Blair Witch Project, The

Blair Witch Project, The

Released: 1999

MPAA Rating: R

Genre: Witch/Warlock

Nuts and Bolts: In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. One year later, their footage was found.

Summary: Three Montgomery College students, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams decide that they want to make a documentary about an old urban legend known as the Blair Witch. Their plan includes traveling to the nearby small town of Burkittesville (Formerly Blair) Maryland and interviewing some of the locals before venturing out into the Black Hills Forest themselves.

Day 1: Josh goes to pick up Heather at her house. He is armed with a 16-millimeter camera on loan to him from the college film department. After playing about a bit with the camera, the two go to pick up Mike Williams. Neither of them has met Mike before but the latter has agreed to be their soundman for the project.

The three stop at a grocery store and stock up on supplies including toilet paper, cigarettes and marshmallows. Shoving everything they have into large rucksacks, they hope into Josh’s car and head into the town of Burkittesville.

They spend most of the day scouting out the area and they shoot some scenes near a local cemetery. They interview a few of the local citizens and we are given a bit of insight into the gossip surrounding the Blair Witch.

Apparently, the Blair Witch was a woman named Ellie Kedward who was a settler that came to Blair sometime in the late 18th century. Accused of witchcraft, Ellie was arrested and sentenced to die from exposure. But ever since then, strange events have occurred in Blair that many attribute to the Blair Witch.

A man by the name of Rustin Parr was convicted of murdering seven children in 1949. He would take them down two at a time into the basement of his house. He made one child stand in the corner of the cellar while he killed the other. Allegedly, Parr claimed that the Blair Witch told him what to do.

One of the interviewees, a woman by the name of Mary Brown claimed to have once been attacked by the Blair Witch. She described her as being covered head to toe in dark fur and wearing a long shawl.

We also learn the tale of Robin Weaver, a young woman who disappeared for three days during the spring of 1886. When she was recovered, she claimed to have been abducted by the Blair Witch.

That night, the three students spend a night in a motel room getting shit-faced off of cheap whiskey.

Day 2: Heather, Mike and Josh head out early to begin principal filming for the bulk of their documentary. They stop at a small stream, which has become known as Coffin Rock. Heather begins her narration detailing the events of Coffin Rock. According to legend, during the time that Robin Weaver was missing, a search party went out to look for her. They were later found bound to Coffin Rock, their bodies eviscerated and strange symbols carved into their face.

After filming the Coffin Rock sequence, the three park Josh’s car and hike out into the Black Hills Forest to find evidence of the old Blair Witch Cult. As night falls, they pitch their tent and go to sleep.

Day 3: The three begin trekking all throughout the forests. They are searching for a cemetery that was rumored to be buried deep inside the woods. Within a few hours though, the group begins to get lost. As they hike deeper into the woods, they begin to find small concentrated piles of stones set up in different areas of the forest. Later that night, Heather hears strange noises from outside their tent.

Day 4: The three continue their search but realize that they are traveling way off from their original projected course. Concluding that there is likely nothing of value to be found out here, they decide to return back to the car. At the end of the night, they set up their tent again and Heather begins to hear strange noises for the second night in a row.

Day 5: The group wakes up only to find three distinct rock pilings set up in a triangle pattern around their tent. Mike wonders if maybe they were always there, but Heather is confident that the piles didn’t exist when they set up the tent.

The three begin trekking back to the car again, and by this point their nerves are getting really frazzled. They are cold and lost and hungry. To make matters even worse, Josh and Mike discover that Heather has lost the map. The three argue endlessly until they finally decide to head south. No matter how trying things become however, Heather continues to film.

Later that day, they find that they have no clue as to where they are going. The only recourse left to them is to follow the direction of a winding creek heading south. All of a sudden, Mike bursts out into uncontrollable fits of laughter. Josh and Heather stare at him confused. Mike finally admits to taking Heather’s map and kicking it into the river. According to Mike, he was pissed that they were lost and he found the map to be useless anyway. Josh and Heather can’t believe what they are hearing. They both freak out on him and Josh and Mike nearly come to blows. After settling down, they continue walking through the woods.

