Sam Raimi (1982's "The Evil Dead"), eat your heart out.
Here it is, "The Blair Witch Project," the 1999 "found-footage" shocker that terrified audiences and subsequently launched an entire sub-genre of horror that would quickly wear out its novelty over the next two decades.
Although "The Blair Witch Project" was not the first so-called "found-footage" picture - feature films that typically use unknown or inexperienced or unprofessional actors and purport to be real footage and are filmed in amateurish documentary-film-style to support that notion - that honor actually goes to the Italian-made "Cannibal Holocaust" (1980).
Despite polarizing audiences and critics at the time of its release, "The Blair Witch Project" nonetheless became a bona-fide pop culture phenomenon and international box office sensation - grossing $248.6 million and becoming the most commercially successful independent feature of all time (until it was beaten by Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in 2004) - because it took a huge creative leap not seen in "Cannibal Holocaust," and that was by successfully convincing viewers that what they were seeing was indeed real, complete with an ahead-of-its-time viral marketing campaign on the nascent Internet, radio and television and in print sources; keep in mind, this was BEFORE the advent of social media giants like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Instagram. (I should know, I was 14 at the time of the film's release back in 1999 and fell for it myself, and remember being convinced that everything had actually happened. The more cynical and jaded of us out there would call this a "snuff" film if that was actually the case.)
It's an ingenious (the late film critic Roger Ebert described it as "insidious" in his four-star review of the film) tactic that works, by tricking the audience into believing that the events of the film are real and having the faux documentary film style to back it up - complete with the requisite bare-bones production budget ($60,000) - the formula for a horror movie cultural phenomenon was set.
Another reason for its success was the fact that "The Blair Witch Project" was riding the wave of the big horror revival of the late 1990s - initiated three years earlier by "Scream" (1996). And by capitalizing on the then-novel "found-footage" caveat as a means of distinguishing itself from the other big-budgeted horror films of the time, co-directors/co-writers/co-editors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez almost single-handedly gave rise to a new sub-genre of modern horror.
Like "Jaws" (1975), "The Blair Witch Project" has a deceptively simple premise that gets by because of its novel if flawed execution that early on seems at least partially inspired by "Deliverance" (1972) and "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974). By now, we all surely know the story: In October of 1994, three film students by the names of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams went into the woods outside of Burkittsville, Maryland, to make a documentary about the local legend of the "Blair Witch," and are never seen again. One year later, their footage was found. That +found footage+ is what forms the basis of the film that we, as the viewer, sees.
That's it. But what follows, is a descent into pure terror. Myrick and Sanchez wrote a 35-page screenplay in 1993 that forms the narrative backbone of the picture, and the actors were forced into improvising most of their scenes with minimal direction and instruction from the filmmakers. Supported by the shaky hand-held camerawork (which quite frankly has never been an issue for me in any of these sorts of pictures - though I get the frustration that some people have with this particular style of filmmaking), we, as audience members, get the impression that we are watching a real-world documentary, since the entire movie was actually filmed using two hand-held cameras. I have always commented that when it comes to "found-footage" features, the one thing that we can always count on are natural performances from the actors. That is no truer here in "The Blair Witch Project" than it is in any of its similar-themed followers over the years. Because of the minimal direction and improvisation on the part of the performers - combined with the natural, hand-held camera visual aesthetic - many (if not all) of their reactions to the (unseen) seemingly supernatural forces that menace them in the film's second half are in fact real; a lot of these "unseen" forces were just the film crew spooking the hell out of the three leads since the budget did not allow for elaborate special effects. Also like "Jaws" in its initial stages, that fear of the unknown is what makes it so scary.
That sort of immersive realism cannot be replicated by your standard-fare feature film. The characters are terrified and we're terrified along with them, but we also have to remind ourselves that Donahue, Leonard, and Williams were never at any time in any real danger. But still, their camera captures the oppressive and ominous backwoods of Maryland quite well. And despite the lack of any special effects, the viewer still gets a nice taste of horror imagery; simple objects in the forest like a bundle of sticks, a pile of rocks, bizarre stick figures hanging from the trees, a huge log fallen across a river, a decrepit old house in the middle of nowhere - these images are all quite unsettling and have a unique way of eliciting pure primal terror and lodging themselves into the viewer's memory because of their un-pretentious, unassuming simplicity.
In a nutshell, "The Blair Witch Project" launched a craze and was a terrifying cinematic horror-movie moment that cannot ever happen again. The viral marketing and the brilliantly-sculpted illusion that the film's events are all true were the key to the success of the picture. If it were to come out now, in the digital media age of 2022, there's no question that the illusion would not work and people wouldn't fall for it like they did back in 1999.
It was a brilliant flame that could only ever burn this bright, this one time. And like "The Evil Dead," it also convinced people not to go into woods ever again...
9/10
P. S.: Although no music is heard in the film (except for a quick cut on a car radio early on), "The Blair Witch Project" does have an accompanying soundtrack called "Josh's Blair Witch Mix" that like the film, also presents itself as a "found" mix tape of music that Joshua Leonard was hip to and was found by investigators in his car along with the camera equipment the three were traveling with to shoot the picture. It's a dark, ominous, doomy, gloomy collection of Goth, industrial, and vintage sounds by Lydia Lunch, Public Image Ltd., Skinny Puppy, The Creatures, Type O Negative, Meat Beat Manifesto, and even the dirge-y composition played over the end credits of the film called "The Cellar" by the film's composer Antonio Cora. I highly recommend picking that up if you can find it somewhere since it perfectly matches the grim and foreboding mood of the film.
