So begins the cultural moment that resounds these decades on and will only continue. Yes, the film makers really only planned on making a nifty little campfire tale that might light up a few festival screens and maybe have an afterlife on VHS. The formula is still applied; make a low budge horror and kick the door down to a film career. After Blair Witch, though, the starting point could be a lot closer to the earth. The technology that was less than a decade away used it as a source point.
I have a clear memory of a post to the newsgroup alt.horror in 1999 where I first saw this title. It was from someone who had been creeped out by the trailer. Just a post among many (it's probably still there) but, while we ol' stagers were used to thinly veiled spam, this just read as normal. Everyone who stopped by it in the feed searched for the title and found the trailer (pre-YouTube and embedding links). And we all brought back our impressions to the newsgroup as trusted posters. And we mentioned it to anyone we could interest. When the website appeared with its images of film cans as menu links and limited though excitingly usable video, it looked like the slick end of urban myth creation.
There is a persistent idea that the Haxan Films team designed the proto-viral campaign through their own punky resourcefulness but the real story is far more satisfying. There are millions of words written about the circumstances of this film's marketing alone and it gets too intricate for me to detail here but a summary should do. After the groundswell of whispers, electronic and actual, blew the title like a gale to its midnight screenings at the Sundance Film Festival where it showed to packed houses, the property was picked up by Artisan for many times more than its production costs and that astute corporate entity elected to pour money into the guerrilla style infiltration for the marketing. This included the extraordinary measure of wilfully distributing "bootleg" copies of an incomplete cut. The vapourware movie bled out of the modem and into the living room in the VHS haunted world of the late '90s. This is how I saw it. A friend of a friend who knew a bloke passed on an unlabelled cassette and we watched it, feeling part of the forbidden elite.
If you want to know about people thinking it was real by the time it was released in Australia in December 1999, the answer is few, if any. U.S. general release preceded it by five months and the internet had long been the e-land of the spoiler. But the flavour of it allowed a tinge of excitement, especially when getting into the cinema and passing the photocopied sign about the dangers of motion sickness.
Hype will always have antihype and people who complained of it being boring, uneventful, a ripoff or plain unscary flooded from the woodwork. For all their complaints about the way horror movies should look and play, the box office here extended the story in the rest of the world. It was a massive and persistent success. At a time when studios were pouring money into increasingly defanged horror movies, this tiny thing beat the lot of them. TS Eliot wasn't always right but he was when he suggested that any artistic revolution needs to be a return to the banal. There, amid the smellable mud and palpable exhaustion was a banality that felt like a nightmare.
That success was transformed from dollar returns to cultural absorption. While what came to be known as the Found Footage genre was slow to launch, the example of its marketing was heeded thereafter, with the ever more normalised internet open to a seemingly infinite spectrum of claims to veracity or more plainly effectiveness. As video recording and reproduction improved in quality, price and distribution, the no-budget feature became such an established norm that its aesthetics were adopted by the mainstream the same way that post punk eventually made it into Heinz soup commercials. Features shot on digital video and projected in cinemas warranted as little comment as anything shot on celluloid. The sense of video's veracity and immediacy became a trope. Now we are at the point where blockbusters are shot on the highest resolution video and look cleaner than film to the extent that some titles get algorithmic film grain imposed on to the digital image the same way that some dance CDs had sampled vinyl surface noise added.
When Found Footage did find its foothold in the late 2000s with Paranormal Activity, the sporadic titles that had appeared between that time and Blair Witch took on a pioneering status. Now, Found Footage is so routinely acceptable that it's just another kind of movie. Still, things penetrate: Rob Savage's lockdown/screenlife horror Host, presented as a single Zoom meeting made it to the screens of those living under the same conditions as the characters. It was a little over the twentieth anniversary but no one who had seen Blair Witch wasn't reminded of it.
So, after all this time and motion, does the Blair Witch Project still work? Yes, and to the same extent. Cut away the hype of real events, you can now watch it in the current climate of routine Found Footage cinema and it feels the same. Feels? For the most recent 312 Nights of Horror challenge (a horror movie per night for all of October) I decided to up the tally of FF titles from all sources. The Blair Witch phenotypes do not need description, they present themselves as markers to an audience that could count them off a list if they weren't so thoroughly expected.
It is scary. If you go into it with the intention of resisting it, ask yourself why you are borthering. If you are going to rate it for jump scares or the appearance of the title character, you should have paid more attention to the first ten minutes that told you in the plainest terms that this was not going to go that way (though many more recent FF films do). If you have ever been lost or felt powerless against distressing circumstances, you will understand this film and why it still scares its audiences. It was my delight to show it as a twentieth anniversary screening to a pair of friends around my vintage who just had not got around to seeing it. Winter 1999, I lit a fire in the hearth, put on comfy foods and wine and we watched, rendered silent when the end credits rolled. One of my guests turned to me and only had to say, "that was good."
Viewing notes: I waited months to do this one as that's how long it took for Second Sight's extraordinary restoration of the film to appear on Blu-Ray. Removing the incidentally imposed film grain on to the video footage rendered it flawed for its directors. Now, the video looks like video and the film like film. The cut is unchanged (though there is the slightly longer festival cut available). There is also a wealth of supplemental material. I know I sound like a shill but this is how a favourite movie should be treated, whatever it is. However, the film is available by subscription on both Stan and Netflix and rentable through pretty much all the others. Get ya some Found Footage.
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