A horror film lauded as ‘terrifying’ and ‘evil’ is streaming now on Netflix if you already need a break from festive cheer.
Released in 1999, The Blair Witch Project has gone down in history as putting the found footage horror subgenre on the map, influencing the likes of Paranormal Activity, REC, and the V/H/S franchise, to name a few.
Directed by Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, the film follows three student filmmakers (played by Rei Hance, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams) who venture to the Maryland woods to investigate the legend of the Blair Witch.
The students go missing, and what happened to them is recounted via a series of tapes found in the woods.
The mockumentary is notorious in part due to its marketing campaign, which listed the actors as missing or deceased, convincing many that what they saw onscreen was real.
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It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, and during its theatrical run, there were reports of viewers being so scared they threw up or fainted.
The Blair Witch Project was followed by a sequel, Book of Shadows, in 2000, as well as Blair Witch in 2016.
In 2024, it was announced that a new Blair Witch Project movie was in the works from Blumhouse and Lionsgate.
The original 90s classic is often dubbed a ‘masterpiece’ and one of the greatest horror films of all time, currently sitting at an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The critics’ consensus reads: ‘Full of creepy campfire scares, mock-doc The Blair Witch Project keeps audiences in the dark about its titular villain, proving once more that imagination can be as scary as anything onscreen.’
In their review, the Wall Street Journal said: ‘The scariest shots, from someone’s little Hi-8 camcorder, document the students losing their bearings, giving way to panic and finally falling victim, though off screen, to some ineffably, unphotographably evil presence.’
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The Philadelphia Inquirer praised: ‘You can dismiss The Blair Witch Project as a trick. Or you can give in to the treat and savor that rarest of accomplishments in a field notorious for tedium and repetition — an original horror movie.’
The Washington Post wrote: ‘The Blair Witch Project is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. Not the goriest, the grossest, the weirdest, the eeriest, the sickest, the creepiest or the slimiest… Just flat out the scariest.’
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone said: ‘I have seen the new face of movie horror and its name is The Blair Witch Project, a groundbreaker in fright that reinvents scary for the new millennium.’
The Blair Witch Project has arguably gained its notoriety thanks to its spine-chilling and ambiguous final scenes, but speaking to Metro, the film’s directors revealed that they very almost didn’t happen.
‘The whole movie was based on making something for cheap,’ Eduardo reflected.
‘We were film students, and we knew how expensive movies were, so we were like, “How do you make a horror movie – or any movie – for cheap?” and we came up with the idea we could do cheap because it didn’t have to be crazy lighting, sound, or anything like that.’
He continued: ‘I think the limits of the budget were actually the strength of the movie. Dan and I have both said a million times that if we had more money, we would have probably had some kind of crazy creature at the end of the movie attacking them and in the cellar, or something in that basement, and we would have ruined our own movie.
‘We struggled with that ending, and we asked ourselves at the time, “How are we going to end this movie?” And I always tell people, man, if we had an extra 20 or 30,000 bucks, we would have hired somebody to make some stupid suit.’
Daniel joked that had they had more money, there ‘definitely would have been an alien in there somewhere.’
The Blair Witch Project is now streaming on Netflix
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