I must say, I´m not too fond of the Found Footage genre, I mean, there are a few exceptions like Cannibal Holocaust who is the one that started everything or even Cloverfield which is pretty cool, besides that, I find films from this genre being boring, but I´m glad to say I watched The Blair Witch Project a few days ago, probably my favorite Found Footage film ever so far.
I´ve read from some people that The Blair Witch Project was unveliable at its time, that it was terrifying and most people didn´t know if it was a real documentary with real people or just another film with paid actors, this is due to the fact that through its campaign it was announced as a real documentary, even at the level of saying the actors were dead or disappeared. We have to take into account that it was 1999, the internet wasn´t a phenomene like today, so a lot of people couldn´t just investigate, so they actually believed all of that.
Whenever you ask someone who watched The Blair Witch Project, they will probably tell you that it was scary at its time and no one truly knew if it was real or not, which is pretty interesting.
The Blair Witch Project has a classic premise: Three people which are named by Joshua, Williams and Heather; these people are doing their thesis which is a documentary on a old legend about a woman which was supposed to be unfairly murdered some years ago because of the heavy accusation of her being a witch, it´s believed that werid things happens on the zone where this woman was murdered, that´s why our stupid protagonists go there in the first place, I don´t know you but I wouldn´t go to that kind of place if I were in their shoes and I think that´s what everyone would do, probably.
Things get complicated when they get lost, I won´t say how this happens in order not to spoil the plot but yeah, they get lost in the woods, we´ll be watching how slowly their sanity worsen thanks to they are actually filming everything they are doing.
Things get more and more complicated as the film progress, no matter how hard they try to leave the forest, they actually end in places where they have already been, weird things happens, things that shouldn´t happen because they are alone in the woods, as you could imagine, these weird things are like a snowball which is falling and as time passes, said snowball is getting bigger and bigger.
There are certain factors that helped the film to reach the success, one of these being the low budget it had, well, to be honest, I´m not really sure if 60.000$ at that time could be considered as a low budget but they made the whole movie to look as if it was filmed by an amateur which helps us to integrate more in the experience, I mean, when watching Blair Witch, you get that feeling of ¨wow, this really feels like it was filmed by students¨, you never get that ¨Hollywood¨ feeling while watching the movie if you get my meaning.
Another factor is the acting of the protagonists, I mean, I won´t tell you is the best acting I´ve ever seen in my life or something like that but I´ve got to be honest, it felt pretty genuine to me, whenever they scream, they get scared or they are crying, it felt so genuine, almost as if they weren´t acting at all, as if they were real people in real circumstances.
One of the things I liked the most about the whole film was the concept of the witch, I mean, there wasn´t a witch in the first place, well, kind of, it´d better to say that no witch has shown through the movie, there were indeed weird things happening that didn´t have too much sense but you never see a witch in the whole footage. This is pretty subtle and interesting, one could say that the characters were actually insane and the things they looked it was due to their mental instability.
Yeah, I mean, you could say that but that doesn´t have much sense either, because all of the weird and scary things that happens through the film were filmed in the footage, so what? Maybe one of the characters that were insane did it, well no, it´s never shown something like that in the footage, also the film doesn´t imply something like that happened. We could say there was a cult behind the scenes and nope, nothing like that is shown on the footage. You know, that´s what I love about The Blair Witch Project, it´s so subtle that you can interpret things as you like.
When you are watching a Slasher film you know what you are going to watch and what to expect, you want to watch the newest tv show of Chil´d Play which is called ¨Chucky¨? That´s what you are aiming for, to watch Chucky doing his bad things, maybe you want to watch the newest entry of Halloween, called Halloween Ends? You are going to watch it because you want to see Michael Myers in action and maybe Jamie Lee Curtis, I don´t know, but I think you get my point, it´s a Slasher, you know what you are going to watch.
These Slasher films are about its killer and their Kill Count and that´s cool, I love Slasher films, but The Blair Witch Project is not about some witch that wants revenge and deaths, I find The Blair Witch Project to be a film about the horrors of getting lost in a place you don´t know, how much it can damage your mental health until you get insane, it´s not about the killer and their Kill Count, it´s more about the moment, the atmosphere and mental situation of the protagonists, the fear is not about the witch.
Let me give you an example, when The Blair Witch Project managed to be successful, it became something of like a franchise, there is a videogame, books, comics..and more movies. In these recent films, they throw away everything I just said, and they just show a witch actually, the psychological horror stuff disappears and it´s not a film about the characters anymore, it´s about the witch, they want you to see a witch that bad and actually it kills the moment.
The film which started this genre is supposed to be Cannibal Holocaust or that´s what they say, correct me if I´m wrong, but truth be told, some time ago the genre just was there, it was when The Blair Witch Project revitalized everything and became so important for its own genre, it´s because of The Blair Witch Project that things like Paranormal Activity exists (for better or worse lol) in the first place.
All of the screenshots were taken by me while watching the film