‘The Blair Witch Project’ at 25: The Birth of Found Footage and the Price of Naive Ambition

Found footage is the cinematic equivalent of an urban legend or a story that campers tell around the fire. Intentionally poor production choices are part of the appeal, a feature, not a flaw as opposed to other movies with high production values that feel less impressive with the passage of time. Originally a term used for a primary film source such as archival news footage usually with a clip inserted into a documentary, the vegetables of the entertainment industry, found footage has been co-opted to denote a genre of fictional film, often a subset of horror, sci-fi or crime dramas where all the calories lie. Movie lovers want to suspend disbelief that they are watching a constructed, sophisticated film and pretend that they are watching something awful as it happens without the trauma or the responsibility to intervene. These people on the screen are not characters in a movie. They could be you, and you could be in that situation so it is all the danger without the trauma or mortality. 

The Blair Witch Project (1999) is not the first found footage film, but it is the most financially successful one with a budget of $60,000 and a revenue of $248 million. During its national opening weekend on July 30, 2024, it came in second to Julia Roberts and Richard Gere’s Runaway Bride (1999). It ranked tenth in the 1999 domestic and international box office, still behind the Pretty Woman reunion, which came in ninth, and such hits in the following order: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, The Sixth Sense, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Toy Story 2, The Matrix, Tarzan, Big Daddy and The Mummy. It is no small feat for an independent film to beat out a Will Smith blockbuster, a James Bond installment with Pierce Brosnan at the helm, and another Julia Roberts’ film, Notting Hill, which starred the then romantic heartthrob who would later turn into a rapscallion Hugh Grant. It is the only found footage film to make the top 50 grossing independent films, specifically lucky number thirteen, a fitting position for a folk horror film.

How did two unknown filmmakers, University of Central Florida alumni Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, strike gold in their directorial debut? With three other grads, they formed a production company, Haxan Films. Their company was named after a Swedish/Danish silent film, Häxan (1922), which translates into The Witch, an alleged comprehensive documentary about the history of witchcraft. It didn’t hurt that they hired three amazing improv actors who used their real names on screen and shot the twenty hours of footage used in the eighty-one-minute film. These actors were such good sports that they agreed to a contract that permitted the directors to mess with their minds, which included getting less food daily, using Josh’s real hair in the bundle of sticks, having the tent shaken, made to walk in circles and really being scared because they had no preparation for the final scene. Clein & Walker, a public relations firm, also crafted a multimedia viral marketing campaign that left moviegoers wondering if the Blair Witch was real or not.

The marketing included a website that went live in June with information that seemed real like police reports, distributing missing person flyers at film festivals, which had to be taken down when an unrelated TV exec got kidnapped and was later rescued, and a Sci-Fi Channel mockumentary, The Curse of the Blair Witch. This special aired on July 12, 1999 and depicted the fictional legend and disappearances as if they were real with interviews and archival news reports. In July 1999, a comic book was released, and in September 1999, The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier, which I still own, was published with additional photos, police reports and news articles. The fun was not restricted to the theater but surrounded the entire event and included creating a fictional history, location and legend, which is still fooling out of towners to this day. For instance, Burkittsville’s colonial historical name was never known as Blair Township during colonial times.

For those who have yet to see the classic or cannot watch found footage without a huge dose of Dramamine, here is a summary of what you missed. Set during October 1994, three aspiring filmmakers, ordinary people, take a road trip to Burkittsville, Maryland to interview locals, which was filmed in Germanstown, not Burkittsville. Some of these locals were actors that the directors planted without the cast’s knowledge. The trio visit the Black Hills Forest, which the titular occultist allegedly haunts and does not exist—filming occurred in Patapsco Valley State Park. Heather Donahue is the leader of the group, i.e. the director, conceived of the project, and uses a Hi8 camcorder. Joshua Leonard, aka Josh, Heather’s friend, films on a CP 16 camera on black and white 16 mm and recruited Michael Williams (Michael C. Williams) to record audio on a Digital Audio Track, the DAT. A weekend expands into seven days as the three lose their way. Unexplained phenomena happen, and the three disappear. Only their visual recordings survive and are found a year later.

