FILM / The Blair Witch Project: A Retrospective / Hunter Calhoun
Image © Haxan Films | Artisan Entertainment
Found footage exploded in the aughts, pulling in massive box office numbers with an incredible return on investment given how cheap they were to make. These movies spread throughout the decade, popular among independent filmmakers due to the relatively low budget requirements of the genre, and even propagated into the 2010s where the trend (mostly) died out by the end of the decade. During its height, it was common for video games to use this style as well. Amnesia and Slenderman both made their own respective splashes in pop culture and owe much of their success to the implementation of the found footage genre into gameplay. However, in the year 2021 found footage is all but a ghost of its former self as far as filmmaking and gaming goes, a flash in the creative pan whose run lasted a solid twenty years. The death knell of this genre can be traced back to the year 2016. Paranormal Activity had run its course, Cloverfield had abandoned the format for its sequel, and most importantly, the film that had started the trend back in 1999 had been remade: The Blair Witch Project.
In horror, the idea of “finding a story” after the events have happened is nothing new. The lost manuscript has been a staple of horror history since Gothic literature. The likes of Dracula, Frankenstein and many works by Edgar Allen Poe and H.P Lovecraft take on this manuscript approach. With the advent of the camera, it was only a matter of time until this trope was adapted in some way for moviegoing audiences.
It took nearly 80 years for this to come to fruition. While The Blair Witch Project may have been the first fully found footage movie, meaning that the entire runtime of the film is meant to be from the POV of a camera in the field, the 1980 Italian horror film Cannibal Holocaust holds the honor of being the first to use it. In many ways, The Blair Witch Project and its mockumentary counterpart The Curse of the Blair Witch, made to advertise the legend in the film as real, are an echo of Cannibal Holocaust. Half of the film is watching the tapes of a missing film crew and the other half is building up the mythos of what must have happened to them through a professor searching for the film canisters. Cannibal Holocaust is half found footage/half traditional film, and seen by some to have sullied the prospect of the found footage film until it was attempted again in the 90s. Most who have seen it (myself included) find it a rather repulsive movie, full of sexual violence and the slaughter of jungle animals in increasingly violent ways. Viewers at release felt they were watching a real snuff film, landing the director in a court case to prove no people died in the making.
It’s possible that this bad press put off future filmmakers from attempting their own film in this style, along with the fact the camera equipment was incredibly heavy, noisy and generally immobile. With a host of camera technology improvements, the time for the found footage resurgence in mid to late 90s was coming to its perfect point. The internet was not yet fast nor connected enough to debunk things as thoroughly as now, and the cameras were not only lighter, but capable of handheld operation, an absolute revolution in terms of filmmaking. This created the perfect storm for a found footage film to fool its audience. Audiences could only question if The Blair Witch Project was real, a questioning that did wonders when it came to marketing.
Having raised money with an eight-minute teaser that presented the film as an actual missing persons case, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez took ahold of the new cheap and light cameras and walked out into the woods with their crew and cast, unknowingly filming a movie that would be a success.
The film in many ways is largely improvisational. The actors trekked through the woods for six days, only receiving small notes from the directors in canisters about what to do. They filmed everything themselves. The result was over twenty hours of footage that the directors then had to cut down to two to create a coherent narrative. This method is much more akin to an actual documentary then it is a traditional narrative film. Traditional films are planned to a tee, and the crew typically have at least an idea of what the final film will look like, whether that be through rigorous scripting or a lot of storyboarding. Documentaries, on the other hand, are built with an idea, and a narrative constructed after the fact from everything collected. It could have been intentional (and most likely was) to film the movie as close to a documentary style as possible to really nail the aesthetic they were going for, but it is worth noting it is much more cost effective to film anything this way.
The movie had no distributor. In fact, the film was essentially laughed out of Sundance by buyers due to the poor camera work. It was eventually picked up for just one million dollars by Artisan Entertainment. Meanwhile, the directors had been building a small fanbase online by putting together a website of lore for their movie, complete with diary entries, police interviews and entries on the legend of the Blair Witch. This reinforces where the found footage format comes from in gothic roots with the stories told in letters, treating film as just another piece of a story viewers could use to piece together a larger story. Artisan leaned into this idea, dumping an additional 15 million into advertising to produce the mockumentary on the legend of the Blair Witch, a special that played on the sci-fi channel called The Curse of the Blair Witch.
Initially laughed off, the film hit theatres with a splash, setting independent records with a box office return of 248.6 million dollars on a meager $80,000 production budget and only a $15 million dollar advertisement campaign, making it one of the most profitable films of all time up to that point. Like a more palatable version of Cannibal Holocaust before it, moviegoers couldn’t shake the sense that what they were seeing was not just a film, but maybe real. Roughly, the films have a similar plotline, both following a documentary crew on their last project, they get lost in their respective environments and are then killed off one by one. As a viewer, we are presented with a mystery that has only one definite answer: that the film crew went missing. The film has no soundtrack. It’s all ambience and what amounts to home videos spliced together. The specifics, down to the finding of the tapes, are a bit murky and left up to the viewer to decipher and imagine on their own. This feeds into the intrigue, feeding into the website, which feeds into the sci-fi documentary and so on and so on.
Cannibal Holocaust, does not follow the “iceberg” form of writing and instead shows the viewer every detail, from arrival to the finding of the lost tapes. It’s a stark difference, and one that may show what general audiences are more attracted to when it comes to horror films. Both of these films stick with the viewer, but for entirely different reasons. Cannibal Holocaust delights in its gore and sexual violence while The Blair Witch Project engages audiences in a slightly more cerebral manner. The Blair Witch Project true scares lie in the space off camera, and in the mind.
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Over twenty years later, a movie like this would never happen again.
Audiences are not so easily fooled anymore. The internet goes through great lengths to debunk things, sometimes finding things out about entertainment well before the general public is meant to. The sharing of information would make it nearly impossible to fool an audience into believing something like this actually happened. First time viewers may see this film and not respect it for the monumental piece of filmmaking and advertising that it is. So, if the film is overlooked now by modern viewers and its genre is dead, does The Blair Witch Project’s legacy end with found footage becoming obsolete? The Blair Witch Project’s true legacy is that of how to market in the digital world, how to get people to become invested in a project based on a story around it, and its style of “maybe-it’s-real-maybe-it’s-not” movie magic has found a new home in online video and internet myth making.
It’s just one of those lightning in the bottle art pieces, spread over multiple mediums, that could never be recreated.
Hunter Calhoun is a creative writing and film student in central Kentucky. In his spare time, he writes short stories and discusses nature conservation.
