Is everyone involved richer? Yes, by all means. The reality is this – The Blair Witch Project is a junk film that was spoon fed to audiences who gobbled it right up. I suppose one could argue the genius of the film based solely on the success of it's marketing campaign, which turned a Z-grade, low-rent horror outing with no real scares into a genuine big-budget spectacle, but that doesn't make The Blair Witch Project a good film – just a cleverly marketed one. The following year, there was a sequel, but by then the budding franchise was all but wilted, and the sequel tanked at the box office. It was even quickly rushed to video (the film opened in early August and hit DVD in mid-October) so the studio could take advantage of the film's decreasing popularity. After only a few short weeks, The Blair Witch Project was one of the most easily mocked, trashed and hated horror experiments ever made. Instead, it's a cheap gimmick that doesn't ever really pay off.
But once you know that, the picture ceases to be even the least bit interesting. No monsters, no ghosts, no visuals, no real scares. And the biggest nail in the coffin – the film shows audiences nothing. The cast was all over the place promoting the picture and destroying the film's best asset – its morbid "maybe it's real" allure. In an ironic turn, The Blair Witch Project is almost the exact opposite, despite utilizing the same premise. That film, shot like a documentary, even went as far as to have the cast members disappear while the film played in theaters, adding to the allure that what audiences where seeing was, in fact, real murder and real violence at the hands of a blood-thirsty cannibal tribe. In fact, one of the earliest films to do this is the 1980 Italian exploitation feature Cannibal Holocaust. Setting audiences up with a fictional narrative (that pretends to be real) with the promise of showing them something truly terrifying is hardly an original idea. But, like so many bad fads before it, the success of The Blair Witch Project was only momentary.īy the time the film hit video it had waned in popularity, quickly becoming the subject of dozens of spoofs and late night punchlines.
The film, shot on a shoestring budget using dizzying standard definition video and shaky 16MM, quickly became a knockout hit. It slowly built momentum (much like Paranormal Activity did in 2009 or Open Water in 2003), then exploded into a whirlwind of popularity. The film was all the rage the summer before I headed off to film school. The Blair Witch Project details three young filmmakers who trek into the woods in search of a mysterious urban legend named "The Blair Witch" and find themselves seemingly encountering some kind of evil.
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