The Blair Witch Project
Ten years before “Paranormal Activity,” there was the Blair Witch.
Like that current ultra low-budget smash, “The Blair Witch Project” reinvented the way films could be marketed. A hit at Sundance, “Blair Witch” utilized the internet in a way no one else had before- by playing the tale of three filmmakers out to make a documentary about a Maryland legend known as the Blair Witch as real, as the found footage of three students who got lost in the woods.
The film is the innovative work of writers-directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, who realize in this film that it’s the unseen that’s truly scary. The same lesson that was so effective in Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” in Spielberg’s “Jaws,” and in the 1942 classic “Cat People,” but is largely forgotten by most contemporary horror films.
But what makes “The Blair Witch Project” work so well isn’t the low-tech scares gotten out of sounds in the darkness, out of ancient symbols, and out of a rattling tent in the night, but the story. A ghost story presented as myth, legend, and as fact through creativity. The interviews at the beginning of the film with the townspeople of Burkittsville setup elements we’ll see pay off later in the film. The story of how the Blair Witch kills her victims. The interview with one Mary Brown, which sounds pretty crazy at times, but as events escalate as Heather (Heather Donahue), Mike (Michael Williams) and Josh (Joshua Leonard) find their situation increasingly dire.
True, when you think about the film rationally, it’s not hard to figure out it’s tricks. (Oooo, making noises in the dark. Oh no, one of the characters disappear.) They’re so seemingly simple it seems like anyone could do it. But could they? Sanchez and Myrick make more somethings out of basically nothing that some filmmakers can make out of everything and the kitchen sink. Because they put us deep in the woods with these characters, because it’s set up as a you-are-there documentary, as found footage of a botched documentary instead of a traditional film, we are in the rough with these characters, and we identify with these characters completely. I’ve done a lot of camping over the years because of Boy Scouts, but this would almost make me not want to do it again.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw this film. It was the Monday after its opening weekend at the Tara in Atlanta. I’d just gotten out of summer school at GSU. I figured it’d be pretty easy to get to an early afternoon show. The theatre was packed. The phenomenon had started. I was roughly five rows from the front watching this movie, and believe me when I say, I came out thinking I’d been put through the ringer. This was especially the case after the last half, when things are at their worst for Heather and Mike (Josh has already disappeared), and they find an abandoned house where the Blair Witch might have haunted. They each have a camera. They hear Josh’s voice, but can’t find him. We see them running, so hopeful of finding answers.
And then the cameras fall to the ground.
Some more thoughts on “The Blair Witch Project,” written in 2014 for a Language of Film & TV online class:
“In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods nears Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary…A year later their footage was found.”
That was the hook at the center of “The Blair Witch Project,” an experiment in horror filmmaking made for $40,000.00, and later went on to become one of the highest-grossing movies of 1999, and the most profitable independent film of all-time up to that time. The reason for it’s success lies in the shrewd packaging on the part of the filmmakers of the film as a “found footage” documentary, and the marketing campaign by distributor Artisan that presented the film as a true story. Though there was a gap in time before “found footage” became a regular part of the movie landscape, “The Blair Witch Project” ushered in a style that blended the style of the documentary format with Hollywood formula.
On the surface, the documentary aspect of the film makes “Blair Witch” feel like nothing else that audiences and genre fans had seen before. However, when you really watch the film, and follow it’s story structure, it follows what we typically see in narrative film. We have the introduction of a set of characters that we will follow through the entire movie in the form of students going out into the woods to make a documentary. We see them as they drive to their locations, and go about their business. They’re getting what they need, and things are going well, although listening to some of the interviewees, there might be something for the filmmakers to be afraid of. Now, it’s time for some conflict.
The second act of the film starts when they get into the woods, and start traveling to their locations where they will be filming. The locations have an ominous look to them, but by the time the students are ready to go home, the story has other plans. Though Heather, the director and leader of the trio, admits to enjoying hiking later in the film, and claims to have scouted out the film, they get lost almost immediately, and none of them seem to have an understanding on how to follow a map. However, that becomes the least of their worries, as they start to hear strange noises at night, and witness strange things. We don’t always see what the characters see, though, which is one of the great strengths of the film Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez (the writers and directors) have made, creating a sense of anxiety and claustrophobia that we share with the characters.
The third act of the film is all about paying off ideas introduced in the first act (especially with the final image, hinted at by one of the locals interviewed in act one), as well as making the terror real for each character, and playing off the tensions between the characters. Mike, frustrated by Heather and Josh’s inability to get them out of the woods, kicks the map into the river. Josh, frustrated by Heather’s need to get every little thing on film, even when they are hopelessly lost, points the camera in her face, driving her to tears. And Heather, in the tradition of every obsessive filmmaker in movie history, continues to film, exasperating the friction between the three, but keeping herself relatively sane in the process.
If the film had been made in a traditional style, it still could have been an effective horror film, but it’s unlikely the film would have had quite the impact in terms of pop culture had Myrick and Sanchez not decided to toy with the audience, and give the film the look and feel of a documentary. Not every shot is immaculately framed. Different types of film stock and aspect ratios are used throughout, lending the film an authenticity that comes with the documentary form. The performances feel believable, less like actors in a movie, and more like real individuals you would come across in a small town. There’s no original score- all of the sound we hear is diegetic, coming from the world of the film, even if we don’t see the source. This is a completely plausible cinematic world, even more so because the filmmakers chose to tell the film as if it had happened, which is big part of why the general public got sucked into the experience of watching the film.
It took several years for other filmmakers to really start to experiment with the “found footage,” documentary style “The Blair Witch Project” brought to modern movies in a way that people wanted to see, but it’s made for some interesting films. The most famous is “Paranormal Activity” and it’s sequels, but “found footage” has gone beyond just horror films such as “The Last Exorcism” and “Devil’s Due,” as we’ve seen in films such as “Cloverfield” (“Godzilla”-like monster movie), “Chronicle” (superhero movie), “Earth to Echo” (family adventure), and “Project X” (comedy). The blending of traditional Hollywood narrative and documentary filmmaking style took a while to take hold in mainstream cinema, but now that it has, I have a feeling it is here to stay.
