As I reflect back on The Blair Witch Project 20 years later, I find myself immediately remembering the publicity machine that was operating behind this movie. Before this movie, the whole concept of a "found footage" movie didn't really exist aside from a couple fringe movies here and there. But this one was playing multiplexes throughout the country and trying to play up that this whole thing was real, when it really wasn't.
Heather (played by Heather Donahue) is a college student making a documentary on the legend of the Blair Witch in Burkittsville, Maryland with two fellow students, Josh (played by Joshua Leonard) and Mike (played by Michael C. Williams). The film we see unfold is the footage they shot for their documentary that was shot in 1994 by the trio who disappeared in the woods outside Burkittsville and only the footage they shot was found a year later. The beginning unfolds like a standard documentary with Heather explaining the legend of the Blair Witch and local residents are interviewed about the legend. Things take a turn when they head into the woods to find evidence of the Witch herself camping out for a few nights as they hike through the woods. Things start getting eerie as weird stick sculptures start showing up, their map goes missing and they quickly get lost. Things only get more intense from there as we watch their final days unfold through the footage they left behind.
The film was carefully conceived by directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez who drew up a 35 page outline for their three actors to follow but left the three of them to improvise the scenes between the three of them with the actors acting as their own camera operators as well. They also told all three actors all the information about the Blair Witch legends as if it were a real thing, planting actors for them to interview to make everything that much more real for the three actors. The filmmakers also kept in contact with the actors as they shot the film. They would stage certain things for them to react to throughout the film, most of it things the actors were not expecting making their reactions all that much more authentic. Shot on a shoestring budget of $60,000, the filmmakers manage to craft a film that works with a frightening authenticity as their situation grows more and more dire. The fact that the actors themselves are shooting the film adds another level of authenticity to the film as well with the shaky camera footage and poor lighting. Then they were brilliant in their marketing of the film utilizing the internet to build buzz for the film by playing up the mystery of what happened to the three main characters and playing it all as authentic. This marketing continued as the film was picked up by Artisan Entertainment and continued into the Summer of 1999. It wasn't firmly revealed to be a fictional film until just before the film premiered. The level of hype behind this movie was huge, especially for such a small movie.
The bulk of the movie is carried by the three leads and they give fantastic performances in the film. The experience of making the film for them was basically method acting to an insane degree. So much of what Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C Williams convey in their performances is based on what they went through filming it in the cold, rainy woods. Throughout the film they grow more irritated with one another as the actors themselves are cold, hungry (because the directors increasingly left them less and less food as the shoot went on) and exhausted. Of course, this authenticity plays through in the film making their desperation and fear all that more palpable. They had no idea what was going to happen each night so the majority of their reactions are genuine. They're not just acting scared, they are legitimately terrified. It had to have been a hell of an experience shooting this movie and those feelings read on film to a palpable degree. Since so much of what is going on in the woods is only heard and not seen, it's the reactions and performances of the three actors that stir the imagination of the audience and can only make those scenes more tense and scary.
Revisiting The Blair Witch Project 20 years later, after all the hoopla and the subsequent backlash and parodies has died down was interesting. The film started a trend of "Found Footage" horror movies but none of them really amounted to much or had the impact this one did, at least with me. In fact, it was a genre I came to actively hate and avoid so I wasn't sure I wanted to come back to this one because of that. But I can't talk about the horror movies of 1999 and not acknowledge this cultural phenomenon. But, to my surprise I still found it genuinely scary. I was able to get into it just as a movie on it's own terms and it really freaked me out again. Maybe because it played into my own fears and anxieties. I hadn't seen it in probably a good fifteen years but it all came back to me. I know this movie has been mocked endlessly, especially Heather's famous "I'm so sorry" confessional, but with some distance from all that I was surprised to find for the most part the movie still worked for me. Except for the plot point about the map. That's still stupid.
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