The Blair Witch Project Turned Technology Into a New Kind of Horror Tool: ’99 Rewind
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The post The Blair Witch Project Turned Technology Into a New Kind of Horror Tool: ’99 Rewind appeared first on Consequence.
Welcome to ’99 Rewind, our celebration of 25th anniversaries of the films, TV, and music from 1999. Today, we’re looking back at the legacy of The Blair Witch Project.
It’s outright impossible to discuss the craft of horror filmmaking without at least making mention of The Blair Witch Project, the landmark indie that changed found-footage movies forever. So many details around the 1999 project have become the stuff of legend, from the fact that principal photography was accomplished over the course of just eight days to the unforgettable viral marketing campaigns only possible in the early days of the internet.
Twenty-five years ago this week, The Blair Witch Project premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before opening nationwide in July 1999. With wind in the sails courtesy of the “real or fiction” trailers and steady word-of-mouth endorsements, the film managed to gross its $60,000 budget back a wild 4,000 times over.
But 25 years later, it’s easy to forget that The Blair Witch Project was a technological achievement in itself. The VHS camcorder was the preeminent tool for capturing memories for families throughout the ’80s and ’90s, but prior to directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, but few audiences had had seen this tool placed in the hands of a protagonist.
The grounded atmosphere (and the fact that almost every single one of the adults in the audience had used or been filmed on such a camcorder) underscored the everyman nature of the whole Blair Witch experience. No, it wasn’t the first “found footage” movie by any means (consider the controversial Cannibal Holocaust of 1980), but it felt urgent, and extremely fresh. Moments where characters are sprinting through the woods, only identified by their heavy breathing as the forgotten camera shakes in their hands, utilized the inherent unsteadiness of the format to the fullest. The swings from monotonous hiking to outright terror, like the now-iconic “selfie” frame, would have had an entirely different effect on more advanced filmmaking equipment.
Rob Savage’s personal VHS copy of The Blair Witch Project, courtesy of Savage
“Aesthetically, The Blair Witch Project’s impact has been far-reaching — though, most importantly, it inspired a generation of DIY filmmakers to pick up their cameras and believe in the possibility of puncturing the mainstream bubble,” says Rob Savage, director of 2020 breakout Host, in an email to Consequence. “Without it we’d have no James Wan, no Blumhouse and — for better or worse — no Rob Savage.”
In 2018, the directors of Blair Witch took a deep dive into their process in a collection of first-person memories for The Guardian. In the piece, Myrick recalls feeling like if they didn’t hurry up and execute their DIY vision fast, that some other filmmakers out there would. The film was then born of a remarkably sparse 35-page screenplay that only detailed the events of the film, leaving dialogue choices and reactions entirely in the hands of the actors.
Our most accessible technologies have evolved alongside horror over the last 25 years; movies like Chronicle and Cloverfield hinge on camcorders (albeit sleeker models than what’s used in Blair Witch), while 2018’s Unsane was shot entirely on an iPhone. Then in 2020, when the film industry ground to a halt with the rest of the world, many creators attempted quarantine projects — some with more successfully than others.
One of those successes was Savage’s Host, a tight and entirely chilling 57 minutes taking place on Zoom. While the idea of an hour-long Zoom call is already a frightening premise, Savage used the limitations of the technology to its fullest advantage: Where The Blair Witch Project makes the endless forest on grainy VHS deeply threatening, Host harnesses claustrophobia and self-contained terror to achieve what Savage calls “the video call from Hell.”
“When making Host, The Blair Witch Project was at the forefront of my mind,” Savage recalls. “There had already been a slew of fantastic ‘screenlife’ movies, Unfriended especially, showcasing the potential of the format — though none of them hit the same level of authenticity as The Blair Witch Project. Since we had a captive audience, locked down in their houses, we saw an opportunity to replicate some of The Blair Witch Project’s tactics for the pandemic generation.”
Beyond the filmmaking itself, the legendary Blair Witch viral marketing campaign would be difficult — but not impossible — to replicate in the present, where the concept of going viral has become wildly normalized by social media, the lines between “real” and “staged” have been further blurred, and predicting what will land with audiences changes so rapidly.
Take the 2023 film Missing, for example, which attempted ads with their lead actress seemingly pleading viewers to help her find her missing mother. Perhaps the film’s lead actress, Storm Reid, is just a bit too recognizable after her roles in A Wrinkle in Time or Euphoria; maybe it’s that millennials and members of gen-Z are now accustomed to corporations masquerading as general users or studios attempting to make something look like shaky iPhone footage. It could also be a combination of these factors, coalescing with the sheer oversaturation we experience through endless scrolling throughout the day.
Meanwhile, in 1999, some people were so convinced that three documentarians had actually gone missing in the woods that a New York detective reached out to Myrick to offer his services. Today, a quick Google search and public records would change this approach, but 2024 also offers its own challenges, accompanied by evolving ethical questions — AI deep-fakes and increasingly realistic editing tools have set us up for new forms of confusion to potentially arise.
But if the legacy of The Blair Witch Project has told us one thing, it’s that there’s already an audacious young filmmaker out there right now figuring out how to use all that — and more — to their advantage.
The Blair Witch Project is currently available for streaming on The Criterion Channel, Mubi, Plex, and Freevee.
The Blair Witch Project Turned Technology Into a New Kind of Horror Tool: ’99 Rewind
Mary Siroky
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