In the past 25 years, filmmaking has gone through many changes. But the one that, for better or for worse, owes itself particularly and almost entirely to one genre is the found footage horror. The idea wasn’t new when The Blair Witch Project opened in the summer of 1999. Cannibal Holocaust had done the same thing two decades earlier.
But it seemed as home video camcorders became more popular in the 1980s and 1990s, more filmmakers would use this in their movies in someway or another. Richard Linklater in his first movie, Slacker, had a character using a Fisher-Price PXL 9000 recorder. I should know, I had one myself. People had home movie cameras since the era of the Super 8 and filming family get-togethers.
Quentin Tarantino cut a scene out of Pulp Fiction where Uma Thuman’s Mia Wallace interviews John Travolta’s Vincent Vega upon first meeting him. He said he cut it because it looked like what others filmmakers were trying to do and sound like him. Easy there, QT! You only had one previous movie. But it shows how much influence can happen in filmmaking in a short period of time even if it’s just two or three years.
Yet Blair Witch took a different approach. The entire movie would be filmed by the three main actors in the movie using their real names as their character’s. This led to some criticism and jokes that writing-directing duo of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez didn’t really do much as they pretty much stayed as far away as they could from the characters. Principal photography took place for eight days in October of 1997 where 20 hours of footage was shot before it was edited down to 82 minutes. However, some controversy itself has arisen about this, but more on that later.
The plot is well, pretty dull and boring, even for 82 minutes. Mainly it’s because none of the characters are that much likeable. Heather Donahue is the assertive one in charge of the concept of doing a documentary on the Blair Witch legend of the Black Hills near Burkittville, Md. The only problem is there is hardly much for a documentary. There’s some interviews with some locals of which they most contradict each other on what they’re talking about. At the most, what they have is something that would amount to a segment on the older version of Unsolved Mysteries.
And that’s the problem. There’s nothing really scary about leaves on the ground or nearly naked trees. We don’t learn much about the Blair Witch and instead just hear stories of a hermit who killed children. It’s suspected that one of them Joshua Leonard accidentally desecrated the cairns at a graveyard. But part of me wonders how far they walked into these woods? So much is left out that we never really do get a sense of what is exactly happening.
Some people said that is the appeal of the movie. And while some filmmakers have done more by showing less, here it feels like we need more. Along with Heather and Joshua is Michael Williams. They spend so much time bickering and arguing that by the halfway mark you’re rooting for the Blair Witch or the murdering hermit. This has become a more common problem in horror movies in the last few decades where the characters are so despised that you don’t care what happens.
The slasher movies used to do this but they at least made you feel some empathy for a few characters. I will say the plot does take off a little when Joshua begins to show signs that he is going mad and then turns up missing. But Heather is so annoying and Michael is so obnoxious that you wonder if Joshua just left on his own. Needless to say, Donahue was nominated for a Razzie Award.
There are a few moments of pure terror. I admit, Heather’s teary-eyed lamentation as she leaves a confession shows that she feels she’ll never make it out of the woods alive. And when Heather and Michael go into a dilapidated house at the climax, there is some tension. Yet there isn’t much of a payoff.
Part of this blame goes on Artisan Entertainment, who bought the rights of the movie. They spent millions on marketing and advertising to make Blair Witch into something a lot bigger than it was. Even worse is Myrick and Sanchez had put together a mockumentary Curse of the Blair Witch which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, now SyFy, a a few weeks before the movie was set to open worldwide.
The mockumentary was intended to set up this silly notion that the movie was the real deal, which hardly anyone under the age of 45 believed in 1999. Also, the mockumentary is actually pretty good as it goes into more about the “myth” of the Blair Witch. And that’s the problem. There had been so much promotion about the movie, people went into it expecting answers. Instead all it was was about an hour and a half of three people screaming the F-bomb at each other. There’s more mention of Williams’ weird body hair than anything scary.
Also, a movie like The Blair Witch Project was never intended to be a phenomenal blockbuster that it was. The cost of the production was up to $60,000 and then after the post-production costs, it was about half a million dollars give or take 100 grand here or there. It ended up making about a quarter of a billion worldwide. Yet, a movie like this belongs in the realm of cult classics that never make much money but build their audience over years, leading to debates on whether it’s good or not. It belongs alongside Session 9 and Trick ‘r Treat.
