Film

Who Else Spent A Terrifying Week In 1999 Believing ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Was Real?

In 1999 you could easily have walked into a cinema still thinking 'The Blair Witch Project' was real.

by Cameron Williams  6 February 2019
The Blair Witch Project

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At the beginning of the school holidays my parents let me stay up late to watch Foxtel — pay television was a new thing in Australia and I had to devour every channel.

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Flicking around, trying to avoid getting addicted to Channel [V],  I found a show called Inside Edition (like an American version of A Current Affair) and it featured a story about a group of hikers making a documentary who went missing: Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams.

An extensive search had taken place and it became a cold case. The news story called out a website that had become a source for all the information surrounding the case, www.theblairwitch.com, and they’d found evidence:

“ … filmmakers’ duffel bag containing film cans, DAT tapes, video-cassettes, a Hi-8 video camera, Heather’s journal and a CP-16 film camera. Professor David Mercer and his students from the University of Maryland’s Anthropology Department discovered the bag buried under the foundation of a 100-year-old cabin.”

The website featured a section about the mythology of The Blair Witch, an urban legend dating back to 1785 about a witch who abducted people, as well as timeline of events that led to the disappearance of the hikers.

The most chilling part of the news story was when they played the footage they’d found! I’ll never forget standing in the middle of the living room holding my breath as my heart pounded watching the terrified hikers running from an unseen presence. I remember thinking to myself, holy shit, this is it, proof of the supernatural.

The feeling stuck around for the rest of the week and I obsessed over every detail of The Blair Witch website. Heather, Josh and Mike looked like normal film students and I fretted over what the hell happened to them.

The Blair Witch Project Project

In 1999 the internet was still quite sparse so if you searched for ‘The Blair Witch’ using Yahoo in your Netscape browser, all you’d be pointed to is the same website and maybe a few forums where it was being discussed.

During the week I felt like the world was going to change because we had proof ghosts existed.  I was also terrified that ghosts existed.

It was one of the wildest weeks of my (boring) teenage life. I got so obsessed I began watching Inside Edition on a regular basis for more information on the Blair Witch case while refreshing the official website like a madman.

And then it happened, a follow-up report, but from the foyer of a cinema? Yep, Heather, Josh and Mike were waiting for people who were coming out of sessions for a film called The Blair Witch Project.

They got me.

They got me good.

The Best Kept Secret In The World

The Blair Witch website went live a few months before it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and it’s credited as one of the first viral campaigns that utilised the internet to generate hype.

The film was made for under $60,000 (US), it sold for $1 million and earned over $250 million worldwide.  But there was a gap between the January 1999 premiere at Sundance and it’s release in cinemas later in the year. The timing was right to keep something of this magnitude top secret.

The Blair Witch Project rolled out at a time when information about every single detail of a film didn’t spread like wildfire.

There were no trailer breakdowns on YouTube or memes to share on social media. The Blair Witch website was it, and most of the world bought into the mystery. Over 20 million people visited the website in the lead up to the film’s release.

Keeping the secret was an even harder task in Australia because we got the film later than the U.S. so only the most savvy internet users (people who used forums and chat rooms) were wise to the film’s big secret.

Author of the book Found Footage Horror Films, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, remembers how it was sold locally: “the delay and new impact of the internet meant it was hard to keep a lid on it, also there was a fair bit of video piracy that saw folks getting it here pre-release.

“But they used the same price strategy regardless — I vividly remember seeing the famous “missing” photocopied flyer outside the Carlton Library where I was working at the time.”

In 1999 you could easily have walked into a cinema still thinking The Blair Witch Project was real and that’s an experience that has rarely been unmatched since. Now, when anything goes viral online we immediately sense it’s part of an advertising campaign or a publicity stunt. Personally, I like to think we were a little less cynical in ‘99, granted, I was a teenager at the time, but the success of The Blair Witch Project was tied to a genuine sense of wanting to believe it was real.

“I Am So Scared …”

Believing that The Blair Witch Project was real helped fuel our fear when approaching the film. If you thought it was real you were in for a wild time but even if you knew it was all fake, the film is still effective in creating a sense of dread and hopelessness.

There were criticisms of the film, mainly it’s use if handheld cameras which often bounced around and set fire to every piece of film school theory.

Heller-Nicolas points out in her book: “In terms of interpretation, there was arguably also a widespread failure to ‘read’ the film’s basic set up correctly: it was simply so easy to confuse a film about amateur filmmaking for an actual amateur film. This of course was the result of the marketing push of the Blair Witch as an authentic, factual document.”

Heller-Nicolas calls out the academic Scott Dixon McDowell, who admitted upon revisiting the film several times it went from being “cinematically challenged” to “cinematically challenging”.

We got so caught up in the found footage side of the film that the directors, Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, got little credit for the effort they put in to give the film the authenticity it needed to work as a fictional film made in the style of a documentary gone bad.

The story of how they made the film is as interesting as the final project. The filmmakers and their cast went orienteering with cameras and were given notes at different checkpoints that gave them direction.

A lot of the dialogue is improvised, and Sánchez and Myrick ambushed the cast with raids such as the scene where the tents begin to shake and the placement of the creepy rock piles and stick figures. There’s a lot of filmmaking craft at play in The Blair Witch Project and it makes the most of its low-budget premise.

It’s also an eerie film about failure.

The film’s most famous scene, parodied endlessly after it was released, is Heather’s apology scene with the camera pointing upward at her face for a terrified selfie.

In the scene Heather apologises to the mothers of Mike and Josh, as well as her own family, and takes the blame for her persistence in making the documentary. Heather’s apology is laced with all the guilt women possess for being too bossy or pursing what they want.

Whichever way you interpret the film, there are forces at play beyond Heather’s control so her only mistake is underestimating an urban legend — Heather and her crew become tragic figures.

Once In A lifetime

I’m glad I got spooked by The Blair Witch Project for real.

When I finally saw the film I was just as terrified as the week I thought it was real. I get nostalgic thinking about how 1999 was one of the last years before the internet exploded where something could be kept secret.

It was the year The Sixth Sense shocked with that twist. The Matrix was released with little hype and melted our minds.

Found footage films would become its own industry with the Paranormal Activity franchise hogging all the attention but it owes a huge debt to The Blair Witch Project. As does every viral video or internet campaign designed to make us believe in something.

I still believe in The Blair Witch Project.

Cameron Williams is a writer and film critic based in Melbourne who occasionally blabs about movies on ABC radio. He has a slight Twitter addiction: @MrCamW.

All this week, Junkee is heading back in time to relive the greatest moments in pop culture from 1999. For more 1999 content, head here.