![]() ![]() There are sections of the movie that are completely devoid of image – it’s just a black frame with very, very faint noises. That this could be cobbled together out of footage shot by a group of film students who were barely capable of handling their equipment. The very things that I used to make fun of – bad framing, poor focus, repetitive conversations, shaky camerawork, even that up-the-nose confessional – all of that actually helps create the feeling that this is a real thing. I’m happy to say that yes, I had been unfairly maligning the film. It’s the pieces I used to dismiss – so a few years back I decided to re-watch and see if the whole was better than I remembered. have also been gone over again and again. The drawbacks in filmmaking, acting, editing, pacing etc. It’s been copied, parodied and discussed at length. The thing is, I think that the pop cultural impact and time has dulled our appreciation of the actual movie. Certainly that’s the way I came to view it – as the progenitor of a sub-genre that went on to spawn much better and more frightening films. I have friends who are of the opinion that it isn’t even truly a horror movie, because there’s nothing in it that’s really scary. ![]() (I say that, though the movie currently has a rating of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes). The consensus since then seems to have dismissed The Blair Witch Project as a mediocre film that happened to hit at the exact right time and in the exact right way. It made it hard to take seriously, and I came away disappointed. So I ended up watching a bunch of enormous asses walking away from me for an hour and half. Shot on 16mm and video tape the movie was filmed in 1:33:1, but the projectionist blew it wide. Unfortunately, I saw it at a second-run movie theater in Portland, Maine, and the projectionist was unaware that the movie was supposed to be shown in its original aspect ratio. The book was quite fun and I was pretty primed to enjoy the movie when I finally got around to seeing it. I even bought the Blair Witch Dossier book, which was supposed to be documents pertaining to the investigation of the filmmaker’s disappearance. I dug through the websites, I watched the Curse of the Blair Witch ‘documentary’ on the Sci-Fi Channel (before it was SyFy). It was really the first film to use what we ended up calling Viral Marketing, and they did it brilliantly, especially given that there was almost nothing in the way of social media back then. ![]() Not in a “it’s a true story!” way – though I did know people who thought that – but in a “wow, look at the way they’re integrating the internet and other media into the marketing” way. I bought pretty heavily into the pre-release hype. So what about the movie that started it all? My own history with Blair Witch is a little complicated. For years I’ve been expecting found footage to fade away, but with the release of films like As Above, So Below and They Are Watching it seems like it’s going to be around for a long time yet. Since then we’ve had some good found footage movies (, Paranormal Activity), some bad ( Atrocious, The Fourth Kind) and mostly a grab bag of mixed results ( Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead). Shaky camerawork, an isolated group, lots of pointless arguing and running. Like Friday the 13th, it took an existing type of film and codified it, laid down the format – for good or ill – that most found footage movies have followed since. The found footage movie wasn’t invented by Blair Witch (see Cannibal Holocaust or maybe even The Legend of Boggy Creek as contenders for that title), but it certainly came into its own with Blair Witch’s debut. Twenty years? It’s true, though, and we’ve been living with the fallout all that time. Stern and private investigator Buck Buchanan have unsealed the official police reports to compile the first fully detailed and illustrated investigative report on one of the most disturbing cases in Maryland history.It’s been over twenty years since The Blair Witch Project was first released. In an exclusive arrangement with the filmmakers' families, noted journalist D. What they captured on film in their final days has transformed their sudden disappearance into one of America's most suggestive nightmares. What actually happened to Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard deep in the Maryland woods has become the stuff of legend. In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. ![]()
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