Movie Review: The Blair Witch Project (1999)
“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.” This is the first thing you see when watching The Blair Witch Project, and even today it truly remains a one-of-a-kind film.
The Blair Witch Project was amazing for its time, and it still holds up. It seemingly came out of nowhere. There wasn’t the internet hype that can generate millions of views on youtube in a single day that we have now. Being children of the ’90s, for the most part, we had TV trailers, Movie Trailers, and maybe some magazine media or other published hype. But this wasn’t traditionally advertised. This was a viral marketing masterpiece. When this film came out, it was seemingly out of left field. The budget was somewhere in the ballpark of $500k and ended up grossing $248M at the box office, which was unheard of. In 1999, there wasn’t as much internet presence as there is today. There also wasn’t technology as abundant that people could use to make movies. These days anyone with a smartphone can make an HD film with maybe not the best quality audio, but with pretty great video quality. And I would bet that there are even boom mic adapters for smartphones out there by now.
There are a lot of things that make this film special. The most obvious being the “shaky cam” or what is now known as the “found footage” genre. There are those who like these types of films, and those who can’t stand them. There isn’t usually much in-between here. Another thing that makes this film unique is that the acting was entirely improvised using more than 15 hours of footage, and then it was edited down later to about 90 minutes. The actors were given individual instructions in empty film canisters with their names on them telling each of them how to improvise each day, and they could not share this with their fellow cast members. They were mostly unaware of what was going on. This made a lot of the moments in the film where there is frustration between the cast feel more genuine, as some of these instructions were intended to create conflict. They also limited the food that the cast ate, and the events at night kept them awake which added to that conflict as well. Most people discredit the film because of the “shaky cam” style of filming, which is from the point of view of the camera. It can be disorienting or nauseating to some when the person holding the camera has to run or do any other task which causes the camera to be jostled around. But back in 1999, this was important to the success of the film, because they had actually tricked a lot of people (including us) into thinking it was real. There was also a fake documentary that aired on television as if it were real, and at the time there wasn’t really a social media presence where people could easily and quickly debunk it.
We hadn’t heard much of anything about this film going in. As mentioned above, nobody really knew much about it. All we kept hearing was that was they had found some videotape of some kids that had gone missing in the woods in Maryland. And before this, there were some documentaries filmed this way, but nothing like this. It starts off innocently enough. Three kids go into the woods to find out more about a folktale about a witch in the area. They bring some camping gear, talk to some locals, and then go out into the woods to investigate. Another unique thing about this film is that they interview locals in Burkittsville (formerly Blair) and some of the people they interviewed were not actors. Some were actors, but the cast was not told who those people were.
As the film progresses, and they get out into the woods, things start getting progressively worse for them. They start hearing strange noises the first night they are out there, but then each night just gets worse and worse. The tension builds pretty well, and the ending has a really nice payoff. Needless to say, I left the theater not ever wanting to go into the woods ever again. It was like Jaws and what people leaving the theater must have felt about visiting the ocean. It scared the crap out of me. It wasn’t until the film started becoming really successful, and interviews followed, etc. that a lot of people finally knew it wasn’t real and the cat was out of the bag. The cast wasn’t allowed to do any interviews when the movie released, and they were basically not allowed to be seen in public for a while after it was in the theater, leaving a lot of people thinking the cast was actually dead, which wouldn’t work today, and the mystique for any film made these days will never be able to be replicate that.
This movie paved the way in mainstream horror for “found footage” films and is easily one of the best horror films of this generation.