In an incredible coincidence between cinematic history and the film, a woman directed the first known found footage film, The Connection (1961), which was adapted from a screenplay, about a director who pays for drugs in exchange for the heroin addicts granting permission to him for shooting up. They accuse him of exploitation, so he takes drugs at their behest and later winds up missing. Found footage films are like Sid Davis films, social guidance films or cautionary tales for adults, specifically any who dabble in filmmaking even as amateurs. Early indigenous superstition believed that capturing the image of a person is like stealing someone’s soul, but taken to its logical conclusion, a person who operates a camera is a monster like a spiritual cannibal. Filmmakers become madmen who destroy themselves and others by going into dangerous situations and not noticing because of the allure of getting the shot, a concept that Jordan Peele explored in Nope (2022).

The Blair Witch Project was so enjoyable because it avoided the expected narrative tropes about what would happen if men outnumbered a woman in the woods. Originally the cast was supposed to consist of three men, but when Donohue nailed her audition, gender bending was a no brainer. The filmmakers considered and discarded some of the ideas that viewers spun after watching the movie. There is no sexual violence although moviegoers projected elaborate gendered backstories on the trio. One popular theory was that Josh was Heather’s alleged former spurned lover who worked in conjunction with Michael to kill her, a reading which not only defies Occam’s razor, but dulls it with a superimposed wild imagination that one would need to strain to read into the text though in the real world, this premise would be more credible than a supernatural explanation for the three’s disappearance.

There are only a few scenes that barely support this collective created backstory. Michael offers to help Heather put on her backpack, but he prioritizes his obligation to record audio over his natural upper body strength/being a gentleman versus, which Heather implicitly agrees with while expressing dismay at the weight of her supplies. Later, during a conflict between Josh and Heather over who has a missing map, Josh shouts, “I’m not going into your [Heather’s] fucking pants” to look for the map. When she replies, without missing a beat or seeming disturbed, she uses “pockets” instead of “pants.” While it is not a reach to read the word change as reducing the charged nature, it more speaks to Heather as a person in power making a subordinate feel harassed although there is an undercurrent of violence. Soon after Josh mentions that his girlfriend is going to be worried about him. In an earlier scene, when Josh is recording footage, he jokes that he saw the Blair Witch, but it is Heather peeing in the woods, which seemed to portend Heather being a threat to the guys’ physical safety rather than pointing to Josh’s being a prurient peeping Tom.

Gendered behavior expectations are subverted in The Blair Witch Project. As a director, a woman embracing a predominantly male dominated profession, Heather went into psychological drag and eschewed all the expected gendered norms of a woman: being more careful than her male counterparts, noticing danger before everyone else and admitting when there is danger. Instead, she prioritized filming, i.e. work, over the safety of human beings and ridiculed her male friends for being scared. Michael and Josh are the ones who notice that she is lost, cannot read a map and become hysterical. They have practical concerns: returning to work and returning expensive rental equipment whereas Heather centers her vision. The two men often scream at her to turn off her camera or stop recording, which she refuses to do. They do not trust her to prioritize their lives over her creative work. Despite their grumbling, they still obey her. The Blair Witch is never shown to the audience, which the filmmakers did not intend. While acting and running, Josh failed to capture the off screen spectre; however, Heather is the only one who reacts to her or rather art director Ricardo Moreno wearing a white dress, who played the off screen titular character. The men are characterized by not wanting to see lest they be perceived, and Josh references Deliverance (1972), a film about locals who violently attack a group of men camping in the woods. The men do not want to investigate the sounds or start a fire. They feel exposed and vulnerable. It is the men of The Blair Witch Project who fear others or the supernatural and want to abandon their plans.

