The Blair Witch Project: A triumph on a shoestring budget

The Blair Witch Project premiered at Sundance 24 years ago today, which would be a rather unremarkable anniversary but for the fact that the amateur filmmakers who starred in it were themselves more or less 24 when they made it; they have thus been associated for half of their lives with their little budget horror film, a temporally sobering reflection albeit nothing to be ashamed of. None of them have really done much of cinematic note since then—Heather Donahue, the iconic face of the movie, went on to become a medical marijuana grower, while Josh Leonard and Mike Williams have continued to act in that quiet sort of working way in which the majority of actors do their trade. It is odd to think that these three talented people, rendered forever young in their shaky camera footage from 1999, are now approaching 50. But aren’t we all.

Blair Witch is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, and it succeeds on those merits in large part because it does not overshoot its basic mandate: It is intensely frightening, and almost profoundly realistically so. It did not have to be that way, even within the relatively narrow constraints of the “found footage” genre of which it is part. Cannibal Holocaust, released twenty years before, is more or less the pioneer entry in that style of filmmaking, and it is considerably more violent and graphic than Blair Witch, yet its goriness is less frightening and more corny than anything else, the gross effects an obvious contrivance by a bunch of Italian guys in a cheap studio somewhere in Aurelio.

Blair Witch is not like that, because its ambitions are much more understated and its horror that much more accessible to even its more jaded viewers. The movie is unquestionably about a supernatural entity stalking three young people in the middle of the northern Maryland woods—the whole ethereal midnight giggling of children makes that pretty well clear, as does the thing with the finger and the teeth—but the fear is delivered through the brutal mental breakdowns experienced by each of the protagonists as their sanity is plucked from them, maddeningly, like nose hairs (or teeth, for that matter). Nothing ever gets better for these poor dupes; once this business with the witch starts the filmmakers never recover the upper hand and never come close to doing so. Eventually they all die in the woods, and in the exact same way as they briefly lived in them: Completely out of control, helpless, at the mercy of a creature that eventually withdraws its mercy and kills them.

That kind of zero-sum filmmaking is bold, because it dispenses with the sort of dramaturgical structure that most eggheaded rewriting consultants will tell you is necessary for your film to get studio backing. Everybody wants to play it safe, and one of the surest ways to not play it safe is to make your protagonists essentially useless, functionally incapable of doing much of anything other than losing their minds. You can’t pull that off without being clever about it. But then Blair Witch didn’t have studio backing, not really; the Florida production company that brought it to the screen was purpose-built for the film itself, and it was reportedly made on a basic production budget of around $60,000, which is about the price of five minutes’ worth of lame CGI in whatever trash Marvel sequel is currently in post-pro.

But you can actually do a lot with $60,000, if you sit down and give it some thought. And one of the things that makes Blair Witch so horrifically compelling is that everything in it takes place at human scale, its plot essentially a case study in traumatic psychology, none of it allegorical, all of it self-evident. The film is a bracingly short 90 minutes. It is shot on equipment just a few steps removed from home movie cameras. The dialogue is uncomplicated and easy, and as the situation grows desperate the exchanges grow increasingly monosyllabic, becoming almost superfluous as everyone breaks down:

Heather Donahue : Uh, no...
Michael Williams : YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME! THIS IS A JOKE!
Heather Donahue : Uh, no...
Michael Williams : THIS IS NOT FUNNY!
Heather Donahue : Mike, just please stop... please, please stop...
Michael Williams : UH NO!
Heather Donahue : It's not the same log, Mike. It's not the same log.
Michael Williams : SAME LOG!
Heather Donahue : Look, it's not!
Michael Williams : IT IS! OPEN YOUR EYES!
Heather Donahue : It's not the same log.

You can’t escape from this kind of relentless human disintegration, which after all is the point. Movies in general tend to be useful vehicles for escapism in part because they demonstrate how we’d like to respond to chaos as opposed to how we actually do. We prefer to see someone behave creatively and resourcefully in a bad situation rather than stupidly and uselessly. We love the ending to Jaws, say, in no small part because our man uses a modern oxygen tank, a sinking old New England inshore and an M1 Garand to destroy the monster. Most of us in the same situation would probably pee our pants and be devoured alive.

