Retro Review: The Blair Witch Project
Released in 1999, greater than the quality of the film itself, the buildup and marketing for The Blair Witch Project created something that had never been seen for horror: viral marketing. The film at times could be described as boring and annoying but it serves to create a slow burn and tension amongst the filmmakers as they drift into terror.
The film’s plot follows a group of college filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams) as they investigate a local legend near Burkittsville, Maryland. After interviewing the town, the filmmakers venture into the woods to visit and document locations where incidents took place. When strange occurrences begin happening around them, the team is too late and they are now part of whatever it is that is happening in the woods.
The film boarders on amateur hack with no plot as we follow around the crew as they argue and raw horror with zero clue of what’s going on. The lore of the film drives viewers to learn more and explore the surrounding marketing to better understand what happened and the simple story of friends in the woods keeps the film focused on the story at hand, never asking for more extraneous understanding or attention.
The performances of the everyone in the film are hard to argue against for simple fact that they are for most of the time genuine. The filmmakers use their real names throughout the film and interact with real people from the town they shot in for Burkittsville and aren’t given any sorts of marks to hit other than locations. The film isn’t so much as scripted as it is reality filmmaking. The deteriorating relationship is at times hard to watch and the story moves along slowly, but the visceral emotion makes the story work.
The story as mentioned is simple. People lost in the woods fall apart as they try to figure out what is terrorizing them, with the implication that it is a ghostly witch. The information about the witch is scarce as it is presented in the film, but her presence is felt the entire time. It never appears that there isn’t an answer that can’t be uncovered. This world is thought out with details to the lore present in the surrounding media but never prove to be required to enjoy or understand the movie. The film never attempts to give a direct answer and lets the viewer interpret the events on their own. When strange things begin to happen, we are left to fill in what is causing it. This is definitely a result of a limited budget but works in hand with the oral folklore and mockumentary cinematography. Stemming again from the improv nature of the performances, the genuine reactions to the horrors they experience are gripping. On top everything, the film only has three characters to follow that never leave each other and have zero subplots to follow. The filmmakers’ motivations are simple and driven by mentioned family and friends back home.
The cinematography is one point of contention to note. While it has become more common practice to use a shaky camera, this film does it to a fault and can cause some people to get sick. A good amount of the time, they are running or walking, and only set the camera up on a tripod a handful of times at the beginning. The poor camera work aids in the lack of budget or experience had.
This was the first horror movie that I saw in theatres in its initial release. I’d become initiated into horror through rentals of classic slashers and monster movies. This was something that tried something different. The trailers gave nothing away (as some might say there isn’t anything to give away) and the viral marketing around it created a storm that hasn’t been seen since, namely because the internet was in its infancy still and there was ambivalence that this film was real.
Of course, this wasn’t the first film to do this. Cannibal Holocaust had done it several years before, but the viral marketing and the mainstream notoriety Blair Witch Project garnered was next level.
Detailing the marketing campaign, there was a website containing all sorts of information such as a timeline of the major Blair Witch incidents spanning from the 1700s to things like police evidence of the college filmmaker’s disappearance (i.e. pictures of an abandoned car belonging to one of the students, a diary, audio tapes, etc). There was The Curse of the Blair Witch, a fake documentary about the legend, that aired on the SciFi Channel. For years after, people thought it was real. It was rich world building far ahead of its time.The production of the movie is equally worth exploring. For the most part the actors had autonomy the entire time and were improvising their lines. The “script”, so to say, was more of an outline of how the story would flow. According to an interview with Heather Donahue- one of the actors featured in the film- when a casting call was set out on an ad, it was described as “an improvised feature film, shot in wooded location: it is going to be hell and most of you reading this probably shouldn’t come.” Over the film, the three lie to each other and get into real fights that the directors had to break up, as mentioned in the commentary. That real emotion shaped the film and despite being uncomfortable at times makes the film better.
Twenty plus years later still every found footage movie will still be compared to The Blair Witch Project. It is a product its time for sure but it pulled of something impossible to replicate. The Paranormal Activity series tried it along with each of its sequels but never quite succeeded. Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, this film’s sequel better left forgotten, had given up on trying to pull off that gimmick only a few years after.
The Blair Witch Project created a legacy that has continued for twenty years now, and despite a sequel that flopped and dormancy, it managed to spawn media in comics and games and even a strange reboot sequel for a new generation. All of this and its measure as the standard I would argue is because this original did everything right.
