Before watching the movie:
In 1999 a mockumentary film was released that had everyone wondering if it was made up or real. I remember it being hyped up as the scariest horror movie ever seen, though in retrospect, every horror movie would like you to believe it’s the scariest one ever. It was playing with the occult and with the barrier between reality and fiction, so I definitely stayed away at the time. For most of my young life, I stayed away from scary movies because I was afraid of being scared. When I decided to see what I was missing, I’ve almost always found them not worth the hype. And this movie had a lot of hype.
After watching the movie:
In 1994, a small documentary film crew hiked into the woods outside a small Maryland town to document its supernatural folklore. They never returned, but a year later, their footage was found and presented to viewing audiences. While going around Burkittsville, director Heather and camera operators Mike and Josh interview locals about the Blair Witch and hear stories about a hermit who lived in the woods and killed children and a girl who went missing and came back with stories of a floating old woman. They hike to Coffin Rock and record a story of five men whose corpses were found murdered, but disappeared before they could be removed. They make camp for the night, and the next day find an old graveyard, where Josh accidentally knocks over one of the cairns. That night they are menaced by the sounds of sticks snapping, and the following day they try to return to the car but are unable to find it before dark and have to camp again, again hearing snapping sticks, and in the morning there are three cairns outside their tent. Having lost the map, they head south as reckoned by Heather’s compass, and in the course of the day come across a lot of effigies made of bundled sticks hanging from trees. Again, they can’t find the car, and the trio are increasingly going between being at each other’s throats and despairing, while every night, they are accosted in their tents by something from the woods.
This was a really slow burn. If you come to it for supernatural horror, it might be a bit boring, because the focus is more on watching the students’ mental states deteriorate as they spend days lost in the woods and being threatened by an increasingly undeniable presence overnight. While I was watching I was wondering how they could have planned and scripted out all the asides, especially in the early scenes where we just get to know the characters in their element before they’re torn down, and it turns out that there wasn’t a script. The filmmakers gave the actors cameras and notes on what they wanted to happen each day, and sent them to go hike in circles in the woods for a few days with no food. They even used their real names, which caused their careers to disappear.
As someone who can’t tell one patch of forest from another, I should relate strongly to getting lost and being unsure of how to get out. But I haven’t actually gotten lost in a forest that I recall, mainly because I rarely go very deep into them and as the characters note, with increasing desperation, you can walk far enough in pretty much any direction and find civilization. And as the other threat is supernatural, the whole conflict really didn’t work for me other than the deteriorating morale of people who have been stuck together much longer than they were supposed to be. I think that’s the movie’s strength, but that might just be because that’s the only part that I properly got.
This movie’s most obvious legacy is a wave of found footage style works, especially horror stories, which I don’t care very much for but I have to admit that it’s often hard to justify why all the necessary story beats got recorded. It’s a nice bit of characterization that they explain that so much of the footage here in the woods exists because Heather prefers to see their grim reality mediated by her camera as a coping mechanism. However, the much greater legacy is how much success and impact it was able to achieve with a fraction of the budget of most feature films and some kinda dishonest marketing to build on the existing buzz. You don’t need fantastic effects or a highly polished script, all it really takes is an innovative idea and some crafty followthrough.
Yesterday's Movies 