Director: Daniel Myrick ,Eduardo Sanchez
Starring: Heather Donahue,Michael Williams,Joshua Leonard
OK, I ‘fess up. For a week or two after seeing this movie, I couldn’t walk in the dark. Hallways had to be lit, nightlights had to be on, and any street that didn’t have a streetlamp was a street to be skipped. Finally, after a lifetime of slasher movies and spook stories, all of which had bounced harmlessly off my thick-skinned imagination, here was a film that brought back the fear of the dark. Watching The Blair Witch Project, I became, once again, the scared little kid who peeked out from under the covers to see if the bogeyman was coming out of the closet. But enough about 10th grade.
This movie, in case you didn’t already know—and if you don’t, I hope your time in the cave was good—was the surprise hit of 1999. Costing about as much as an SUV, this little indie packed theaters week in and week out, driven by a large wave of hype. Of course, with the hype came the backlash—as many people as there were who loved this movie, just as many thought it was absolute dung. Well, I can’t blame anyone who hated the hype. But hype’s one thing, and the movie itself is another. Having said that, let me say this: The Blair Witch Project was one of the best movies of 1999.
The plot goes like this: in October 1994, three student filmmakers ventured into the woods near Burkettsville, Maryland to film a documentary about a local legend, the Blair Witch. The film students never returned. A year later, their footage was found. That assembled footage is the movie we see.
The greatest thing about this movie is it completely throws every horror movie convention out the window. The music that usually cues you into the next death, or the camera pan that usually ends with a shot of the slasher, aren’t here. For 90 minutes, the most we see and hear are dark woods and eerie noises. The fact that nothing ever comes out of the dark—that what the students, and we, fear remains unknown—is what makes this movie so darn freaky.
This movie got tons of hype when it came out. A lot of it was deserved, but a lot of it was pure corporate greed. Consequently, too many people came into it thinking that they were about to see either the greatest, or the scariest, movie ever made.
Which is sad. Because in the end, Blair Witch is neither. What it is though is a completely original, utterly frightening experience. I’ve heard that some audiences, weeks into the movie’s run, had booed at the end of the movie. I saw the movie opening night in a packed theater in Miami. This was before the hype, before the magazine covers, before the ubiquitous marketing. At the end of our show, the audience burst into spontaneous applause—we all knew that, right there, in the peak of the summer movie season, we had just seen something completely different. My advice: don’t let the hype kill The Blair Witch Project. See it with fresh eyes. And if you can walk alone in the dark after seeing it, you’re a better man than I.
