31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 21 (The Blair Witch Project)

Pictured: The terrified confessions of a
soon-to-be fictional girl.

Let's continue along that weird and wild path of "imaginary gossip about real people" with a real pioneer in that craft. Yes, it's The Blair Witch Project and it's the film that brought the found footage genre to prominence... but we're on the other side of history here in 2017. To really appreciate The Blair Witch Project, you have to cast your mind back to 1999. This may be difficult if you weren't alive back then, or were an infant, or whatever. I was alive back then. I was an ordinary teen, still taking his first baby steps in the world of horror. Out comes this weird movie, and we've never seen anything quite like it. It doesn't look like a movie at all. This looks like real life, a series of tapes made in 1994 by a bunch of dead college kids of their last moments. Oh my god. Is this real? Is this a real bunch of footage of real college kids who died, crying and screaming, in the woods? The marketing and proto-viral nature of this one only helped blur the line between fantasy and reality, and basically launched found footage as its own genre. That's the 1999 side of history, but what of the 2017 side? Let's do our usual surface dive and head into the woods to find out.


This is not a pleasant movie. Not by a long shot. The Blair Witch Project is basically 80 minutes of misery porn with a couple of possibly supernatural spooks thrown in. Something is stalking these college kids through the woods and making horrible noises in the night, but we never learn what. That's good and all, but it also makes the remainder of the movie all too real. With the absence of the usual horror movie business of a structure and a bunch of scares, since this is Real Life, what we're left with is the very real chronicles of three people who are lost in the woods for a week. Here is where The Blair Witch Project got something right with its whole premise of found footage; the use of the camera. I am no cinematographer, but the cinematography of fictional movies and their camera use have a certain style and rhythm to them based on whoever is shooting or directing it or whatnot. Heather Donahue is a college filmmaker who knows how to work a camera, and she's filming basically everything that happens to her and her pals while lost in the woods. Other found footage films are forced to contrive in why anyone would be filming this shit in spite of all the scary stuff that's happening, but this one justifies it in some interesting ways. The first is desperation, as when confronted about why she's filming all of this shit she screams that it's all she's got. Later, another person picks up the camera and is filming Heather. He begins to understand why she's doing what she's doing, using all of this footage. "It's not quite reality", he says. "It's totally like, a filtered reality, man." In one line he nails the essence of the found footage film. Imaginary gossip about real people. A blurring between fantasy and reality, felt on both sides. In the film's world, the camera is used to add a layer of fiction to the very real hell of being lost in the woods for days. In our world, the fiction of the story is given a layer of reality with the found footage format. Totally like, a filtered reality, man.


The unreality of things continues, as the kids travel straight south for 15 hours only to somehow end up basically back where they started. Directions no longer make sense in this world. could this be a consequence of filtering reality? Our closing moments are spent in a spooky abandoned house, and things change. After 75 minutes, even with the perspective in first-person? We're in a scary movie. There's a real sense of dread, typical to the usual horror movie, that has been absent up until now with this film's focus on real kids lost in the real woods. Then, just as quickly as it began, it ends. Cameras fall to the ground. Three college kids, killed. How the footage was recovered, we do not know. What we do know is that something lurks within the woods of Maryland. Something which is spoken of in legend and myth. Something which has altered directions and perceptions, which has stalked three college kids whom dared invade its lair, and has killed them. Was the Blair Witch real? Was it a murderer? A ghost? We'll never know. All we have is 80 minutes of edited footage. I think I know what it was. It's something which blurred the lines between fantasy and reality. Something which filtered reality and created an entire genre of people pointing cameras at spooky things. There's only one thing it could be.


The Blair Witch is just a rogue Idea we imprisoned in an entire genre, and lord help us if found footage should ever die.