Even though it was initially praised by many critics including Roger Ebert and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, others ripped it apart. Andrew Sarris of the New York Observer said it was a product of the “Sundance scam: Make a heartless home movie, get enough critics to blurb in near unison ‘scary’ and watch the suckers flock to be fleeced.” For the most, Sarris may be correct. The viewers at Sundance are a different breed than the average moviegoers or even critics. Also, it’s better going in cold to see a movie. Even by this time, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were mocking Sundance for showing movies about gay cowboys eating pudding only to later have Ang Lee directed Brokeback Mountain about gay cowboys,.
I even heard part of the movie’s popularity may have been attributed to the motion sickness people were reportedly receiving. With a lot of shaky camera action, it does get hard to watch if you suffer from that a lot. This was the era in which people were paying good movie to go see a movie just to watch a trailer that appeared before it and then they got up and left. This was reportedly the case with Scary Movie 2 which had a trailer for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, There was no YouTube in 1999. And a lot of Boomers were still saying the Internet was a fad that wouldn’t last.
I heard from people at my college that people were going to see it to see how long they would get motion sickness even to the point it made them vomit. And now, they have children they criticize for doing TikTok challenges. I once went to a party where two or three people had a contest to see who could throw up the most from drinking too much.
And the actors in the movie recently told Variety earlier this year, they got little to nothing for appearing in the movie. It reportedly made about over $248 million but Donahue, Leonard and Williams have said they received very little of that. They had to sue Artisan and Lionsgate but they received a small settlement that is still profiting off their likenesses.
They said that Artisan Entertainment, in an attempt to creature the illusion they were really missing, had them making no public appearances. They couldn’t even go to the Cannes Film Festival that year. Leonard said he was still working as a waiter days up to his appearance on The Tonight Show. He even waited on his own agent. Williams was still moving furniture and Donahue’s car broke down while she was working a temp jobs. They said they received fruit baskets when the movie past the $100 million mark.
Originally, they said the footage they filmed for eight days was only to be used for 10-15 minutes of a more typical horror movie that Myrick and Sanchez said they were making. Only a year later did they realize the footage they shot would be the whole movie. And there was a clause in their contracts that gave the filmmakers use of their likeness.
The entire story can be read at the Variety website here: https://variety.com/2024/film/news/blair-witch-project-cast-robbed-financial-success-1236033647/
But aside from that, it was also reported that a separate movie The Last Broadcast, written, produced, directed and starring Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler as host of a public access show who go missing while investigating the New Jersey Devil legend had premiered a year before. Some people thought Blair Witch ripped it off. The movie has the same found-footage format and produced very cheap but ended up making $4 million worldwide. It’s about the same in style and production of Blair Witch. It just didn’t have the marketing.
What was more fascinating was The Sixth Sense opened not too soon after Blair Witch on Aug. 6 and ended up grossing $672 million worldwide. It was the second highest grossing movie behind Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for 1999. A lot of movies were hyped that summer along with Blair Witch, such as Eyes Wide Shut, American Pie and even Wild Wild West. But none did the business Sixth Sense did because it had the best marketing ever – word of mouth.
I went to go see Sixth Sense with a young woman I liked, her brother, and another person in our dorm because we noticed it was playing at the same cineplex as Blair Witch. And I wasn’t willing to sit through it again so soon. Also, they had it showing in the Mugs and Movies theater and I got to sit next to her. I admit, it was a far better movie and people were going back to watch it to see what they had missed. People were taking about things that were in the movie.
No one was anticipating Sixth Sense. It basically was just a movie that didn’t get much hype or anticipation. Also, it had more answers than questions and everything came together at the end. In the end, Blair Witch was like an amusement park ride. Even if you enjoyed it once, you don’t really want to see it again so soon. My guess is that Artisan had originally intended to piggyback the movie as an independent supernatural thriller. But it got so much publicity after Sundance that the executives hyped it up.
Sadly, they got greedy and ordered a sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which was working on the idea that people believed the first movie was real. (I have heard Donahue, who has changed her legal name to Rei Hance, said her mother was getting sympathy cards because people believed she had died.) But I haven’t met one person who actually believed the movie was real. Also, if that was the case, why would it even be allowed to be shown? It was like the movie Free Solo. You know he was going to make it because if he failed, who’d want to see a movie about a guy who falls to his death from the El Capitan summit?
