31 Spooky Nights: The Blair Witch Project

Three film students vanish after travelling into a Maryland forest to film a documentary on the local Blair Witch legend. They leave only their footage behind.

Amelia: This movie is so much better than people say it is! I had never seen it before, as it came out when I was eight and that was a little before I developed my taste for horror, but I’ve been hearing about The Blair Witch Project and seeing it parodied for over a decade. The rating on IMDb is 6.4. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is 55%. What? WHAT?! This is how you do a scary movie in the woods. The Forest should have taken a few pages from The Blair Witch Project’s book!

Billy: Like a lot of budding creative types, I made a bunch of movies with my friends in high school. No, you will never see them, but when I get together with old friends, we still sometimes pull out those VHS tapes and relive the shaky camera work and ridiculous inside jokes we thought was legitimate film making. Watching The Blair Witch Project, I was floored by how exactly the same the early sections of this film are to my home movies, right down to the behind-the-scenes antics and the completely unprofessional way they talk over their interviews. There’s great moments here, practically a comedy duo of the fishermen, along with the horror that comes later on. I get why some people actually thought this was real. The way they use two cameras is a little thing that adds so much. Switching between the black and white film camera and the colour camcorder is dynamic and shows the intention of public and private moments early on in the film, though this later changes as all pretense slips away and there’s nothing but raw emotion, desperation, rage, and fear captured in either image.

Amelia: The fear in The Blair Witch Project comes from a place of hopelessness. You never see the witch. The witch’s existence is never even proven to be real. As far as they know, and you as the viewer know, Heather, Josh, and Mike are just cracking from the stress. The longer they go without food or comfort, the more paranoid and susceptible to the myth of the witch they become. With a budget as small as this movie had, that’s a brilliant way to play up the fright. Is it a supernatural being or regular people slowly losing themselves in a life or death situation? The movie never answers that question, but it could go either way.

Take Josh and Mike as examples of the supernatural vs the rational. Josh’s fear comes from these seemingly supernatural things that keep happening to them. The slime that appears one morning? It’s only on his stuff. He’s been marked and and the rest of his story is supernatural things happening to him. Mike on the other hand, is just done. He’s done guys. On a scale of one to ten, he’s a ‘can’t even’. He ‘can’t even’ when most of us still could. Seriously though, Mike’s fear comes from the fact that they’re lost in the woods and running out of food. His judgment starts to go, he becomes more emotional. Even before they get lost, we see him snap at Heather. The guy had a temper to start with, and the stress of what happens in the woods breaks him. So is it that supernatural stuff is happening to these three or is it that stress has just brought out more primal emotions that exaggerate the situations? With Heather (the viewer’s analogue) as the neutral party, each person watching is left to decipher it for themselves.

Side note time, did you know this movie was nominated for a bunch of Razzies? Including acting. Which is genuinely surprising to me because the three main actors were given thirty-five pages with a brief mythology of the witch and nothing else. Almost everything was just their genuine reactions to these situations.

Billy: I’m going to tell you exactly why I loved this movie so much: sound. I didn’t expect the soundscape of this movie to be so good, especially because of how divorced it is from the visuals. Hearing Josh scream in the distance makes for something otherworldly yet easy accomplishable. What is heard and not seen is the scariest part. And everything in the film supports that premise. Think back to that iconic shot of Heather looking into the camera delivering her monologue. Look at how you can’t see her mouth or anything else that’s actually producing sound in that shot. Intentional or not, it’s insanely clever. Like when they’re running through the woods and she shouts “What was that?” and the camera doesn’t pan. Your mind clocks into overdrive imagining what could be seen.

Amelia: I’ve read all the complaints levelled at this movie and honestly, they seem to come from people that just don’t understand why this movie is the way it is. Found footage isn’t everyone’s genre. It’s not mine. In fact, I’ve hated almost every found footage movie I’ve ever seen, but it works here. The POV forces you into the narrative. You’re not passively apart of this like you are in most other movies. Do you get motion sick from the shakey cam? Close your eyes during the worst of it and you get the same movie because of the sound design. It’s seriously a thing of beauty! Only barely hearing Josh’s screams in the dark of night and then from within the house from different areas all at once… I literally just shuddered thinking about! It’s legitimately terrifying.

What The Blair Witch Project does with leaving so many questions hanging by the end, what it does with the less-is-more technique makes itself a different movie for each person that watches it, and that’s pretty damn impressive!

Billy: What really works about this movie is that it’s so character driven. It gets you comfortable in the early scenes, lets you get to know the surface of these characters and who they make themselves out to be in the real world before they go to into the woods. Who they are underneath really shines through as each of them gets broken and lost. It builds so naturally, from seemingly best friends to falling apart in violent rage, and then back again as Mike and Heather realize there is absolutely nothing else to cling to. By the time they reach the isolated house in the final moments, the tone is completely different. Mike standing in the corner is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen because I have no idea what it actually means.

Spooky Verdict

Amelia: Eight witches out of ten

I loved this movie! I was scared while I watched it and I haven’t been legitimately scared of a movie in years. The final five minutes in the house? I almost couldn’t breathe. Even knowing how it ended from years of spoiling parodies and it was still tense as hell. It’s movies like The Blair Witch Project that show that bigger is not always better. They had a shoe-string budget and they had to work around those limitations. Humans are innovative when pressed, and that ingenuity shines in this movie!

Billy: Nine witches out of ten

Yeah. You heard me. This is a great little independent film and is so creative with its use of sound and limited visuals. Looking back on the explosion of found-footage movies that came after it, you’ll see how good The Blair Witch Project really is at defining a genre. Nothing ever really lived up to it.