[COLUMN] 25 Years After The Blair Witch Project, We're All Lost in the Woods | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

25 years ago last week, The Blair Witch Project premiered at Sundance. It is interesting to consider the film’s legacy.

There is a tendency to think of The Blair Witch Project as the first “found footage” horror film. This isn’t entirely accurate. There are plenty of antecedents, with the movie owing a sizable debt to Cannibal Holocaust. Indeed, even when the film was released, there was some minor controversy over its perceived similarity to The Last Broadcast, a similar low-budget horror film released the previous year.

There is an argument to be made that The Blair Witch Project was to “found footage” horror what John Carpenter’s Halloween had been to slashers. It didn’t invent the genre, but it was successful enough to codify the trappings and structure of a particular subgenre of horror, the template to which any number of copycats and imitators would be compared. After all, “found footage” was so rare in popular cinema that audiences watching The Blair Witch Project reported motion sickness.

However, this may overstate the influence of The Blair Witch Project. Although millennial audiences grew up with “found footage” horror films, the genre didn’t explode in the aftermath of The Blair Witch Project. The movie’s direct sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, was released the following year as a quick cash grab. Pointedly, despite being directed by documentarian Joe Berlinger, it ditches the “found footage” format and plays out as a much more conventional (and expensive) horror film.

“Found footage” only really took off in the mainstream in the mid-to-late 2000s, with the triple whammy of Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, and [REC]. Those movies likely wouldn’t exist without The Blair Witch Project, but they were also much more influential in accelerating Hollywood’s embrace of the form. Paranormal Activity spawned a franchise, and cinemas were flooded with movies like The Last Exorcism, Troll Hunter, Apollo 18, The Devil Inside, and Chronicle.

There is perhaps a credible argument that the explosion of the “found footage” genre owes more to real-life events than it does to The Blair Witch Projects. Critics and academics have drawn a clear line between the format and the events of 9/11. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took place in densely populated areas, and were captured on cameras by many observers. The news and documentary accounts of the attacks were filtered through that handheld footage.

Watching The Blair Witch Project at a remove of a quarter of a century, it’s impressive how prescient the film feels. On release, there was some pushback against The Blair Witch Project for what would become the subgenre’s “main logical road bump”, the question, “why are they still carrying the camera?” To its credit, the film argues that the camera lens is a way for student Heather (Rei Hance) to mediate the horror, to put some distance between herself and what is happening.

However, two decades into the new millennium, that logical road bump doesn’t seem as severe as it once did. The Blair Witch Project plays very well in an era defined by social media, in which privacy increasingly seems like an abstract concern as younger people place more and more of their lives online, documenting every experience and moment for posterity. Today, the question isn’t “why the protagonists of The Blair Witch Project would keep filming?”, it’s “why would they stop?”

There is an interesting and deliberate tension within The Blair Witch Project, a film that unfolds primarily through the seemingly “objective” lens of a video camera. Many of the reviews at the time noted the film’s restraint. The Blair Witch Project might be a horror film, but the audience never really sees anything. As Roger Ebert noted, “At a time when digital techniques can show us almost anything, The Blair Witch Project is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can't see.”

Of course, the decision not to show anything was rooted in pragmatic concerns. The Blair Witch Project was made on a shoestring budget, which made complex in-camera effects prohibitively expensive. Some of this restraint was accidental. There was a moment during a key sequence where the camera was supposed to reveal a woman dressed in white, possibly the corporeal form of the eponymous monster, but the cameraman forgot to pan at the right moment, so it is not in the movie.

This restraint is a classic horror trope, just like the decision to avoid showing the shark in Jaws. However, it’s particularly effective in The Blair Witch Project because the action is mediated through a camera lens within the world of the film, creating an impression of objectivity. “The camera cannot lie,” to quote a cliché. So there is a wonderfully effective tension within The Blair Witch Project between what the protagonists are clearly experiencing and what is appearing on screen.

It is entirely appropriate that the film’s closing shot finds Mike (Michael Williams) standing in the corner of the basement, facing the wall so that he cannot see what is happening behind him. It is an obvious callback to the stories of the children murdered by Rustin Parr, a local vagrant, during the 1940s. However, it’s also an effective thematic statement for the film itself. There is something monstrous lurking in this space, but it can’t be seen.

