Now I feel the need to preface this by saying that horror is not my favorite movie genre. I am very picky about my horror movies. I tend to like Troll 2, Killer Klowns B-movie level of horror that's so bad it's good or psychological thrillers like Psycho or The Sixth Sense. For the most part I'm rarely in the mood for a horror film so when one really strikes me it's pretty significant. The Blair Witch Project kept me up all night after I saw it (because I am a weenie) and I kept thinking about it for days after. It was a good concept for a film and barely anything happens; it was simple yet effective. The premise of Blair Witch is basically what's written on the movie poster. In 1994 three filmmakers go into the woods to shoot a documentary on a local legend called the Blair Witch. They are never found but their footage is a year later and what we are watching is the film that was discovered. While shooting the documentary, the young adults talk to locals and visit sites and cemeteries that are connected to the Blair Witch. For much of the film, they are lost in the woods and experiencing creepy things that start to convince them that the Blair Witch is real and after them.
So what makes this movie stand out? There are several elements of the film that make it scary, in my opinion, and separate it from a lot of horror movies today. One is the lack of jump scares. This film is pretty slow-paced and that's what makes it so tense. All the scary sounds the characters hear or creepy things they find aren't thrown at us all of a sudden with a loud sound effect. Because this is supposed to be "real" footage, there is no soundtrack at all until the amazingly creepy music during the credits. The slow pace never drags and even when there isn't something scary happening on screen at one moment, we still have that eerie sensation the characters are experiencing of feeling like they're being watched. Another aspect of Blair Witch that really messes with you is the vagueness of the villain. We never see the Blair Witch. We hear various descriptions of her from some of the locals that are interviewed but we never see her for ourselves, not even at the end during one of the film's most famous scenes, the exploration of the "abandoned" house. Not letting us see the villain makes it scarier than if we actually saw some hideous, ghostly creature. The audience is left to use their imaginations and conjure up the worst.
Before I move on to the found footage technique, which I think is the film's best weapon for terror, we need to talk about the making and marketing for this movie, which is almost as legendary as the Blair Witch herself. I kind of wish I was old enough back in '99 to have experienced it all myself. Part of what makes The Blair Witch Project so scary isn't even what's in the actual movie; it's how they made it and then sold it. The movie was directed, written, and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who were film students themselves when they conceived of the idea back in 1993. Along with a few others, they began their own film company called Haxan Productions, named after a film about witchcraft from the 1920's. Inspired by documentaries on the paranormal they created the legend of the Blair Witch and wanted to combine the elements of horror films and documentaries to make a movie they thought would be truly scary. Their script for the film was only 35 pages in length with the dialogue to be improvised by the actors. After an open casting call the three leads were cast. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams played fictionalized versions of themselves in The Blair Witch Project, their real names also being the names of their characters. In a television segment about the making of the movie, the actors recall filming for about a week in the woods, finding clues about what their day was going to be like and where to travel, and being scared by Haxan Productions crew members at night to film their authentic reactions. The directors and the crew tried to make the movie just as real for the cast as well as the audience.
The marketing of The Blair Witch Project was unprecedented at the time of its release, especially for an independent film. First, directors Myrick and Sanchez created the legend of the Blair Witch and tried to sell it as a true story. Several inspirations were used for the Blair Witch, most stemming from the Salem Witch Trials and other historical figures. In fact the names of some of the characters in the film are near anagrams of real people. The Blair Witch's name Elly Kedward is derived from Edward Kelley, a 16th century mystic and alchemist who claimed he could communicate with the dead and knew how to make the Philosopher's Stone. Another character from the film, Rustin Parr, the hermit who kidnapped and murdered several children in the 1940's, is a near anagram of Rasputin. The legend of the Blair Witch states that in 1785 Elly Kedward was banished from Blair, Maryland for witchcraft (Blair is the fictional colonial name for the real town of Burkittsville.) It was believed that Kedward died in the woods into which she was banished but a year later her adult accusers and half the town's children disappeared. Since that time any strange disturbances in the small town have been attributed to the Blair Witch, including the attacks by Rustin Parr.
Myrick and Sanchez used several outlets to promote this legend as true. At screenings of the film, they handed out flyers to the audience that were basically "Missing" posters of the three lead actors. Even IMDb participated, listing on the website that the actors were "missing, presumed dead" for up to a year after the film's release. During the same year Blair Witch was released SciFi Channel released a special documentary called Curse of the Blair Witch, which you can you watch on YouTube. This documentary presents the fabricated legend of the Blair Witch and includes fake news stories about the students who went missing and their footage that was found. It also includes actors portraying the students' siblings, friends, girlfriends, and professors talking about how they knew each student. It completely plays as real and was a very interesting marketing ploy. I highly recommend you watch it. Probably the best marketing tool by Myrick and Sanchez was the creation of the Blair Witch website. Because of this site, it is believed that The Blair Witch Project is one of the first movies to be marketed using the internet and even one of the first movies to go viral, before that term was used as we use it today. You can still go to the original website today and it is a real treat. I've included it here so you can check it out for yourselves. It includes a timeline of the Blair Witch legend, photos of the "missing students," the aftermath of their disappearance including the photos of their car that was "discovered," the sheriff investigating the case, and the film itself that was found. There's also so much more, again everyone and everything being presented as real. It caused quite a controversy at the time and had people debating about whether this was a regular horror film or a true story.
