The Stars

At the centre of The Blair Witch Project are three faces. Joshua Leonard, Michael Williams (making their acting debuts) and Rei Hance (formerly Heather Donahue, who had minor screen experience). Their unknown status and their commitment to the project, which saw them not only filming the footage themselves but also working around the clock while being directed from a distance, sometimes with little food and staying away from other roles before the film launched, really helped to sell that the film’s story was real.

In the years since all three stars have had other acting roles but have also pursued other career avenues. Hance acted in several other movies (Boys and Girls and New Suit) and TV shows (The Outer Limits (1995), Taken and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). She has now stepped away from acting to focus on other pursuits, including writing books, podcasting, gardening and working with I Ching. Williams is still acting with recent credits including Satanic Hispanics, this year’s Ghost Game and the upcoming HIS. He also runs his own acting and public speaking studio alongside his wife Toni. Leonard has continued a steady stream of acting work. With credits as varied as Unsane, If I Stay, Hatchet and more. He has also written and directed his own films. Including the award-winning Fully Realized Humans. 25 years after going “missing” all three stars are still active, doing what they love.

Fair Compensation

Unfortunately, their work on the Blair Witch Project has cast a long shadow over all three actors. After Lionsgate and Blumhouse announced a Blair Witch reboot Joshua Leonard spoke about the film’s impact on himself and his costars on social media.

He mentioned that because they used their real names for the film’s characters they had to go to court to get their names back from Artisan Entertainment, who had apparently claimed copyright on them. And how the actors were paid 300k to buy out their film shares, in a deal Leonard told the New York Times they were not involved with, which shut them out of future residuals despite the series (even today) continually trading on the work and images they put into the original film.

Some may say that Lionsgate, who acquired the rights to Blair Witch, shouldn’t have to pay the actors for past mistakes. But it leaves out that these actors, who went through so much to make an iconic movie that people are still talking about today, never received the credit or compensation they deserve.

We Don’t Need A Reboot

Let’s be honest, a Blair Witch reboot isn’t needed. The original’s magic was lightning in a bottle that could never be recaptured by a big publicised studio project. In addition, the found footage genre has mostly faded from prominence and cinematic entries in the series haven’t done well. Meaning it’s unlikely a new entry would provide audiences with anything new or interesting like the original. It would merely be an exercise in brand recognition.

With the series record of taking a low to mid-budget and making an adequate profit, it could still make money. But if the series continues, trading on the hard work the original cast did in making the first film work, Lionsgate could at least do the courtesy of meeting their demands. Those being to be paid adequately for the work they did, along with residuals, to be consulted on future projects that will include their likenesses or names and for Lionsgate to give a $60,000 yearly grant to a genre filmmaker to help make their first film. If the series continues, doing these things would help right past wrongs. It would give the actors agency over their own images again and help engender more industry creativity. It really is a no-brainer.

Also Read: How The Blair Witch Project Changed Horror

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Spoiler Warning for Choke, Four Lions, Being John Malkovich, The Blair Witch Project and Locke

Choke

A film based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel – is not as violent or immediately unsettling as Fight Club but certainly weirder. Victor is a sex addict who works at a colonial-era theme park and earns money for his con-artist mother by going to restaurants, pretending to choke and having a stranger save his life. Victor says that if you save someone’s life you feel responsible for them and so he milks them for as much money as he can. A weird start but it gets weirder, through an extremely convoluted turn of events it is revealed to Victor that he is a descendent of Jesus Christ (but he isn’t really). It’s very true that you can get away with stuff in books that you just couldn’t in films, it would seem ridiculous, or too dark and by the standards of literature Choke the book is weird, but in film, Choke is really out there.

