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.
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.
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 20th 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.
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