Sorry for my absence! I was at Horror Hound recently and living my best life, and then I got totally side tracked with real life issues and then fanfiction is a tempting distraction, so here we are.
With my love of found footage, I was pretty shocked when I was going through my archive and I realized I hadn’t reviewed the mother of all found footage: The Blair Witch Project (the good one aka the original). What could be considered the grandfather of found footage as we know it today, The Blair Witch Project mostly centers around three wannabe documentarians (Heather, Josh, and Mike) who get lost in the woods and are seemingly hunted down by an unseen Blair Witch. The film concept is simple, and the execution is where it really takes off. The audience does not see the Witch, nor really anyone else besides the three main characters; it is just three assholes in the woods either getting hunted by a demented witch or, perhaps, being tortured by each other.
The design works and the structure adds to believability. The camera isn’t always rolling like in other found footage films, which seems completely implausible with how batteries and sleeping work. The cameras only ever come on when something is happening or has happened overnight. These found footage pieces also are paired with the documentarians having fun and interviewing locals about the Blair Witch. Be it the acting or the script, but the interviews are some of the best and most convincing evidence that The Blair Witch Project could be real found footage, which adds to the horror of the whole piece.
The audiences are piecing together the mystery along with the three protagonists while still having so many unanswered questions. There is never any answer on whether the Blair Witch is real, or if Mike and Josh are actually gaslighting Heather as revenge for getting them lost in the woods. Their dynamic is great with each other, and they do seem like fair weather friends who are just working on a passion project but have no unyielding loyalty to each other outside of that. Heather is the leader of this group but really struggles to inspire loyalty. Mike is more of the hot head, and Josh seems to be caught in the middle and just trying to make a documentary about the Blair Witch. The different character dynamics breed genuine conflict that initially start over small things but eventually escalate and cause the characters to lie to each other out of revenge.
The ending is genuinely haunting in a way so few other found footage films are — it just sort of ends; there is no wrap up, no final jump scare, no monster reveal. We see Heather find Mike and Josh, allegedly, after wandering the woods looking for them, only for the camera to fall and Heather to scream. Whether audiences believe The Blair Witch killed her, Josh and Mike or whether they are more skeptical, thinking the killers instead are Mike and Josh in an effort to get revenge, we never really know the truth and I think that sells the overall horror way more than if we got questions answers.
The Blair Witch Project is often seen as one of the staples of found footage and it’s with good reason. It’s a scary movie that sets the tone for how found footage should be: a piece of media that exists to evoke more questions than answers, and simply acts as a creepy artifact of the time. That’s it. And I think that’s why almost thirty years later, it still is seen as a found footage staple.