They come upon a large clearing, which is decorated with strange Voodoo-like stick figures and crosses. They are clearly frightened but they film the bizarre sights anyway. After getting ample footage of the strung up voodoo dolls, they leave the site to set up camp.

That night, they decide not to light a campfire. In the middle of the night however, Heather awakens to a strange sound from deep in the woods. She can clearly hear the voices of children. The three go out to investigate, but no evidence of any children is found. They go back to sleep.

Day 6: When the group awakens, they find that a lot of their hiking equipment has been strewn about the woods. More specifically, all of the scattered remnants belong solely to Josh. Josh finds strange blue slime covering all of his stuff. Josh, who has thus far proven to be the most stable of the three, begins to lose his mind. He can’t understand why only his stuff was tampered with.

They pack up their stuff and begin hiking again. They are hopelessly lost now and fall into heightened fits of anxiety when they discover that they have been traveling in circles.

Day 7: Heather and Mike wake up in the tent to discover that Josh is missing. They spend the entire day searching for him but to no avail. Later that night, Heather hears a voice crying from deep in the woods. She thinks its Josh.

Day 8: Heather and Mike go outside only to find that a bundle of sticks wrapped in flannel has been left outside their tent. Investigating the pile, Heather opens the bundle and discovers a pouch that is soaked with blood. Inside the pouch are one of Josh’s teeth and a portion of his tongue. She completely loses her mind. Sorry Josh, but it looks like you have been voted off the island.

Late that night, Heather records a personal message for her family. She accepts full responsibility for everything that has happened and apologizes to her own family as well as to Mike and Josh’s.

After she is done recording, the two begin to hear screams that sound like Josh’s voice. They follow the sounds of the voice and come upon Rustin Parr’s old house. Heather runs upstairs in search of Josh, while Mike investigates the cellar. Mike freaks out and begins screaming for Heather. Heather races down into the basement and finds Mike standing in the corner. She lets loose a shriek of terror and the camera falls to the floor. “You ARE the weakest link! Goodbye.”

Acting/Dialogue: The acting here is really exceptional. The believability of the characters is compounded by the fact that they used their real names for the film and that the bulk of their dialogue was improvisational. Now while the dialogue mostly consists of swearing and shouting and screeching, it all flows very naturally and none of it comes off as sounding fake or rehearsed. Heather really hams up her part during the video farewell sequence. Her face is close up to the camera and she is blubbering and blasting snot all over the place. The way I see it, any actor or actress who is not afraid to have their boogies appear on film is A-OK in my book. All kidding aside, the three students really do a great job in portraying characters caught in the grip of haunted isolation.

Gore: There is a scene where Heather finds a bloody tooth and what (I have come to understand) appears to be a piece of Josh’s tongue.

Guilty Pleasures: Josh films Heather taking a crap in the woods. No nudity though.

The Good: Let me start off by giving a little detail as to what this film is meant to be. Edited as a documentary, this movie posits the idea that everything we are seeing here is 100% genuine. In fact, there are many who truly believed that the footage shown was legitimate and that these three students did in fact disappear during the production of this movie. Although there is nothing cinematically unique about this concept, it did propagate a War of the Worlds style schism that elevated this movie into the American group consciousness. Just for the record, Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Josh Leonard are all alive and well. Don’t be fooled into thinking that any aspect of this movie is real in any degree. It is a balustrade of bullshit.

The Blair Witch Project presents to us a psychological study into isolation. We have three people that are thrown into a situation that they can no longer control, and their plight is accentuated by the underpinnings of the ghost stories that play along their subconscious minds. In any other situation, a pile of rocks would just be a pile of rocks; but in the minds of these kids, it becomes something more. A pile of rocks now becomes a death marker. We watch their personalities slowly degrade into humanity’s baser primal instincts. However, with each new psychological pitfall they stumble into, they each manage to find the strength to steel their resolve and carry on. The fact that they don’t completely beat the shit out of one another is a testament towards illustrating their own internal fortitude.