We want heroes. Yet “SAME LOG!” is not heroic; it’s horrific, and more pointedly it is common. It shows us, the audience, that we are regrettably just like these people—which means we can die just like them too. That’s the necessary fulcrum on which most good horror movies pivot.

Blair Witch is a great movie, but it is also a great anthropological object, utilizing as it did the nascent Internet to hawk itself; more importantly it utilized nascent Internet culture, the burgeoning reflexive network of people who went online to actually do weird and interesting things, like discuss the alleged disappearance of three amateur filmmakers “in the woods near Burkitsville, Maryland.” People, more than a few of them, really believed that all of this happened. It was funny times. There is a general understanding these days that this was kind of a one-and-done thing, that the Internet has become too ubiquitous and its users too skeptical to allow this kind of clever deception to take place a second time, and that it is “hard to imagine a hoax-based movie campaign ever again gaining that kind of currency,” as the New York Times put it.

I used to believe that but actually I’m not so sure anymore. Much of the Internet, after all, now runs on “viral videos” that are almost universally fake, scripted, blocked out and heavily edited—and yet everyone seems to think it’s all real. “Look at this funny video of this dad discovering the puppy his kid has been hiding under his bed!” “Watch this grandma’s face when this boy tells her what he did at school today!” It’s all bogus, a bunch of cheap, bottom-shelf tricks, faker even than Blair Witch, which was at least shot without a script and which actually did kind of drive its performers a little mad. Who really thinks you can’t fool people anymore? It happens countless times every day.

But maybe people don’t want to be fooled by movies anymore. Actually moviegoers in the main don’t really seem to want much of anything these days. Blair Witch has historically been hailed as a sort of watershed moment in horror cinema, and it was definitely that, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that it occurred amid a markedly strong 15-year-or-so stretch of horror movies overall: Hellraiser in 1987, say, and Pet Semetary in 1989, Candyman in 1992, Scream in 1996, a dozen or 20 others. Two years before Blair Witch they released Event Horizon; four years after it was the release of the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, arguably the only remake ever really worth anything and likely the last truly great horror film until Ari Aster’s Hereditary 15 years later.

Things aren’t so great nowadays: Nearly every single one of these movies has been rebooted or requel’d in the past six or seven years, including Blair Witch itself, and I think there’s dim talk of an Event Horizon TV series at some point, if they can gather together enough pathetic masochists to make it happen. Between the endless rehashing of older, better movies and the nonstop haunted-orphanage-from-the-1920s cookie-cutter dreck, it’s not a good time for horror cinema. Or really any cinema of any kind.

Blair Witch, then, is a testament both to a moment in time that no longer exists and a creative impulse which is increasingly nonexistent in modern filmmaking. It used to be quite a bit more common for someone to have an interesting, original idea for a movie, and make the movie, and you could expect that movie to do reasonably well at the box office and inform a larger part of the cinematic narrative to some degree. What, meanwhile, are the “most anticipated movies of 2023?” A Mario movie? A Little Mermaid reboot? The first half of the tenth installment in the Fast and Furious franchise? Another Evil Dead movie? The fifth Indiana Jones movie? The seventh Transformers movie?

What a sterling lineup. Total trash. Ironically, the breakdown of the cinematic impulse is reminiscent of that which is experienced by the young filmmakers in Blair Witch after several exhausting and horrific days in the forest:

Heather Donahue : Do you just expect me to do something or say something? What do you want me to do, Josh? Josh?
Joshua Leonard : I wanna make movies, Heather. Isn't that what we're here to do? Just to make some movies.
Heather Donahue : Fuck you. Fuck you. Really. Fuck you.

One rather gets the sense that Hollywood today feels the same about its viewers, and ultimately that the viewers feel the same way about movies overall: “Fuck you. Really.” Twenty-four years is a long time ago for cinema, longer still when you consider what it once was and what it could have been. “It's like a totally filtered reality,” Josh says at one point of filmmaking. “It's like you can pretend everything's not quite the way it is.” But of course you can only pretend for so long.