The sequel directed and co-written by Joe Berlinger of Paradise Lost fame is one of the worst sequels and horror movies ever. Berlinger later said the studio forced him to re-edit the movie and add scenes of violence and gore. But it was obvious by the Fall of 2000 when the sequel opened, no one cared anymore for Blair Witch. The sequel only made about $26.4 million domestically. It happens. Some movies are huge blockbusters but are easily forgotten within a few years.
Leonard got a supporting role alongside Robert DeNiro and Cuba Gooding Jr. in Men of Honor. He was cast as the antagonist in Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane which was reportedly filmed on an iPhone 7 Plus. But Hance said she found it hard for people to separate Heather Donahue the character from Heather Donahue the actress. She had a role in the romcom Boys and Girls alongside Jason Biggs, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Clair Forlani, but spent a lot of the 2000s in forgettable TV movies and low-budget movie roles. She admitted to using the money she did receive to travel around the country drinking. But she got clean and sober and gave up acting in 2008. Even though he admitted on late-night TV that he was retiring from moving furniture, like Hance, he found little roles in major TV shows or movies and had to go back to it.
The directors, Myrick and Sanchez, have also had problems repeating the success as most of their movies, which deal with the supernatural or horror, have underperformed greatly at the box office or gone straight to DVD or Video on Demand. They have also received much negative reception. If anything, it’s a testament of the difference between a great concept and great storytelling.
In many ways, you have to feel for Hance, Leonard and Williams who basically did most of the work, but corporate Hollywood was the winner. Artisan went defunct in 2004 after it was acquired by Lionsgate Films, they have the rights to the franchise. The found-footage format mostly remained dormant for most of the 2000s until Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity became big blockbusters. From that point on, found-footage format had a Renaissance with movies like Rec and its American remake Quarantine. Even George A. Romero used it for Diary of the Dead and Brian DePalma, always experimenting with different techniques, did it for his war drama Redacted.
However, the V/H/S franchise wore the format down with several of its entries. And there have been several movies in the Paranormal Activity franchise that the concept has lost its appeal. While we the viewers watch things unfold on screen, a great filmmaker knows how to tell a good story. Alfred Hitchcock filmed Rear Window as if we were seeing things from the viewpoint of Jimmy Stewart’s character but he didn’t cheat us. Just because you film a movie in the POV found-footage format doesn’t mean it’s going to be entertaining.
The found-footage concept has also extended to shows like Ghost Hunters which was hilariously mocked on South Park. In my review for the Georgia Southern newspaper the George-Anne, I compared Blair Witch to a cross between an Andy Warhol experimental movie and a snuff film. This upset a fellow student in the Communication Arts department who took it upon herself to “school” me in the terminology of snuff as she said it applies to porn.
Actually, it applies to any reported video or movie that involves a murder. However, it’s not been confirmed for decades if such footage ever existed in film or video. Of course with stuff on the Internet now, there are footage reportedly available on the dark web. However, this was popularized by the Nicholas Cage movie 8mm, which I’m sure this student, who acted like she knew everything about entertainment, was referencing. I asked her if she got the Andy Warhol reference and she turned up her nose and said no as if it was an insult.
You see, Andy Warhol famously filmed his lover at the time, John Giorno, sleeping for about five and a half hours and released it as an avant-garde movie called Sleep. He later made a movie just over eight hours long of a single shot of the Empire State Building in slow motion. It’s called Empire. Other people said Warhol would grab people who were new to his studio called The Factory and put them in front of a camera, get them in focus, start recording and just leave as people would either stare at the camera or look around. A young Dennis Hopper said he was subjected to this as well.
I don’t think anyone could ever do something like Blair Witch again. Even movies that were filmed mostly in secrecy such as A Ghost Story, 10 Cloverfield Lane and Pearl all were well received by many but didn’t make the money at the box office the way Blair Witch did. Also, all it take is for a Wikipedia post to totally ruin a movie’s plot.
There are plans for a new remake of the Blair Witch movie to be produced through Blumhouse whose founder Jason Blum produced Paranormal Activity. The reason that movie worked is that Oren Peli, writer/director, actually showed us stuff to make us scared as well as creating a tone. I don’t know what will come of the movie. I watch the 2016 Blair Witch which I really didn’t like.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 