“I’m scared to close my eyes. I’m scared to open them.” – Heather Donahue in “The Blair Witch Project.”
It’s a funny thing with memory — how your mind’s eye can produce a clear picture of a relatively minor moment in your life from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, but you can’t instantly recall what you had for lunch last Monday or what you did two Sundays ago.
Here’s something I remember from late summer 1999. On a sunny weekday afternoon, I was walking across the Wabash Avenue Bridge, returning to the Sun-Times building after having watched an advance screening of “The Blair Witch Project” — and I could still feel the chills from the experience. That movie scared the life out of me.
Over the years, it’s become somewhat fashionable to dis “The Blair Witch Project,” to wonder what all the hype was about, to call it underwhelming. In a 2022 poll for the Scotsman, readers called it the most overrated film of all time. A 2019 article in Collider about underrated and overrated horror films placed “Blair Witch” in the latter category. Threads on Reddit dis the movie.
“The Blair Witch Project” (available for streaming on Peacock) will screen Tuesday at Landmark at the Glen in Glenview as part of the “Retro Replay 1999 — The Year That Changed Cinema” series. In advance of this, I rewatched the film for the first time in many years — and while I wouldn’t say the chill is gone, it is somewhat lessened. (I mean, you can only see something for the first time once. Right?)
Maybe it’s because we’ve had so many “found footage” movies over the last 25 years, including the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, “The Last Exorcism” and “Cloverfield,” among others. (“Blair Witch” wasn’t the first in the genre, though it remains the most successful of all time, with a box-office gross of $248.6 million worldwide, which would be $469 million in today’s dollars.) Perhaps it’s because I knew what was coming this time around, and I couldn’t totally buy into the concept that the trio of filmmakers lost deep in the woods and terrified to the point of hysteria would keep the cameras rolling until … well. The end.
Still, I admired the vision and the skills of the directing duo of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, who came up with this concept and brought it to fruition on a budget of just $60,000, on a shoot that lasted only eight days. Their use of sound in particular contributed greatly to the feeling there was something out there, something just beyond the camera’s reach. There were still a few moments that sent shivers down my spine — and those moments were produced by the screams in the blackness, the muffled cries for help, even the snapping of twigs in the dead of night. Like so many of the best scary movies, “The Blair Witch Project” is more about what we don’t see.
I was also impressed by the performances of Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard as the aspiring documentarians who hike into the haunted woods near Burkitsville, Maryland, in 1994 and are never heard from again. They probably haven’t received enough credit for their acting, in part because they went by their real names and the whole concept behind the film was that they weren’t acting, they were just being themselves. (Leonard, Williams and Donahue, who legally changed her name to Rei Hance in 2020, have called for further compensation for their work on the original as well as consultation considerations for any reboots and sequels.)
Another clever touch: shooting the “documentary” footage in black and white, while the behind-the-scenes scenes are in color, recorded by a shaky, hand-held video camera. Switching back and forth adds to the feeling someone actually did find both the cameras and their contents a few years later.
The legacy of “The Blair Witch Project” is also about the revolutionary viral marketing campaign. Long before the film was released, directors Myrick and Sánchez created a website filled with fictional police reports and newspaper articles, and they filmed an 8-minute mini-documentary that aired on TV in 1998. When “Blair Witch” played at Sundance, the actors were nowhere to be seen and weren’t part of the promotional effort, and the IMDb page for the film listed the main cast as “missing, presumed dead.” It was the closest thing to a “War of the Worlds” moment you could have in the 1990s.