It’s an abstract sort of horror, perhaps even “meta.” The audience watching The Blair Witch Project understands from the outset that there is something lurking in the woods. After all, the opening text reveals that the documentarians all disappeared while working on the film. Clearly something happened. However, the film is built on the unsettling implication that whatever happened exists beyond the capacity to be faithfully printed on to video tape.

This may be at the root of the backlash against The Blair Witch Project, which had been heralded by Washington Post film critic Lloyd Rose as “the scariest movie [he’d] ever seen.” As Gena Radcliffe notes in her retrospective, the film was quickly subject to criticisms that it was “just ‘not scary’, it was ‘boring’, it was a ‘con’, and, that most favorite of meaningful terms used by cineastes, ‘overrated.’” It is easy to understand this response to the movie, particularly given the praise it received.

Once again, though, there is a sense in which The Blair Witch Project is unsettlingly prescient. It is a film about the limits of technology to capture reality, and the nightmares that lurk in that gulf between what can be captured on film and what can be experienced. The film adopts the language of documentary, but it cannot faithfully capture whatever is tormenting these would-be filmmakers. It can only capture their response to that horror, not the horror itself.

This raises an uncomfortable question: what is real and how can the audience ever truly know? This question percolated through a lot of the great films of 1999, most notably the Wachowski Sisters’ The Matrix, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor, and David Fincher’s Fight Club. It had also been a preoccupation of films from the previous year, like Peter Weir’s The Truman Show and Alex Proyas’ Dark City.

While most of those other movies invited the audience to question the nature of their experienced reality, The Blair Witch Project challenged its viewers to grapple with the limitations and manipulations of mediated reality. Just because something is captured on film and adopts the language of a documentary does not mean it is real. More than that, there may be certain realities and experiences that cannot be faithfully captured or replicated on film.

The Blair Witch Project wasn’t just a film about this blurred reality, but became an example of it. The film itself was a self-demonstrating proof of its own thesis. In promotion, fact and fiction mingled. “The genius of Blair Witch was not the witch, or the movie itself, but the project,” noted Jim Emerson. Talking head footage that had originally been intended for the film was cut out and repackaged as a separate documentary, The Curse of the Blair Witch, which broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel. Audiences argued over whether the film was “real.”

The Blair Witch Project was perfectly timed to capitalize on the emerging internet. Between 1996 and 1999, the number of internet users had exploded from 45 million to 150 million. The internet was beginning to exert an influence on wider culture. In January 1998, the Clinton-Lewinski scandal was broken by gossip and news aggregation site The Drudge Report. As the millennium approached, Hollywood was starting to pay attention to “meta news” sites like Ain’t It Cool News or Slate.

The film’s marketing team savvily realized that the young medium could serve as useful paratext for The Blair Witch Project. The characters in the film all shared names with the actors portraying them, and the performers were listed as “missing, presumed dead” on the Internet Movie Database. The film could control its own narrative by setting up its own website that presented the events of the film as fact, receiving upwards of 160 million hits by the end of August 1999.

The Blair Witch Project was an urban legend rendered on a global scale. It was massively successful. It returned nearly $250 million on a $60,000 budget. In terms of budget-to-box-office ratio, The Blair Witch Project remains (along with Paranormal Activity) one of the most profitable movies ever made. It placed in the top ten earners at the domestic box office in 1999. Its cultural impact was so great that Rei Hance changed her name from Heather Donohue to escape the film’s shadow.

When considering The Blair Witch Project, it can be difficult to separate the film itself from the larger experience. This is another way that time has been kind to The Blair Witch Project. The film has aged well in a world where audiences are increasingly wary of the power of the internet to spread disinformation and understanding of the limits of technology to parse objective truth. As in The Blair Witch Project, the modern internet understands that they cannot trust what they are seeing.

Artificial intelligence and deepfakes make it impossible to take images and video footage at face value. The past few years have shown how quickly disinformation travels through digital spaces, allowing segments of the population to live in a completely disconnected reality. At the time, it might have seemed strange that audiences could ever have believed that The Blair Witch Project was an actual documentary, but it feels more plausible (and unsettling) in an era where large numbers of people believe that the world is controlled by a satanic cabal engaged in ritual child sacrifice.

The Blair Witch Project is a story of three people lost in the woods, uncertain of their reality and unable to discern the truth through their camera viewfinders. In the 25 years since the film premiered, that feeling is more relatable than ever.