A word I've used a lot while writing this is "real." The production of the film, the marketing, and the movie itself feels real and thus makes it more scary. Horror films, especially those based on the supernatural, depend on plausibility to an extent. We have to believe these characters are experiencing what they're really experiencing, put ourselves in their shoes to really get a good scare. This is probably the main reason why The Blair Witch Project was so scary at the time and is still scary today: the found footage technique allows us to literally be in the character's shoes and experience what he or she is experiencing. It becomes so palpable that things we would scoff at normally like ghosts or two-hundred-year-old witches can scare the pants off you. Of course, you're not the one really holding the camera. You're watching all of this on a screen in the comfort and safety of your home or a movie theater. Found footage works because it feels real, but we know it really isn't. Horror and sci-fi directors years after Blair Witch really took advantage of this medium, even though The Blair Witch Project wasn't the first film to use the found footage technique; it only popularized it. Found footage allows a viewer to experience something scary that's realistic but doesn't have to be near it. Of course the directors went above and beyond by trying to market this movie as a real thing, just like Orson Welles did so many years ago with "War of the Worlds," but for the most part, audiences know that although something might be creepy it might not necessarily be dangerous.
Living vicariously through others to be creeped out or explore paranormal phenomena didn't start with the Blair Witch and has only increased since the film's release. To an extent exploring the world of UFO footage allows a regular person to see through somebody else's eyes something strange or scary they have discovered. That might be more enjoyable than seeing the "real" thing for ourselves. Or how about ghost hunting? Book after book, TV show after TV show has been produced that show professional ghost hunters or even just the average person capturing "evidence" of phantoms or ghouls terrorizing someone's property. These shows and books can be interesting or downright goofy but there's usually a little voice inside our heads that says, "Man, I'm so glad that's not me."
Because of the internet, especially blogs and video sites like YouTube, we have so many more options for experiencing creepy things that are actually happening to somebody else. One activity that can be found on multiple websites and mediums is exploring abandoned houses, theme parks, what-have-you. Abandoned places are usually dirty, messy, and, we think, have the potential to be haunted. They're both creepy and exciting and you can watch tons of videos or see pictures or read blog posts of people exploring all kinds of abandoned places. We find what they find and yet we're in no real danger of either being caught by the police or an angry ghost. Some of my favorite internet photographers, like Dani Rose have blogs dedicated to photos they've taken exploring abandoned houses in rural areas. The pictures are fascinating but unsettling, always leaving me with two contradicting thoughts, "I would love to do that" and "I'm glad I'm not really there because that's so creepy." Some of these abandoned places are so famous that blog posts and videos dedicated to them have tens of thousands of views. One such place is Nara Dreamland, a Japanese theme park sadly now under demolition. The park was a blatant rip-off of Disneyland. It opened in 1961 and closed in 2006. For ten years, the place was a hot spot for exploration and thanks to the internet we can watch footage of it since most of us, especially those who live anywhere other than Japan, wouldn't have been able to visit it. One blog post by Paul Jones has tons of photos and details about the park, including cool finds like castles and roller coasters as well as unsettling discoveries such as clown wigs and headless mannequins.
YouTube is a goldmine of video footage of Nara Dreamland as well as other explorations. It's known for its vast amount of vloggers, some who have gained specific audiences drawn to their stories about personal experiences with the paranormal. One of my favorite YouTubers is grav3yardgirl or Bunny Meyer. Although she's known to her over eight million subscribers as a vlogger who enjoys fashion, makeup, antiques, and trying out As Seen on TV products, she got her start on YouTube by making paranormal videos. She recently went back to her roots by sharing her experience with a doll she owned that she believed to be haunted. Even though I'm not one to believe in ghosts I enjoy Bunny's videos on the paranormal because I like her. YouTubers with likable personalities tend to do really well on the site and Bunny is no exception; she has a very dedicated fan base. Although she rarely makes paranormal videos anymore, they are highly requested by her audience and they do well because it can be exciting to hear about someone else's spooky experiences, especially, as in Bunny's case, from someone we feel like we know. The spookiness is behind a screen and once the video is over we're back in the real world. All these examples are ways that we can go beyond the cinematic and scripted horror film to get a good scare. It's why the found footage technique works so well. We want to be scared. That's why we go to see a scary movie or watch someone's video on something frightening they experienced. But we want distance. I don't think most of us really want to be haunted by a ghost, or see some creepy art at an abandoned house, or come across the stick sculptures of the Blair Witch in the middle of the woods. Found footage makes what we're watching seem so real it's tangible, and yet we know we are separated by a screen. And even if it's marketed extremely well, we know, thank goodness, that it's fake.
The Blair Witch Project was released almost twenty years ago and it still has an impact on its audience. It used unique marketing ploys to present the film as real and took advantage of a smaller budget to make a horror film that was scary based on the feeling it gives you, not on a thousand jump scares and CGI ghosts. It's a movie that could teach a lot of current horror movies a thing or two. Half the fun of watching Blair Witch is learning how it came about, watching the fake documentaries and exploring the old promotion website. What makes The Blair Witch Project still so terrifying is not the fact that it's fake but seems real; it's the feeling we have throughout the film that tells us, "This could be real." And that's a horror movie that has done its job well.
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