactions were not them acting, however, but genuine.  The way The Blair Witch Project was filmed involved the three actors following clues left in milk crates found with Global Positioning Satellite systems.  The actors were given individual instructions to help improvise their actions during the day, which would then be cut down and used for the final release.  As such, the actors had no clue where they would be heading to next and were sincerely upset they had walked all day only to end right back where they were.  What was most likely acting, however, is the poignant scene of Heather repeating to herself that it is okay as her camera looks to the sky.

By this point, both audience and characters are readily expecting s*** to go down that night, with Mike offering to take first watch so the others can “try” and sleep.  Yet despite expectations, the group end up having a calm night, using the downtime to have some small talk:

Mike: Who wants a Cheeseburger?

Heather: (with flashlight in mouth) I do!  I do!

Mike: Well I've got a cheeseburger in my back pocket.

Heather: Do you?

(All laugh slightly)

Josh: You know what I'd f***ing love?

Heather: What.

Josh: Mashed potatoes.  My mom’s mashed potatoes.  My mom’s mashed potatoes and a piece of ass.

Turns out it’s the next day where s*** goes down when Josh vanishes during his watch.  At the point of losing their minds, Heather and Mike opts to follow the compass direction based on The Wizard of Oz witches.  They remain lost, and on the sixth night are tormented by what sounds like Josh screaming in pain.  The next morning, Heather finds a bundle of sticks tied together at the foot of their tent.  The sticks are tied by strips of Josh's clothing and, when she unravels them, finds blood, teeth, hair, and what appears to be a chunk of tongue within the bundle.  Heather breaks down, but—using what slim sanity and courage she has left—pulls it together and hides the reveal from Mike. 

On the seventh and last night, Heather speaks directly to her camera, leaving what appears to be her last will and testament—having concluded that she will most likely be killed in the woods.  While the humanoid stick figures are the franchise’s most iconic symbol, the scene of Heather talking to the camera is the franchise’s most iconic scene.  It’s an uncomfortable closeup of her face surrounded by pitch darkness.  Heather claims responsibility for the entire situation as snot and tears come running down her face:

Heather: I just want to apologize to Mike's mom and Josh's mom and my mom and I'm sorry to everyone. I was very naive. (Looks away from camera scared) I was very naive and very stupid, and I shouldn't have put other people in danger for something that was all about me and my selfish motives. I'm so sorry for everything that has happened because in spite of what Mike says now it is my fault. Because it was my project and I insisted on everything. I insisted we weren't lost. I insisted we keep going. I insisted we walk south. Everything had to be my way and this is where we've ended up. And it's all because of me we are here now hungry, and cold, and hunted. I love you mom and dad. I am so sorry.

There's a haunting scene where Heather hears, or thinks she hears, something off in the woods.  A crazed look overtakes her face, her eyes darting to the side as vivid red veins can be seen crawling to her pupils.

Hearing Josh once again screaming in the distance, Heather and Mike gather up mad courage to go look for him.  They come across a decrepit house in the middle of the woods, similar to the one mentioned by the mother.  Inside the house, they find demonic symbols and small bloody handprints all around.  Mike begins frantically sprinting down to the basement where he swears he hears Josh's voice—a hysterical Heather screaming for him to slow down.  As Mike reaches the basement someone or something behind him attacks, causing Mike’s camera to fall to the floor.  Heather comes running down after in a frenzy, having devolved into nothing but screams.  The screams are genuine, with Heather the actor being so terrified by the shooting that she apparently continued screaming long after the shoot was over.  As Heather reaches the bottom, she sees Mike standing silently in the corner facing the wall before going silent herself as she's attacked from behind.  Everything then goes dead silent as the footage stops and the credits begin.

The Blair Witch Project is a terrifying thrill ride and I enjoy every minute of it.  It remains top dog in the found-footage genre: a combination of realistic setting, purposely low-grade appearance, a grueling, unorthodox filming process alongside respectable dedication from its actors, and taking full advantage of the fear of the unknown to craft an electrifyingly scary, hauntingly memorable film.  The Blair Witch Project is a powerful showcasing of how less is more, remaining one of the 20^th century’s most financially successful, well-recognized, and influential indie films.  Beneath all the success and recognition, however, remains a simple little film that can scare the crap out of me.