The 1990s were an era of horror films that need to be studied. The early part of the decade gave us the tail end of the slasher sub-genre that governed horror. By the mid-1990s, you had anything from poorly produced Stephen King adaptations made for television to Wes Craven revitalizing the slasher with Scream. Yet, by the end of the decade, The Blair Witch Project would usher in what you can do with a horror film and the new heights you could take it without studio backing. Even if you don’t like the found footage horror film, you can’t argue against the floodgates it opened.
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All of it is produced with a camcorder, some hiking gear, and utter the fear that centers around a group of aspiring documentary filmmakers who go off into the woods of a small town to investigate a string of local murders that are believed to be committed by a supposed witch. Once they get lost and begin to hear scary sounds at night, all bets are off.
Why We Never See the Blair Witch on Screen
You never see ‘The Witch’ in The Blair Witch Project, though you see remnants of the entity around. The closest you get to seeing her on screen is in the film’s final moments (more on that in a second). What did you expect from a few filmmaking hopefuls with no money but an idea of how to make a scary film?
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The Blair With Project lives and breathes in the idea that it’s not what you see. It’s what you don’t that gets you scared. It’s in the screams of actress Rei Hance, formerly known as “Heather Donahue,” and the iconic close-up of her runny nose. It’s in the pile of rocks that the three lost searchers of the witch wake up to, and the stick figures made of twigs hanging from the trees. The fear and dread lie in the idea of ‘Josh’ (Joshua Leonard), who goes missing in the film’s third act, and the meltdown of ‘Mike’ (Michael C. Williams) as he begins to lose his mind. The threat of the witch being unseen keeps things grounded in reality. Thus, all the fears and anxieties the characters have as they dive further into their living hell feel all too real.
Many People Thought The Blair With Project was Real
A key factor in the success of The Blair Witch Project is that it’s presented as an actual piece of found footage. The marketing behind the movie didn’t break character in that sense for a long time. All of this makes you, an audience member, want to see what this witch looks like and see it badly.
The Blair Witch Project was also a film that utilized the internet before anyone else ever thought to do so, making it not easy to spot if it was a fake thing for people to buy into or not. The website for the film now takes you directly to the Lionsgate website, but at the time, www.theblairwitch.com had an eeriness about it that made it feel like you were examining the files of a crime scene. You know what wasn’t on the site? Any photos of the Blair Witch. Viewing the website only added fuel to the fire to get butts in seats when the film hit the national stage and scared millions.
That Ending Though…
Some want to scoff at The Blair Witch Project‘s ending; others think it is a masterpiece. By the time you reach the final few moments of the film, your palms are sweaty as you await some sort of big reveal as to what the witch looks like.
In the film’s final minutes, we are with Heather and Mike, who hear Josh yelling for help in the distance. They have stumbled upon a strange abandoned house in the woods. Mike is attacked by something off-camera. We then cut to Heather on her camera, yelling, screaming, and looking for her friends. She eventually enters the basement and finds Mike standing in the corner, facing the wall, previously mentioned in the film as a tactic used by Rustin Parr, a man who killed multiple children and was alleged to have done so at the instruction of the Blair Witch. Mike is completely motionless, Heather’s camera gets knocked to the ground, and the screen goes fuzzy, and eventually goes black.
It’s an unforgettable ending that will linger with you as you go about your life after seeing the film. Many other found-footage horror films have attempted to do the same thing, and many have failed. The Blair Witch Project accomplished all of this without ever showing you the monster.
