Williams) gradually turn on each other as their circumstances grow bleaker, until there’s arguably no longer any need for a witch or other bogeyman to torment them.
The real horror lies in watching Heather (Heather Donahue), Josh (Joshua Leonard), and Mike (Michael C. Viewed from another perspective, however, The Blair Witch Project is one of the goriest movies ever made: It’s 81 minutes of nerves being slowly shredded before your eyes. So little actually happens that it’s a wonder there were no riots reported when it opened in theaters. Viewed today, when it’s a given that found-footage movies are entertaining hogwash-nowadays, some of them don’t even bother with verisimilitude, opting to cast familiar faces like Friday Night Lights’ Zach Gilford ( Devil’s Due) and Mad Men’s Ben Feldman ( As Above/So Below) rather than unknowns- Blair Witch’s efforts at spookiness seem almost adorably quaint. Its effectiveness as horror was almost entirely dependent on the illusion that its three characters were real student filmmakers who actually went missing five years earlier, after recording this footage. The only parts that can really be called scary-and even then, only for viewers who are more freaked out by the suggestion of an unknown threat than by actual monsters or killers-are the scenes shot in the middle of the night, which represent maybe 10 percent of the film’s total running time. The Blair Witch Project is a great movie, but it isn’t a great horror movie. Promised the most terrifying movie ever made, they instead got three annoying people wandering through the woods being terrorized by piles of rocks and bundles of sticks. (CinemaScore grades are so absurdly generous as a rule that a B can inspire mass panic at a studio.) Speaking anecdotally, I can’t recall another film that inspired so much sheer anger from people who felt they’d been duped by hype. Move down to the 21-34 group, and it managed a C+, which is still basically “Thanks for wasting my time.” Even teenagers, surely the target audience, could muster only a lukewarm B. According to the polling service CinemaScore, female viewers 35 and older gave it a D-, while male viewers in the same age bracket awarded it a rare F. (Believing the footage to be genuine was likely a factor.) If there were some means of determining the most violent movie-related backlashes, however, it’s a fair bet that The Blair Witch Project would rank somewhere near the top of the list. Critics were generally enthusiastic, and there were plenty of folks who had the same intense reaction as the Sundance audiences. Oh, one more thing: America fucking hated it. Apart from Paranormal Activity-a direct descendant-there’s been no little-indie-that-could sensation like it since. Its two directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, were even on the cover of Time.
Shot for an initial budget that’s been reported as less than $50,000, it grossed just shy of $250 million (closer to $350 million, adjusted for inflation), making it one of the most profitable films of all time. Found-footage horror, which had previously barely existed as a genre, became so popular that it’s still going strong 15 years later there are movies in multiplexes right now that only exist because of The Blair Witch Project. An innovative online marketing campaign-launched when the Internet was still a relatively new toy for the general public-followed, creating even more frantic wanna-see by making it appear as if the film were non-fiction. From the moment of its première at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival (where it screened as a midnight movie), Blair Witch was a full-steam word-of-mouth express, with people who’d just seen it grabbing those who hadn’t yet by their parkas and shaking them violently, insisting that they absolutely must. Calling The Blair Witch Project a phenomenon is flirting with understatement.
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