The Blair Witch project had people vomiting in the cinema on its 1999 release (Picture: Artisan Pics/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)
If there’s one horror film fans of the genre would like to wipe from their memory it’s The Blair Witch Project.
The American documentary-style horror – written, directed and edited by film students Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez – was released to shocked reviews in 1999, with some not realising it was a fictional story.
The supernatural flick followed student filmmakers – Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard – who played fictional versions of themselves, as they embarked on a camping trip into the Maryland woods to investigate the local legend of the Blair Witch.
True to its genre, this doesn’t end well: the plot sees the three disappear, and the story is told via ‘found footage’ discovered with their equipment a year later.
With no third person camera angle, the success of the Blair Witch Project was credited for popularising the ‘found footage’ style of film in the modern age, leading to horrors including Paranormal Activity and The Sacrament.
Reddit fans have now picked out the Blair Witch Project as the film most would like to erase from their memories – perhaps so they can watch it again with fresh, gullible eyes, or maybe because their viewing was truly scary the first time around.
The film popularised the ‘found footage’ style of horror films (Picture: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock)
Many cinema goers didn’t realise the film was fictional (Picture: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock)
‘One hundred percent The Blair Witch Project,’ answered u/LearningArcadeApp, in an r/CreepyBonfire thread asking the question.
‘That movie is all about the fear of the unknown. It’s the scariest movie I’ve ever watched. Topnotch acting in particular. But once you know, you know, and you can never rewatch it the same way,’ they added.
‘This is my pick. I don’t why it’s so polarising,’ agreed Aware-Mammoth-6939, adding: ‘Slow burns like Blair Witch Project always are scarier to me. The buildup of tension is what I find so terrifying about that movie.’
‘This. Gosh I remember watching the found footage on their website using a dialup modem. The one scene at the end. F***ed me up for like a week,’ added LovelyBones17.
User Acceptable_Ocelot391 agreed, adding: ‘I hadn’t heard anything about it and my boyfriend set it up perfectly for me.
‘I walked out stunned that they would let people go to the theatre to see this creepy failed documentary footage where some kids probably died. I was so gullible!’
Two others agreed that it would be Blair Witch Project for them too – but only because the shaky camera shots made them feel ill.
The marketing campaign was genius – people actually thought the missing students were real (Picture: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock)
The Blair Witch Project is about to be reimagined (Picture: Lionsgate)
The Blair Witch Project was the first ‘found footage’ horror that took off in the internet age, using genius marketing techniques in order to convince cinema-goers the footage, and the story, was real.
It may sound gimmicky now, but back then it really worked. The filmmakers handed out missing person flyers of the students – using their real names – and even got fake missing person news stories written in local press.
The movie’s website acted as an extension of the film, born from a 35-page screenplay, with its amateur student-made look and description of the myth the ‘missing’ students were investigating.
Marketing efforts also included filmmakers posting about the ‘missing’ students on forums and stirring up curiosity online, and they even went as far as to manipulate the IMDb records of actors, changing their bio information to missing and presumed dead.
Actor Leonard told Vice in 2019 of how some people still to this day believe he and fellow actors were actually – and are still – missing.
‘As individuals, it got a bit weird since we’d used our real names in the film. Our parents were getting condolence calls,’ he said.
‘Then, when the cat was finally out of the bag and we started press, some people still didn’t believe us.
Horror fans reckon they would like to erase it from their memory (Picture: Artisan Pics/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)
The actors’ IMDb pages even declared them ‘missing'(Picture: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock)
‘They thought we were actors, hired to play Josh, Mike and Heather in order to keep the whole thing from seeming like a snuff film. To this day, there are still conspiracy theories about this stuff.
25 years on from its release – when it infamously had fans vomiting in the aisles – the Blair Witch Project is back again, as horror producer Jason Blum announced he is rebooting it for a modern makeover.
However, Leonard took to social media pretty miffed that he was not informed of the remake as Lionsgate and Blumhouse used his face on the press release.
‘So, this is MY face on a press release for a film being made by two major studios – both I’ve worked for, both I respect,’ vented Joshua on Instagram after seeing the Variety announcement.
‘The WEIRD PART is that I didn’t know anything about it until a friend sent me a “congrats” screenshot yesterday.’
Controversial 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust is considered to be the first ‘found footage’ movie of the genre before the Blair Witch Project.
The film tells the story of a film crew that sets out to contact the tribes of the Amazon rainforest, with director Ruggero Deodato saying he was inspired by media coverage of the Italian terrorist organisation Red Brigades, which engaged in murders, kidnappings, and tortures.
On its release, many were appalled by its realistic visual effects of graphic violence, leading to Deodato being arrested on suspicion of murder.
The murder charges were dropped after the supposedly ‘dead’ actors were produced in court, very much alive.
The project is widely considered to be one of the most controversial and brutal in the history of cinema, and it was seized, banned or heavily censored in many countries as a result.
It was also well-known for its very real violence against animals, including on-screen killings, which Deodato later defended to The Guardian as having happened in order to ‘feed the film’s characters or the crew, both in the story and in reality’.
Deodato died in December 2022 aged 83.
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