Ask most people what The Blair Witch Project’s about, and you’ll get some variation on “a group of student filmmakers get lost in the woods and get hunted by a witch.” And if that’s what you go in expecting, I get how the camera whipping around at night and never quite landing on a witch could feel like a letdown.
But I want to give you the same advice I’d give the characters as they fumble with their cameras: Adjust your focus. Because The Blair Witch Project isn’t a movie about a witch stalking three filmmakers who are lost in the woods; it’s about three filmmakers who are lost in the woods and losing their minds. When you keep that primal human element in mind, you start to realize that The Blair Witch Project is really at its scariest in the bright light of day, even now, 25 years after it was released.
The Blair Witch and What We Can't See
Let’s be honest: The Blair Witch Project’s most famous moments do take place at night, but then, that’s the case for most horror movies. Humans are naturally inclined to feel more unsafe in the dark - what could be lurking just out of our field of vision that’s ready to attack? Presented as an in-production documentary, The Blair Witch Project shot on 16mm film and Hi8 tape and that low-fidelity footage serves as its own source of tension when the sun goes down. Even if there’s something out in the dark, there’s no guarantee these cameras will pick it up. Just what is being obscured by all that noise? What can the characters holding the cameras see through their eyes that we can’t through the lens? When student filmmakers Heather, Mike, and Josh are chased out of their tents in the night and Heather screams “what the fuck is that!?”, it’s not just the chaos of the moment that’s frightening, it’s that the Blair Witch could be out there somewhere and we can’t see her.
We’re naturally programmed to expect danger in the dark, and that’s just why horror set in the daytime can hit so hard - it feels like it upsets the natural order. We’re supposed to be safe in the light. Those are the rules, Alan Wake says so, all the time! It’s why Michael Myers standing behind a bush - or behind a sheet - long enough for Laurie to see him, but not long enough for her to be sure he’s really there, creates so much dread. Or why some doofus getting brained by Leatherface from out of nowhere is so shocking. (Although, not that shocking - dude was trespassing. You don’t pull that shit in Texas.) These moments of paranoia and extreme violence take place in the daylight, and they’re even more disorienting and surreal as a result.
But The Blair Witch Project is no slasher; it’s rooted most strongly in folk horror, where evil manifests as a force of nature that can’t be reasoned with and corrupts absolutely, no matter what societal conventions or technological advances the characters cling to. The arrogance of modern belief in the face of ancient power is a common theme in the genre. It crops up not just in The Blair Witch Project, but in a long list of films, from the 1973 classic The Wicker Man to more recent highbrow horror like Ari Aster’s Midsommar and Robert Eggers’ The Witch. It’s something the latter film telegraphs immediately: The opening scene has William flipping the bird to the town council and saying “all I need to survive in the woods is my family and God.” Thomasin knows that he’s dooming them, and Eggers underlines that with the family down on their knees in worship, as the forest they’re about to enter seems to be screaming in a chorus of voices, and those voices are saying “DON’T LIVE HERE, IDIOTS. YOU’RE GONNA GET WITCHED! BLACK PHILLIP, BLACK PHILLIP!” Such characters are often driven mad by the growing awareness that they’re not going to be able to outsmart the forces that prey on them.
Those forces are often invisible, or obscured, in folk horror, which fittingly brings to mind an adage that’s as true of The Witch as it is of The Blair Witch Project: Nothing is scarier than what we make up in our own minds. Our imaginations are especially adept at filling in blanks caused by restrictions on our perspective - and using our personal anxieties and fears to do so. And when it comes to restricted perspective, found-footage movies have a built-in advantage. It’s the great equalizer of the subgenre: the conceit that we as the audience are experiencing these horrors through the same lens - literally - as the unfortunate souls involved. If the film succeeds in drawing the audience in, like The Blair Witch Project does, that can open up unique opportunities for filmmakers to create visceral experiences that may not be as easily achievable in traditionally-shot movies. And The Blair Witch Project weaponizes that outsized focus on perspective that’s built into found-footage: disorientation.