One of the most compelling aspects of the cast is that they come to us as realistic approachable people. The characters themselves are not prom queens or football stars, but are rather ordinary people, not too dissimilar from those we once went to school with. As you watch the Blair Witch Project it’s easy to find yourself pointing at the screen and saying, “Man, I knew a dude in gym class who was JUST like that Josh guy!” This familiarity helps to bridge the gap between cinematic fiction and the reality of our own lives. It draws us in to their world and we move with the characters through each transition of the film. We can love these guys or we can hate them; but there is no denying the simple fact that these are very real people. It’s easy to watch a film and enjoy seeing something horrific happen to a character whose personality is so aloof that it alienates the target audience. But when we see these things happening to regular people, it brings everything much closer together and the horror becomes as real as the characters on the screen.

Now the Blair Witch Project is a film that cost about twenty-five bucks and change to make. But in all honesty, its lack of budget is what helps to provide some of the scarier elements of the film. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez do not need to rely on expensive computer generated ghosts or monsters carved out of foam-latex to provide us with our scares. The horror is very subliminal here and it is subtly peppered throughout the film in small quantities. With each strange circumstance the group encounters, our brains unknowingly draw a comparison between it and a portion of the lore was detailed earlier in the movie. Later on in the film, we are treated to some genuinely creepy elements; especially when we begin to hear the hallowed cries of Josh’s ghost wailing way off in the distance. What is it about a pile of fucking rocks that manages to evoke more terror and suspense than a 20 million dollar computer generated werewolf leaping out at you?

The Bad: There are only three major flaws that I have found with this movie. But they are pretty big ones and contribute greatly to the overall rating. One of the largest problems with the Blair Witch Project is that it cannot survive based solely on its own merits. In order to adequately appreciate the totality of the story, it needs to be supplemented by its various satellite films. Namely: Curse of the Blair Witch, Shadow of the Blair Witch, Sticks and Stones, The Burkittesville Seven, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and the Blair Witch Project Official Website. From these alternate sources, we get the full weight of the back-story behind Ellie Kedward, Rustin Parr and many of the other victims of the Blair Witch Cult. The Blair Witch Project, in and of itself merely serves as an appetizer to a much larger story. So while the BWP may have been a huge commercial success, as a stand-alone movie it falls extremely far from its true potential.

An epileptic’s worst nightmare, The Blair Witch Project is a very difficult film to watch. Shot as a documentary, all of the scenes that we view are through the camera lens used by the actual characters. As such, we are subjected to a lot of jerky movements, dizzying spin-arounds and many shots, which are blurrily erratic because someone is running with the camera.

Negating the power of the back story (which is the only real point-of-interest to the film), the characters meander along yelling, screaming, swearing, fighting and carrying on like a bunch of leftover cast members from The Real World. Although I can appreciate the tension that the producers are trying to put forward, it is difficult to watch a movie where 80 minutes of it is nothing more than three dipshits saying, “Fuck You!” to one another. Unfortunately, this becomes the film’s biggest detraction. And it is a flaw that greatly knocks the rating back a few notches on the ole head-o-meter.

When taken as a whole, the Blair Witch Franchise is a rich and compelling ghost story whose after affects will remain permanently ingrained into your mind. However, this movie, in and of itself is merely a broken spoke on a much larger wagon wheel.

Great Lines:

“I'm scared to close my eyes. I'm scared to open them.” --Heather Donahue

“It's not the same on film is it? I mean, you know it's real, but it's like looking through the lens gives you some sort of protection from what's on the other side. It's not quite reality. It's like a totally filtered reality. It's like you can pretend everything's not quite the way it is.” --Josh talking to Heather.

“OK, here's your motivation. You're lost, you're angry in the woods, and no one is here to help you. There's a witch and she keeps leaving shit outside your door. There's no one here to help you! She left little trinkets, you took one of them, she ran after us. There's no one here to help you! We walked for 15 hours today, we ended up in the same place! There's no one here to help you, THAT'S your motivation! That’s your motivation!” --Josh yelling at Heather.

Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 severed heads.

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