As it's pieced together by the townspeople in The Blair Witch Project and in the companion documentary, Curse of the Blair Witch: In 1785, a woman named Elly Kedward was accused of witchcraft in Blair, Md.-later Burkittsville-after she was discovered pricking the fingers of children to let their blood. The back story is briefly touched upon before things get weird for Heather, Josh and Mike in the woods, but Myrick and Sánchez have said they wouldn't mind fleshing out the lore in another film. "There's a common misunderstanding that not a lot went into it," Myrick told The Guardian in 2018, "but it took two years of effort to make it look like it was just shot by three students over a long weekend."Ĭourtesy Artisan Entertainment The Legend Williams and Joshua Leonard hiked into the Black Hills of Burkittsville and never came out.
Meanwhile, 1994 is the stated year in which "student filmmakers" Heather Donahue, Michael C. The movie was shot over eight days, in Germantown, Md., Seneca Creek State Park and the Griggs House, in Patapsco Valley State Park. Over the next several years, they came up with the Blair Witch lore, hired a few unknown actors who could do improv, scraped some money together and production got underway in October of 1997. In and around 1993, they were talking about horror movies-and the recent drought of truly great ones-when they thought about the potentially terrifying consequences of a group stumbling upon a house in the woods and not being able to resist going inside, despite knowing that something appalling was happening.
But as an object lesson of how little you need for terror beyond pitch darkness, The Blair Witch Project deserves all its success, and then some.Richard Young/Shutterstock Years in the Makingĭirectors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez met as students at the University of Central Florida School of Film. Inevitably, the film has more rough edges than most (many deliberate), and the improvised dialogue veers from the unsettlingly convincing and the needlessly rambling. It's strong on disturbing throwaways (stick-figure dolls, child-sized handprints, something unidentifiably bloody) and there's a gathering sense of panic - realising the woods don't conform to her precious map, Heather finally cracks up completely, far more disturbingly terrified than any previous screen screamer. It would be unfair to give away too much, but the movie gets its chills without resorting to special effects (which it couldn't have afforded anyway) or anything in the way of an explanation.
After interviewing a couple of locals about the legend, the foolhardy trio head into the woods, and everything starts to fall apart. The actors, using their real names, swiftly establish soon-to-fray relationships: Heather (Donahue) is the director willing to suffer for her art who doesn't care if others suffer less willingly with her, cameraman Josh (Leonard) is the slacker-type along for the ride and sound technician Mike (Williams) is mostly concerned with making sure they get the rented equipment back on time. The first few minutes are disorienting, deliberately shot with all the shakiness of raw footage from some backpacker's video diary. An opening caption tells us that three wannabe filmmakers disappeared in October 1994 in the Black Hills Forest of Maryland and that all that was ever found of them were several cans of film, which have been edited together into the documentary we are being shown.
#THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 1999 FULL MOVIE ONLINE UPDATE#
First-time writer-directors Myrick and Sanchez opt for an update of that format (perhaps influenced by the notorious Cannibal Holocaust and all those bogus In Search Of Bigfoot snorers that came out in the 70s), with film instead of a diary. Many classic literary ghost and horror stories pretend to be manuscripts left by mysteriously-disappeared narrators, who often let their pens drop in mid-sentence as the monster comes to get them. But, in a way, it's a shame this micro-budgeted picture has received so much attention for its unusual production history and comes to the UK after success of blockbusting proportions in the US, since it's the sort of film that gets its best effects by creeping up on you unawares and whispering scary things in the dark. By now, the word legend applies as much to the making and marketing of this extraordinary film as to the fictional backstory that haunts its characters.