Here it is, "The Blair Witch Project," the 1999 "found-footage" shocker that terrified audiences and subsequently launched an entire sub-genre of horror that would quickly wear out its novelty over the next two decades.
Although "The Blair Witch Project" was not the first so-called "found-footage" picture - feature films that typically use unknown or inexperienced or unprofessional actors and purport to be real footage and are filmed in amateurish documentary-film-style to support that notion - that honor actually goes to the Italian-made "Cannibal Holocaust" (1980).
Despite polarizing audiences and critics at the time of its release, "The Blair Witch Project" nonetheless became a bona-fide pop culture phenomenon and international box office sensation - grossing $248.6 million and becoming the most commercially successful independent feature of all time (until it was beaten by Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in 2004) - because it took a huge creative leap not seen in "Cannibal Holocaust," and that was by successfully convincing viewers that what they were seeing was indeed real, complete with an ahead-of-its-time viral marketing campaign on the nascent Internet, radio and television and in print sources; keep in mind, this was BEFORE the advent of social media giants like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Instagram. (I should know, I was 14 at the time of the film's release back in 1999 and fell for it myself, and remember being convinced that everything had actually happened. The more cynical and jaded of us out there would call this a "snuff" film if that was actually the case.)
It's an ingenious (the late film critic Roger Ebert described it as "insidious" in his four-star review of the film) tactic that works, by tricking the audience into believing that the events of the film are real and having the faux documentary film style to back it up - complete with the requisite bare-bones production budget ($60,000) - the formula for a horror movie cultural phenomenon was set.
Another reason for its success was the fact that "The Blair Witch Project" was riding the wave of the big horror revival of the late 1990s - initiated three years earlier by "Scream" (1996). And by capitalizing on the then-novel "found-footage" caveat as a means of distinguishing itself from the other big-budgeted horror films of the time, co-directors/co-writers/co-editors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez almost single-handedly gave rise to a new sub-genre of modern horror.
Like "Jaws" (1975), "The Blair Witch Project" has a deceptively simple premise that gets by because of its novel if flawed execution that early on seems at least partially inspired by "Deliverance" (1972) and "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974). By now, we all surely know the story: In October of 1994, three film students by the names of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams went into the woods outside of Burkittsville, Maryland, to make a documentary about the local legend of the "Blair Witch," and are never seen again. One year later, their footage was found. That +found footage+ is what forms the basis of the film that we, as the viewer, sees.
That's it. But what follows, is a descent into pure terror. Myrick and Sanchez wrote a 35-page screenplay in 1993 that forms the narrative backbone of the picture, and the actors were forced into improvising most of their scenes with minimal direction and instruction from the filmmakers. Supported by the shaky hand-held camerawork (which quite frankly has never been an issue for me in any of these sorts of pictures - though I get the frustration that some people have with this particular style of filmmaking), we, as audience members, get the impression that we are watching a real-world documentary, since the entire movie was actually filmed using two hand-held cameras. I have always commented that when it comes to "found-footage" features, the one thing that we can always count on are natural performances from the actors. That is no truer here in "The Blair Witch Project" than it is in any of its similar-themed followers over the years. Because of the minimal direction and improvisation on the part of the performers - combined with the natural, hand-held camera visual aesthetic - many (if not all) of their reactions to the (unseen) seemingly supernatural forces that menace them in the film's second half are in fact real; a lot of these "unseen" forces were just the film crew spooking the hell out of the three leads since the budget did not allow for elaborate special effects. Also like "Jaws" in its initial stages, that fear of the unknown is what makes it so scary.
That sort of immersive realism cannot be replicated by your standard-fare feature film. The characters are terrified and we're terrified along with them, but we also have to remind ourselves that Donahue, Leonard, and Williams were never at any time in any real danger. But still, their camera captures the oppressive and ominous backwoods of Maryland quite well. And despite the lack of any special effects, the viewer still gets a nice taste of horror imagery; simple objects in the forest like a bundle of sticks, a pile of rocks, bizarre stick figures hanging from the trees, a huge log fallen across a river, a decrepit old house in the middle of nowhere - these images are all quite unsettling and have a unique way of eliciting pure primal terror and lodging themselves into the viewer's memory because of their un-pretentious, unassuming simplicity.
In a nutshell, "The Blair Witch Project" launched a craze and was a terrifying cinematic horror-movie moment that cannot ever happen again. The viral marketing and the brilliantly-sculpted illusion that the film's events are all true were the key to the success of the picture. If it were to come out now, in the digital media age of 2022, there's no question that the illusion would not work and people wouldn't fall for it like they did back in 1999.
It was a brilliant flame that could only ever burn this bright, this one time. And like "The Evil Dead," it also convinced people not to go into woods ever again...
9/10
P. S.: Although no music is heard in the film (except for a quick cut on a car radio early on), "The Blair Witch Project" does have an accompanying soundtrack called "Josh's Blair Witch Mix" that like the film, also presents itself as a "found" mix tape of music that Joshua Leonard was hip to and was found by investigators in his car along with the camera equipment the three were traveling with to shoot the picture. It's a dark, ominous, doomy, gloomy collection of Goth, industrial, and vintage sounds by Lydia Lunch, Public Image Ltd., Skinny Puppy, The Creatures, Type O Negative, Meat Beat Manifesto, and even the dirge-y composition played over the end credits of the film called "The Cellar" by the film's composer Antonio Cora. I highly recommend picking that up if you can find it somewhere since it perfectly matches the grim and foreboding mood of the film.