1999 saw the release of a sleeper horror movie hit, one that remains a landmark in the found footage sub-genre, and the horror classic now available to stream on Prime Video. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, The Blair Witch Project tells the spine-tingling tale of student filmmakers Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard, who vanish in the woods outside of Burkittsville, Maryland while making a documentary on a local legend known as the Blair Witch in October of 1994. The Blair Witch Project is comprised of the raw footage of the trio’s trip unearthed one year later, with the entirely off-screen Blair Witch terrorizing them and the audience to their core.
Videos by ComicBook.com
The Blair Witch Project debuted in theaters under the guise of being genuine footage of three missing student filmmakers. However, despite it being a clear open secret that the movie and Blair Witch mythos in it was entirely fictional (right down to Donahue, Williams, and Leonard giving late night talk show interviews during the movie’s press tour), much of the moviegoing public was convinced of The Blair Witch Project‘s authenticity upon its release. The movie’s 2000 sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 later played upon this idea, following another group of young people convinced of the reality of the movie’s events and meeting a different but equally grim fate of their own.
The Blair Witch Project was filmed in Seneca Creek Park State Park in Montgomery County, Maryland in October of 1997 over a period of eight days. An accompanying mockumentary featuring interviews with the trio’s family and friends was also shot, with the original plan being for portions of the filmmaking trio’s footage to be interspersed with the interviews. While editing the film, Myrick and Sánchez decided the main footage of the three protagonists in the woods was an effective and terrifying horror movie, leading to The Blair Witch Project being composed entirely of their footage, and the mockumentary interviews being released on the SyFy Channel (then called the Sci-Fi Channel) in tandem with the movie as the mockumentary Curse of the Blair Witch.
Upon its release, The Blair Witch Project amassed a worldwide box office haul of $248 million against its meager budget of between $200,000 and $500,000. With the movie’s minimalist structure and very effective use of off-screen noises and scares to create the terror of the Blair Witch without ever showing her, The Blair Witch Project drew both resounding praise as one of the scariest horror movies of all time, as well as criticism from detractors turned off by the movie’s shaky cam and low budget scares. Nonetheless, The Blair Witch Project helped pioneer the popularity of the found footage horror genre, paving the way for subsequent found footage hits like Cloverfield, The Last Exorcism, and the REC movies along with their English-language remakes in the Quarantine series. Additionally, the Paranormal Activity and V/H/S franchises have really struck found footage gold from the foundation laid by The Blair Witch Project.
Despite its popularity, The Blair Witch Project has not been without controversy. In particular, the three leads of The Blair Witch Project have publicly expressed their dissatisfaction with their startlingly low remuneration from the movie’s success. The Blair Witch trio have even requested retroactive residuals from The Blair Witch Project‘s owning studio Lionsgate (the movie having been originally been released by the now-defunct Artisan Entertainment).
While its behind-the-scenes legacy is certainly complicated and in some ways quite unfair to its main cast, The Blair Witch Project stands as a timeless and still very effective horror classic that was instrumental in kicking the popular found footage sub-genre into mainstream popularity. With Amazon Prime adding The Blair Witch Project to its streaming library, horror fans can once more delight to the movie’s effective scares and atmosphere as the Halloween season approaches, while the three stars of the film should hopefully receive their fair slice of the pie from the movie’s continued success in the streaming age.
Most Viewed
-
Production I.G.