Like Deliverance, the men get ensnared first. Heather films the haunting final scene of Michael facing a corner like the children whom a Burkittsville child serial killer, Rustin Parr, captured and killed in pairs, forcing one to look in a corner while killing the other, which means that Heather likely got killed then Michael with Josh’s fate left pessimistically ambiguous. There is no final girl or boy in The Blair Witch Project. No one gets rewarded for being dumb enough to tread the same ground as victims of a centuries old mystery, especially Heather. This independent horror tells a cautionary tale of filmmakers’ false sense of security and foolish narrowmindedness in the face of ambition, which is explicitly detailed in Heather’s final confessional, an iconic tearful, extreme close up of her right eye crying.

The primary underlying dread of this film is of the supernatural legends of this country although the explanation does not have to be otherworldly. It can also embody the primal colonist fear of the untamed wilderness, which is associated with the devil in opposition to the alleged Godly civilization. This brandishing of civilization against the threat of a tenebrous evil is not represented as spiritual warfare, but Heather’s confidence in civilization, the US or America, and civilization’s destruction of natural resources as her underlying source of hope that they will eventually escape the Black Hills Forest. It never happens, and Michael mocks her, later with Josh joining, by singing The Star Spangled Banner and America The Beautiful. Once Josh goes missing, Michael mournfully shouts that he will miss a baseball game, America’s pastime, because he is lost in the woods. America as a source of hope symbolizes foolishness and ignores the actual legacy.

If the supernatural caused the disappearances, Elly Kedward, a fictional character who evokes the historical specter of the Salem Witch Trials, a woman who was the victim of systematic injustice in 1786, is haunting the area and functions as almost a possessing catalyst to avenge herself against her accusers’ descendants or anyone who dares to treat the land without the reverence of a cemetery. Another moral of The Blair Witch Project is that civilization or the myth of American security cannot keep an American safe from the sins of its founders, especially other women who assimilate to possess power. Claiming the heritage of a great nation also means claiming the sins of their forefathers, a concept that has been the foundation of Stephen King’s work, especially It.

Also, it is important to note that The Blair Witch Project is a Halloween movie. It is set in October, and there are Halloween decorations on the Burkittsville residents’ doors. It is a season to remember the dead, and some cultures believe that it marks the time when the veil between the spiritual and material world is at its thinnest, the worst time to visit a haunted wooded area, especially a person who possibly celebrated Samhain. In the fictional history of Kedward, she was an Irish Catholic immigrant. The superstition of wearing a costume is to ward off vengeful spirits, which Kedward would be, especially if she was a falsely accused witch. Accidentally knocking over a cairn or burial mound could be considered a discretion. It does not have to be deep. It could just be another scary movie.

Of course, far from the viral guerrilla marketing campaign, people’s cynical hindsight is 20/20. Donohue won a Worst Actress award at the 20^th Golden Raspberry Awards, which was held on March 25, 2000, and The Blair Witch Project got nominated for Worst Picture, which is one category where Will Smith’s Wild Wild West (1999) finally edged out the indie classic. People deride the shaky camera and not seeing anything happen, which is a valid complaint, but it is also revisionist history. The lack of clarity was part of the charm of the movie.

If The Blair Witch Project was not such a hit, countless movies would not be so desperate to make lightning strike twice with subsequent sequels, which paled even in comparison to the fake TV special: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000) and Blair Witch (2016). When Jason Blum at Miramax declined to distribute the movie, Blum learned the error in his judgment and produced the Paranormal Activity franchise (2007-2021) and is currently working on a reboot of The Blair Witch Project.

While Myrick and Sanchez would go on to create more films and television series, none would ever achieve the success of their first feature. Variety recently interviewed the cast to reveal that they did not reap the financial benefits of the film’s ranking fifth—Paranormal Activity is number one and continue to fight against the use of their names, images or even voices without their permission. Donohue will have to fight Focus Features for using her screams in TÁR (2022), which indicates that Donohue’s performance was better than the Razzies thought at the time. Also, the real town of Burkittsville must deal with the fallout of intrusive tourists who still believe The Blair Witch Project is historical, not fiction. People can pretend that they are above the charms of the original, but its successful legacy and creative impact still haunts filmmakers to this day.

The Blair Witch Project was released by Artisan Entertainment on July 30, 1999. It is currently available to stream on FreeVee.

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Sarah Vincent

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