Munedawg Communications

Back in 1999, The Blair Witch Project took the cinema world by storm. Shot on a shoestring budget, $200,00-$750,000, actually low by Hollywood standards, the final box office gross came to nearly $250 Million. Written, directed, and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, it utilizes the format/gimmick of “found footage,” although it wasn’t the first film to do this, surprisingly the technique was used in Orson Welles’ The Other Side of Midnight in 1976.

In the film, three filmmakers, Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard, and Michael Williams travel to Burkittsville, Maryland in 1994 to shoot a documentary about a local legend, The Blair Witch. In the film, the actors are using their real names and all of the principal photography was done by them, the bulk of it by Heather with a Hi8 video camera and some of it by Josh with a 16mm film camera. After interviewing the local townspeople about the Blair Witch and a hermit named Rustin Parr, they head off into the woods to camp for a couple of days and film segments pertaining to the legend.

Initially the filming goes well, but then the whole trip descends into a nightmare. On the DVD commentary Myrick and Sánchez note that initially in the film as the three are seen getting more lost in the woods and even have strange encounters with seemingly supernatural elements, there are moments of humor interspersed with the impending doom, like the Vienna sausage and Gilligan’s Island conversation.

And as Myrick and Sánchez said, there reaches a point in the film, like when Heather discovers the bundle containing Josh’s teeth, that the audience realizes that there are no more fun and games and that the Heather and Mike are going to die.

After awhile, after its initial massive success, the film suffered from an enormous backlash from the public and critics alike. Even to the point where Heather actually legally changed her name to Rei Hance to distance herself from the project. And admittedly, she was one of the few actresses that would even allow themselves to be portrayed in the very unflattering “apology scene”.

Now for the Munedawg’s rebuttal to all of this! 🙂 Personally I like the film. It is much more effective than horror films with much larger budgets because the filmmakers were able to get real performances and reactions from the cast. And the whole getting lost in the woods aspect is especially scary to some of us. I remember a quote from a woman who said that she had never experienced seeing her outdoorsman husband, who did a lot of backpacking and camping, actually being frightened by a film because it was all too real a scenario for him. And me too, I do stuff like hiking and trail riding and I have actually been that lost. Even nowadays with GPS, Googlemaps, etc. you can get out cell phone range, then all bets are off!

Also, I think the very simple props, like the rock cairns and the stick figure humans, is surprisingly creepy and effective.

The film was an original idea and all the lame parodies and imitators that followed in its wake just show the lack of creativity from other filmmakers, although The Bare Wench Project was hilarious! 😀