When the Audience Feels as Lost as the Characters
Disorientation is at the heart of Blair Witch Project’s approach to building dread, and it’s not just deployed during the nighttime scenes. It permeates every facet of the production. From the outset, The Blair Witch Project’s co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez wanted the movie to feel as authentic as possible, so they focused on casting actors with backgrounds not only in improvisation, but in operating film equipment - they’d be the ones shooting the movie. Instead of a script, Myrick and Sanchez produced a 35-page outline of the important beats to hit, leaving the actors to come up with the dialogue in real time as they experienced the Blair Witch’s evil firsthand (the evil of Hollywood accounting, which cut the actors out of most of the film’s profits, wouldn’t rear its head until later.) Myrick and Sanchez coordinated drops of food, batteries, and replacement media for the three to shoot with, but direct interaction with the cast was kept to an absolute minimum to maintain their sense of isolation, and to preserve their reactions to new information that they collect about the Blair Witch along the way. It’s a very shaggy approach to making a movie, to the point that it almost feels generous calling the filmmakers “directors,” but from the top down, that lack of direction creates a reality that feels a little more real. We the audience feel as lost, as disoriented, as the characters.
The movie splits its first act between establishing the rapport between the characters and interrogating the origins of the Blair Witch legend. Heather, Josh, and Mike interview the townspeople of Burkittsville, a town closely tied into the Witch’s origins. The townsfolk don’t all believe the legend, but those that do really do. The most significant story - besides the Blair Witch’s rumored origin - is that of Rustin Parr, who in the 1940s claimed the Blair Witch manipulated him into luring children to their deaths in pairs of two, forcing one to stand in the corner of his basement while he killed the other.
Yes, this story hints towards the significance of that famous final shot, but along with everything else they learn in town, these interviews also tease the Blair Witch’s strong influence over not just her victim’s free will, but the laws of nature that keep them grounded in reality as they wander into her woods. Co-director Eduardo Sanchez refers to this area of influence as “the Blair Witch bubble.” When you’re on her land, you play by her rules. And her rules fucking suck. They don’t make sense. And rules that our logical minds can’t trace the logic of are very scary.
But The Blair Witch Project takes its time before it really pulls the rug out from under Heather, Mike, and Josh. As the crew travel into the Black Hills Forest, the three spend a lot of time vocalizing how skeptical they are of whether the stories of the Blair Witch have any basis in fact, even as the evidence starts to pile up… like the perfect little rock formations that magically appear outside their tent one morning. Or in the form of everyone’s favorite nature sounds playlist to fall asleep to (“Hey Google, play giggling fucking children and tent-shaking noises!”). As the characters are quick to point out, woodland tomfoolery does not a Blair Witch make - they’re still sharing a pretty strong baseline of what’s real and what’s not. But at this point, wherever those nighttime incursions are coming from isn’t all that relevant - they are still very disturbing. And yes, these things are all happening at night, but it’s only when the sun comes up and the trio continue their doomed attempt to return to their car that we see the psychological weight being loaded onto them, and how that’s becoming their unmaking.
The rapport and friendliness between the three filmmakers we got a taste of earlier on doesn’t last long as they struggle more and more to explain their compounding bad luck. Tensions are simmering. This movie’s set in 1994, so instead of Google Maps the crew is working with just a regular old paper map. Heather gets defensive quickly about her understanding of the terrain. Mike’s erratic outbursts might be burning off steam for himself, but they don’t do much to instill confidence in his colleagues that he’ll be reliable in an emergency. Josh’s refusal to hedge his bets and respect the Blair Witch’s totems set him up for his early, gnarly exit. The camaraderie they started with sours into suspicion, and every other line of dialogue is a microaggression. All of the preparation, all of the research, all of the bonding that the crew did before entering the woods means less and less with each passing hour. And because we’re essentially living all this through their eyes, the question of what’s really going on starts to feel just as existentially dreadful to us as it does to Heather, Josh, and Mike.
