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A Review: The Blair Witch Project

By Jack Clark


The Blair Witch Project came out worldwide in theaters July 30th, 1999. It was a low-budget horror movie independently made by Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick. It grossed almost $250 million dollars worldwide, yet it had a production budget of only $60,000 (post-production cost of the movie had ended up closer to $200,000-750,000). The script, written by Sánchez and Myrick, was 35 pages long and relied on most of the dialogue to be improvised by the actors while shooting. The movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival after a controversial promotion that labeled the actors as either “missing” or “deceased”—even the families of the actors had believed they had passed. Critics had a positive reaction to the movie, once it was officially released in theaters, although the audience had mixed reviews.

The Blair Witch Project centers around three film students making a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch. It plays out in a “found-footage” styled-story, with the entirety of the film being shot through the lenses of the cameras the film students were using to create their documentary; therefore any scene in the movie was shot by the characters themselves. The three film students take a weekend trip out to Maryland to interview locals about the Blair Witch, and, after a few interviews, the film students venture into the woods for the remainder of the weekend to explore specific sites relevant to the Blair Witch. The more time they spend in there, the more goes wrong. They start to bicker, they hear terrifying sounds at night, wake up to strange things in front of their tent, and become lost in the haunted woods.

Personally, I enjoyed The Blair Witch Project. It’s a quick watch, spanning only one hour and twenty-one minutes, and is an original take on the horror genre. It’s a paranormal documentary in a fictional world. We can only see what the characters choose to film, which heavily limits the scenes you can put in, and definitely constricts character development. In fact, that’s what’s so endearing about the movie to me; despite this huge constraint, characters still show development, occasionally using the camera to speak directly to an intended audience in their fictional world, and instead talking to us, the actual audience who does not exist in their world. This first-person take on the movie only draws the real-life audience closer to the characters. We are watching what they want to show (thankfully, the main character and director of the documentary they were filming was quick to pull out the camera and record, even when she was arguing with her fellow film students), and when they feel fear, they are actively, knowingly portraying that to an audience (even if their audience wasn’t meant to be us). We could not be closer to these characters, as we can’t actually be in their head, nor can we actually hear their thoughts and feel their fear. However, we can see what they’re experiencing through a camera directly held by a character in the story. It’s immersive. Yes, the arguing between the main characters could be annoying at surface-level, but, in my perspective, it showed what the characters were feeling while lost in those woods. They were tired, they were scared, and they were stressed. They were in a situation that they couldn’t fully grasp, but could feel the severity of by the end of the movie. I have seen some people complain about how annoying the characters were, but, to me, they reacted the same way anyone else in their situation would have acted. I don’t think it’s fair to necessarily hate the characters for responding naturally to a horrible situation. On the contrary, it makes me enjoy the movie even more. The movie was based around three “real-life” students making a documentary, when everything goes wrong. They were supposed to have huge faults, they were supposed to be stupid and to mess up and argue—They were in college, they were young! Additionally, this was a horror movie. Tensions need to be rising, or else the scary parts aren’t as scary. It was important to have several conflicts occurring throughout the movie. Not to mention the constrictions when it came to the budget and the time period; They couldn’t just CGI a dark monster in and call it a day. There needed to be arguing for the story to work the way it did. It was, to me, a very enjoyable movie, and certainly a classic horror.


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