‘The Blair Witch Project’ Ruined Cinema

The Blair Witch Project, released in July 1999, was a game-changer. It was a tiny independent film that grossed, eventually, $248 million worldwide. Considering its budget of $25,000 and its cast made up of three unknown actors (who would, throughout their respective careers, never really become “known”), that’s quite a feat, even for a film that came at the heels of a massive independent cinema movement that brought low-budget films into the mainstream. It wasn’t the strength of the film that propelled its major success, but rather its marketing campaign, which utilized viral tactics that seem commonplace these days on social media, that suggested the film’s found footage conceit was real and that the three-member documentary crew caught on camera really did disappear while searching for evidence of witchcraft in rural Maryland. It was, of course, all made up, a complete bait-and-switch, but the film was praised by many critics when it was released.

But here’s the thing I realized after watching it again this week: it’s a pretty bad movie.

I’ll admit that I was obsessed with it back in ’99, especially before it was released. As a teenage film nerd, I read everything about the film leading up to its release. I was in on the gag; I knew it was not a “real” documentary, that the documentary crew — made up of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams — were, in fact, actors who survived the short shoot the previous year in Maryland. I knew that the legend of the Blair Witch was completely made up, that everyone interviewed in the film, which real people, were making up stories. I was astounded that people fell for this elaborate marketing lie, and I even defended the film when friends complained about how lame it was.

Fifteen years later, watching the movie again on Netflix, I was astounded with how boring it was. Three actors go into the woods with a few cameras and recording equipment. They interview “locals.” They camp. They find some rocks and sticks bundled together. They get lost. They fight. They hear noises. They find a house. The cameras stop rolling. The end! It’s not a particularly fascinating film, nor a novel premise. Why did it work a decade and a half ago?

A quick reminder of the “found footage” conceit: it was still a pretty new concept back in 1999. The Blair Witch Project was not the first film to incorporate the conceit — that would be the controversial Cannibal Holocaust, released in 1980. But Blair Witch was certainly the first major success for the genre, and its box office records naturally influenced a slew of similarly shot films. Most of these, like Blair Witch, were horror films, albeit subpar ones: Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, and Quarantine all come to mind. Those three, and two others — Chronicle and Project X — certainly had the highest profile, and all of them have another thing in common: the conceit never really worked. (That’s what I can say for Blair Witch: the narrative — what little there is — doesn’t fall apart by the end of the film, overshadowed by the gimmick of the found-footage conceit.)

And let’s not even get started on what is now a norm in film marketing: the insufferable attempts at recreating Blair Witch‘s viral success. It was a little movie that premiered at Sundance in 1998, and a year later exploded in an unprecedented wide release. There were book tie-ins and a poorly made sequel — a movie that didn’t try to replicate the original film’s style or conceit, but rather a run-of-the-mill b-horror film that only tarnished the original film’s legacy even further.

It’s Blair Witch‘s legacy that’s the worst part of the film; to be fair, one can’t hold writer-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez or the cast responsible for the cinematic crimes that came after it. But, looking back, was it all worth it? Hindsight makes one jaded, but what Blair Witch really gave us were a slew of terrible imitations that are a part of a trend that doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon, and they certainly don’t help Blair Witch‘s case. The Blair Witch Project was a massive fluke, a viral success that can never be replicated, and nor should it. It doesn’t have the power that it had fifteen years ago, and that’s not because of the imitations — it’s because it wasn’t that great to begin with.

Photos: Artisan Entertainment