All three of them are holding on to one simple fact to maintain their sanity: Up to this point, everything they’ve experienced - sticks cracking, tent shaking, creepy kids creeping - has a possible, rational explanation. The crew interviewed as many people as they could in Burkittsville - any of them could have decided to make a weekend out of it and follow these uppity film students into the woods to give them more than they bargained for. Even Mike’s completely inexplicable act of kicking their map into the river, which could maybe be construed as the Blair Witch pulling his strings, has plenty of basis in how the movie sets him up as being the most impulsive and the most frightened of the three filmmakers.
Take Me to the River
Which brings us to the scene around which the entire movie pivots, something that can’t be explained… the moment the characters can no longer chalk their misfortune up to nasty locals, and it’s one that takes the characters’ disorientation - and the audience’s - to another level. Heather, Josh, and Mike have been lost in the Black Hills Forest for four days, and they decide to spend an entire day following their compass south, along the river. After Mike ditched the map, the compass was presented as the group’s last, best hope at navigating their way out of the forest. Heck, we even saw it working perfectly well - it guided them to their earlier checkpoints. And in any case, they’re following a river. Two solid, tangible markers with which to orient themselves in physical space.
And this is when the crew’s hubris comes crashing down on them, when the extent of the Blair Witch’s power over them becomes unavoidable: How is it that walking in a straight line along a river for 15 hours led the crew back to the exact same place they started that morning?
It’s a total violation of logic, and a confirmation that Heather, Josh, and Mike are at the mercy of a force that they can’t understand, compete with, or reason with. If they can’t rely on the notion that walking in one direction all day should leave you winding up somewhere new, what other simple truths that gave the crew comfort can no longer be trusted? This happens four days into the eight that the crew will survive, but it’s this moment, in broad daylight, when we’re forced to accept that there’s no escape from the woods, and no safety for the crew. Things are falling apart - Heather, Josh, and Mike are falling apart - and the center doesn’t hold for very long. Josh disappears shortly thereafter and the Blair Witch ships pieces of him back to Heather and Mike. Those two - who, remember, were ready to kill each other over that discarded map - are reduced to cradling each other and rocking back and forth on the ground.
And whose perspective are we seeing this moment of vulnerability from? The visual language of the movie up to this point is all about putting us right into the characters’ shoes, so it’s noteworthy that this is the one shot in the entire movie where the camera isn’t being handled by someone. It’s one moment of objectivity in a sea of wrong turns and fatal misunderstandings, and it’s telling us that these two scared kids are destined for the basement where the Blair Witch brings all of her lost children.
The Blair Witch Project’s impact was undeniable, with the low budget and sky-high box office returns inspiring countless found-footage horror movies, most of which missed the point of what made the film so gripping in the first place. Even the efforts to continue the Blair Witch story have seen mixed results; Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was a messy meta-sequel that got bogged down by being self-reflexive just for the sake of it. 2016’s Blair Witch was better, but even though it accounts for the Witch’s reality-warping powers - like when she turns off the sun and detaches some redneck kids from the spacetime continuum - Adam Wingard’s sequel also controversially shows the Blair Witch… which kind of misses the point of why the first movie was so scary.
That leaves Bloober Team’s 2019 Blair Witch game as the strongest Blair Witch sequel story. The story-heavy game channels the first-person perspective of the movie and emphasizes tone and tension over action. By the time you’ve made it to Rustin Parr’s house, your institutional knowledge of how dangerous this place is makes every step a nailbiter, even if the war flashbacks that pay off at the end of the game break up the suspense. The game at least scratches at what The Blair Witch Project does so well: It makes the woods terrifying.
A lot of times, what happens in a movie can distract from what that movie’s actually about. The Exorcist may be famous for its spider-walking, head spinning, and pea-soup puking, but take all those supernatural trappings away, and you’re left with the story of a mother pushed to her breaking point and willing to try anything to cure her daughter’s terrifying condition. The Blair Witch Project isn’t so different in that way, and the fact the filmmakers all fall victim to the Blair Witch is only part of the tragedy. The real horror here is watching through their eyes as Heather, Mike, and Josh’s sanity is stripped away from them one bright, sunshiny day at a time.
