8 October: The Blair Witch Project

It’s 8 October. While I sit at my desk pondering today’s challenge for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween -- “Slow Burn” if you’re scoring at home -- I have the windows open and can happily say that it officially feels like fall here in SoCal. The air is slightly cooler, the leaves are turning colors, and the stick figures are hanging from the bare branches of trees like some kind of eerie fruit. Well, maybe that last one is only happening in the woods surrounding Burkittsville, MD, the site of today’s movie: The Blair Witch Project.

Released in 1999, The Blair Witch Project was, at the time, a movie like no other. Made for a measly $60,000, it was a purported found-footage documentary filled with jerky camera work, a mixture of 16mm film and video, and really bad hiking decisions made by three young, independent filmmakers. (I do not encourage would-be visitors to the woods to kick their map into a creek.)

Was it really a documentary, though? Certainly the film’s website and an hour-long special aired on the SciFi Channel, Curse of the Blair Witch, made it out to be so. It was hard to separate the fact from the fiction, because the fiction -- official looking police reports, newsreel-style footage, interviews with family and friends of the missing filmmakers -- was so convincingly presented as fact. By the time viewers sat in their seats at their local multiplex, their heads had been so turned around by the film’s marketing campaign that they were ready to believe anything.

In 1999, I was one of those people. While I didn’t visit the website or see the SciFi Channel faux-doc, The Blair Witch Project worked on me like no movie had done so before (or since, if I’m being honest). I knew what I was seeing was only a movie, but everything -- the camerawork, the performances, the “texture” of the footage, the slow build-up of little events over the length of the film culminating with that final scene in the basement -- felt so darn real. I was shaking when I walked out of the theater. That night, I did not sleep a wink. At all. I lay in bed all night thinking of the movie, the characters, and...the witch.

I’ve never been so terrified in all my life.

I can’t think of higher praise for a movie.