THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

I was in Year 10 when The Blair Witch Project came out. I was sixteen years old. And I think I speak for myself and my classmates – we bought it. Hook, line and sinker. The hype was real. They really found this footage. “No, serious, it’s real, there’s a documentary about it, have you seen the website, it’s like legit, they don’t give a Geocities to just anybody.” I remember arguments about whether or not The Blair Witch Project was real. However, I also remember arguments about whether or not the dude who was the teacher’s assistant in the computer labs was going to “pull a Columbine” because he wore a long leather jacket. 1999 was a weird year.

If you’ve never seen The Blair Witch Project, you simply must, it’s so good. Three amateur documentarians disappeared in the woods and this is their footage. The first smash hit found footage horror film. It spawned a truly batshit atrocious non-found footage sequel, and a ‘yeah it’s fine’ remake. If Blair Witchhad arrived in 2009 and not 1999 we’d be on Blair Witch: The Ghost Dimensionby now and would get a new one every Halloween. As it stands – we’ve got one horror classic, and then the scraps of a franchise nobody knew how to properly launch.

The film follows Heather, long-haired Josh and face-the-wall Mike. When it first appeared, Heather copped a lot of backlash for being “annoying”, which isn’t true and is greatly unfair to the performance. The Razzies, truly the least funny trying-to-be-funny thing that exists on this planet, even awarded Heather the Worst Actress Award, in celebration of the fact that finding a crying woman annoying in 1999 was a classic example of 90s humour. It’s also a ridiculous award to give because Heather Donahue is genuinely so good in this film.

On a re-watch I think that Mike really got away with being the most dipshitted person in the gang. There’s a scene where they can’t find the map and Mike reveals that he kicked it into the river because he didn’t understand how to read it, even though Heather understood how to read the map. Honestly Mike, you belong in that corner.

How would I fit into this famously mostly improvised film? Well, this will absolutely shock you to your core to learn, but when I was 20 I attempted to shoot my own black & white horror movie with some friends. The film took place in a car, we improvised our dialogue and one by one we’d each get out of the car only to never return. So, I reckon 20-year-old me would have tried to get in on this little production.