The Witchy Witch of the Blair

Written By Khushi Choudhary

It's March, 1886. Deep within the forest of Burkittsville, Maryland, you're hangin' around, taking a stroll, breathing in the cool autumn air. Suddenly, you feel an ominous presence around you—a gush of cold breeze, a bottomless feeling in your gut—and you feel uncertainty beginning to swell in your body. As you turn around, you see a figure behind you: an old woman whose feet didn't touch the ground. She smiles at you. Her eyes wrinkle with kindness and generosity. "Come with me," she said. And you did. As you follow behind her, you see an old, abandoned house emerging in the distance. You start to wonder if following her was the right decision. The old woman leads you into the house and down into the basement in the bowels of the house. "Turn around and face the corner," she says with a new, crackling voice. With the hit of her words, your skin turns cold—you can't help but obey. As you close your eyes, a thousand voices rush through your mind, screaming, begging you to leave. But in your heart, you know: you aren't getting out alive. 

This is the Blair Witch legend that haunted the town of Burkittsville, Maryland, throughout 1700-1900. During this time, several cases of the Blair Witch were reported. From children being pulled down and drowned in shallow rivers by a "ghostly white hand" that reached up from the water to hermits abducting to people disemboweling children under the command of the Blair Witch’s evil spirit, stories and stories piled up, provoking fear, and, apparently, curiosity among people in the United States. In 1994, three Montgomery College film students, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams, drove up to Burkittsville and decided to shoot a documentary about the legend. Unfortunately, they soon became missing after a few days of their shoot, and only their "footage" was found. It was then released in 1999 and named The Blair Witch Project. 

Heather Donahue & Joshua Leonard learning the basics of the camera (https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xzy4p/blair-witch-project-oral-history-20th-anniversary)

Heather Donahue & Joshua Leonard learning the basics of the camera (https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xzy4p/blair-witch-project-oral-history-20th-anniversary)

In reality, the filmmaker's "footage" was a film that was carefully planned out and directed by two filmmakers, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. In the 90s, the rise of computers and the digital world was relatively new. It wasn't until 1993 did the WorldWideWeb browser and editor get finalized and made available to any user that wanted to exploit it. From then on, everyone with a computer wanted to connect to the internet to be a part of the new Web experience. In the filmmaking aspect, the horror genre in the 1990s was on a steep decline, with successful franchises, such as Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street, losing momentum at the box office; audiences were tired of conventional scares. Therefore, in 1993, Myrick and Sanchez, having noticed the 1990s culture, mainly how gullible people were by online information, and the need for new material in the horror movie genre, developed a brilliant idea: they used the technology at their disposal to provide a fresh spin on horror. With a 35-page script mapped out, strong improvisational actors chosen, and the equipment of low-budget gear, Myrick and Sanchez slowly but surely began to create the Blair Witch legend. 

The process for The Blair Witch Project was an intense yet unique one. Overall, the film had a low budget of $300,000. After a fairly fierce auditioning process, actors Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams were hired to play fictionalized versions of themselves, heading out to the Maryland woods to film a documentary about the Blair Witch legend. During pre-production, the filmmakers taught the actors how to shoot on their own: teaching them the equipment, familiarizing them with the town, and setting them up with survival tools. Afterward, they went on location (Maryland) and began the filming process. Over the eight-day shoot, the actors were kept uncomfortable with small food supplies and undesirable conditions, such as having to soak in the lake without showering. The directors usually left the actors on their own to capture authentic moments, only providing guidance through directing notes and stepping in if something went off track or a critical question needed to be answered. According to Sanchez, the filming process was like doing "theater in the woods," with the filmmakers playing the Blair Witch. For instance, they would usually go out at midnight, run around, and make noises to scare the actors. This kept an unpredictable element within the film, as not even the actors themselves were sure of what to expect.

Upon releasing The Blair Witch Project, the film's marketing team marketed the film as real found footage. Prior to the film, they even made a short documentary to showcase to investors, presenting the film idea as if it were a true story. Through creating TV news clips, newspapers, police reports, interviews, journals, and most notably, their Blair Witch website, the marketing team's attempts became viral. This effectively captures the people's gullibility in the 1990s, as they believed everything they read on the internet. After Sundance, a well-known film festival, two young directors sold their film to Artisan Entertainment for $1.1 million; eventually, the film grossed up to around $248 million.

 The Blair Witch Website (https://www.blairwitch.com/) 

 The Blair Witch Website (https://www.blairwitch.com/) 

Upon viewing the Blair Witch in today's day and age, one might leave without experiencing much fear or discontentment. However, it's undeniably a cultural phenomenon as it's not just a popular horror film—it's the embodiment of an entire decade's culture, trends, and anxieties. As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author of the book Found Footage Horror, says,

“There was something in the air in 1999 that made us acutely aware that technology could be linked to some kind of vague, chaotic unknown, and 'Blair Witch' tapped into this at exactly the right moment.”

The Blair Witch Project was able to play on the early development of the internet, using the people's gullibility to its advantage. The film serves as a reaction to the digital age and became a cultural sensation as its creation had the

“right place, right time, right story.”
— The New York Times
Khushi Choudhary
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