Widely imitated shots in the still-potent third act - Heather delivering a monologue of teary regret Mike facing the corner in the basement of abandoned house - pay off every scene that led up to them.Ĭapping a decade in which indie filmmakers repeatedly proved their box office draw and creative vitality, The Blair Witch Project heralded a new breed of quasi-guerilla, entirely meta movie-making. The hopelessness of their situation is panic-inducing and painfully intimate, told in ragged breaths, distorted screams, and little else. Williams), and Josh are too slow to realize their fate on this weekend camping trip to film a documentary about the mythic Blair Witch (not a historical figure, but rather a lean and inventive fiction created by the film's directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, and embellished by its creative team). Famously, its actors were dropped into the woods and encouraged to improvise while being regularly fucked with by the filmmakers, which led to scenes of terror so authentic and pulse-pounding that Blair Witch sits among the greatest showbiz hoaxes of the 21st century, from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds to cult flicks like 1980's still-shocking Cannibal Holocaust.Īs anyone who's seen the original knows, Heather, Mike (Michael C.
#BLAIR WITCH 1999 MOVIE#
That scene, and so many others in this movie that's celebrating its 20th anniversary on July 14, speak to not only Donahue's pushy, arrogant documentarian and the emotional tourists it indicted, but the behind-the-scenes making of a widely influential, low-budget horror classic. Think of the joy of being in a really good film." "Think about how cool the fucking cemetery is going to be when we get there. "Just breathe and don’t look down," she barks from behind her always-on VHS camera. In concrete terms, there is nothing really graphically scary in The Blair Witch Project, but kids who see it need to be capable of understanding that it's entirely manufactured and fictional.A few days before the shit truly hits the fan in The Blair Witch Project, Heather (Heather Donahue) films one of her doomed compatriots, Josh (Joshua Leonard), as he struggles to cross a log over a frigid, brown expanse of creek in the woods around Burkittsville, Maryland. It's important for parents to remember that tolerance for scariness is highly individual, and, especially for teens and younger kids, highly suggestible. On another level, there is something cathartic for teenagers about seeing this graphic representation of an uncontrollable id on the loose. On one level, they provide peer bonding - you have to be friends with someone you grabbed in a moment of terror, and it's fun to have that shared experience.
Teenagers have always loved scary movies. Like some sort of cinematic Rorschach test, as we watch this movie, we are each scared by whatever lurks in our subconscious. The filmmakers made a virtue of having no budget for special effects and left everything to the audience's grisly imagination. Directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick drew from canny filmmakers such as Val Lewton and Alfred Hitchcock: People are much more scared by what they don't see than by what they do see. This horror film is more conceptual art and marketing phenomenon than movie.
Frequent use of "f-k." In one scene, characters act drunk while drinking beer and scotch in a hotel room. Some of the imagery, particularly at the end, is especially terrifying. There is a scene in which a bloody shirt, along with what appears to be a severed tongue and teeth, comes into view of one of the cameras, much to the horror of one of the characters filming. Groundbreaking for its time - its use of handheld cameras "found" one year after the disappearance of the filmmakers caused quite a buzz upon its initial release - the movie relies less on the outright blood, gore, and violence of so many horror movies and more on a psychological horror and tension that is slowly ratcheted up with each passing day and night of the characters' descent into the eerie terror that awaits them. Parents need to know that The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 "found-footage" horror movie in which three film students attempt to film a documentary about the strange and terrifying murders that have taken place in some woods in rural Maryland.
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