When Blair Witch opens in theaters, it will probably play to a crowd of moviegoers who were barely walking when the first film, The Blair Witch Project, now a found-footage "classic," was released in 1999. That's fine with the directors of the original film, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez; they have given the update their blessing and are credited as executive producers.
"Enough time has passed where the new one can be embraced on its own merits," Myrick said. "A whole bunch of young horror fans want to see a new Blair Witch they can call their own."
What the new one cannot possibly do is replicate the shock of the original's success or the collective goosebumps it seemed to produce that pivotal summer when it became a pop-cultural phenomenon and changed the way horror films were made.
Shot in just over a week on a scant budget in the woods of Maryland, The Blair Witch Project dispensed with the run of 1980s slasher films and even laid waste to the '90s sardonic horror of the Scream franchise. Instead, it recalled the tension and suspense of the directors' favorite movies, like The Exorcist and The Shining.
"We wanted to put a level of realism back into horror films," said Sanchez, who'd bonded with Myrick as film students at the University of Central Florida. "The gore had kind of taken over," he said, adding that "there was very little imagination."
The story Myrick and Sanchez told was a simple campfire tale about three student filmmakers -- Heather, Josh and Adam -- who enter the possibly haunted woods near the small town of Burkittsville, Md., in 1994 and are never seen again. Until they are seen over and over again, that is.
'DISCOVERED' FOOTAGE
Hubristic Gen-Xers, the three never stop filming one another, even when it's clear the end may be imminent. This footage is later "discovered," and the audience experiences a full narrative relentless and brutal in its shift from excitement and worry to dread and panic and, finally, resignation.
The stars -- the unknown Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard -- shot their own footage and created their own dialogue based on a tight outline and a series of note cards planted by the directors and producers at points throughout Seneca Creek State Park. The actors basically stayed in the woods for a week, while the filmmakers, using a pre-cellphone, military-style GPS setup, tracked them and directed them remotely.
To create the hyper-realistic, contagious sensation of being lost, the actors received different instructions. "Heather's note would say: 'Keep going south. Do not falter. You know the way home. Stick to the plan.' Then there would be a note for Josh, 'You need to take control,'" Myrick recalled.
Sanchez said: "It was a total experiment, a 24-hour-a-day shoot. There were a lot of times where we were literally eating somewhere, and the actors were still in the woods shooting."
After the week was over, the filmmakers began editing. "Our goal was to have maybe 20 minutes of found footage, housed within the framework of a traditional documentary," Myrick said. "We shot a bunch of supporting footage. Talking heads. Experts in the field. Interviews with locals."
Just before submitting the movie to the Sundance Film Festival, they shed that framework, focusing just on the three doomed travelers. "It was a tough choice," Myrick said. "Looking at it on your computer screen is one thing, but 85 minutes of shaky cam footage on a big screen is a whole different experience." In any case, they expected the film to function as little more than a calling card to land them TV work.
The concept of a found-footage horror film is now so common that it's hard to remember that it was then brand new. Still, developments in pop culture laid the groundwork for the film. "Reality TV was sensitizing audiences to that aesthetic, 24-hour news as well," Myrick said. "We were all getting used to watching this video coverage, and Blair came at the right time."
CREATED CREEPINESS
The gothic nature of The Blair Witch Project seemed a bracing counterpoint to the modernity that marked much of American culture at the turn of the millennium. In an increasingly digital world, the feeling of something authentically creepy proved irresistible. "We were just responding to the idea that filmmakers need legends," Sanchez said, and for that he drew on his Maryland roots. "There's a lot of history there, so we just felt like going back and creating a weird legend that was believable."
Sundance accepted the film, and word began to get around. "Fans started making their own sites, and we started getting a little indication that it was catching fire," Myrick recalled.
The demise of Heather, Josh and Adam seemed all the more real thanks to a surplus of documentary-style footage cut from the movie's initial concept and screened on what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel as Curse of the Blair Witch shortly before the film's premiere.
The Blair Witch Project, which sold at Sundance to Artisan Entertainment for a price in the low seven figures, was released in summer 1999 and went on to gross nearly $250 million globally, on a budget of about $60,000. All this without ever showing a witch.
MovieStyle on 09/16/2016