Being John Malkovich

A film that is so weird that it sounds like a rejected idea from The Twilight Zone. Talented but unsuccessful puppeteer Craig takes a day job filing in an office where the height of the floor is literally half that of a normal floor, meaning staff are constantly crouching. On day one he becomes besotted with cool Maxine despite having a girlfriend already. Then Craig finds a hidden door that when he goes through it deposits him in the mind of the actor John Malkovich, seeing through his eyes, until being ejected into New Jersey. What follows is scheme after scheme to gain control of this door and then John Malkovich and the bizarre love triangles of relationships involving various people inhabiting Malkovich. It’s weird, funny and moving and even contains a peculiar cameo for Charlie Sheen and is the film that made the writer Charlie Kaufman synonymous with very odd films.

Locke

Tom Hardy gives a sensational performance as the title character in a film which is set entirely in a car, with Locke talking on the phone to various people about big events in his life. When I first heard about Locke I had assumed it was some sort of unusual thriller, was he talking to a hitman on the phone who had his family? But no, Locke is driving overnight to be at the side of the woman he had a one night stand with who is having his baby. This coincides with a genuinely monumental engineering project which Locke is managing but is missing to be at the birth of his child. Phone calls go back and forth between Locke, his colleagues, the local council, his wife and the woman he slept with. This should be perhaps the most boring film ever made, it even includes a discussion about filing paperwork with the local council, but it is engrossing. Locke is trying to do the right thing for everyone – he knows he made a mistake but he needs to support the woman he slept with, he needs to finish this job, he needs to be honest to his wife (obviously, he really needed to not have an affair but that has happened). Certainly, not a wild ride of thrills and scares but nonetheless a very interesting film.

Four Lions

I think Chris Morris is literally the only person in the world who could have successfully brought this film into being. Four Lions is the story of four British Muslims who are planning to commit a terrorist attack. And it’s a comedy. Chris Morris was already hailed as a comedy genius for The Day Today, Brasseye and more. For what would be a hugely controversial film he had a long record of staring down the assembled fury of the media and much of the British public and telling them to sod off. The film is exceptionally funny and poignant, we see the film through the eyes of the four terrorists and the relationship between best friends Omar and Waj is heartbreaking, especially when Waj is having doubts about their attack, Omar telling him to look into his heart, and Waj replying his heart says, “It’s wrong, Waj, don’t do it.” A truly great film that manages to have jokes about suicide bombing, drone strikes and religious extremism as well as jokes about the relative size of hands and Toploader.

Blair Witch Project

It seems conclusive that The Blair Witch Project is not the first found footage film but it very much has become the touchstone film of the genre. Nothing about The Blair Witch Project should work – it has no stars, made by unknown filmmakers, with an original budget IMDb lists as $60,000, the camera shakes like it’s on a rollercoaster and it’s too dark to see what is happening half of the time. Of course, many of these things were actually the secrets of its success. The fact that the actors were unknown allowed a marketing campaign that suggested it really was found footage, the shaking camera made it seem real, the darkness allowed you to imagine what was happening. Many people saw this film and hated it – it wasn’t scary and it was boring, but undeniably many people saw it and were terrified. To this day it is one of the most financially successful films ever when comparing the budget with the amount of money made.

Also Read: How The Blair Witch Project Changed Horror

More: The Best Performances of Tom Hardy

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Summary

The Blair Witch Project follows student filmmakers, Heather, Mike and Josh who set out to make a documentary on the town of Burkittsville, Maryland, the creepy legends about the surrounding black hills; and their supposed connection to the Blair Witch. But when the team venture into the hills they get lost and begin witnessing strange things, like cairn’s and stick effigies appearing around them. Eventually, Josh goes missing. Upon investigating Mike and Heather are attacked by unseen forces and are never seen again.

How The Blair Witch Project Stood Out?

It’s hard to believe now, as found footage is a staple of the horror landscape, but the style was once both new and credible. The Blair Witch Project was among the first movies to use an unprofessional style to create an air of authenticity. Audiences were used to slickly produced horror films. But the low-grade film stock, shaky camera, realistic audio, no score, and no monster made this movie seem like someone’s home movie, not a professional film. And the film furthered its connection to reality by employing a different kind of filming process to get its performances.

To push the film’s realism, the directors cast unknown actors and wanted them to improvise all their dialogue. To do this, the actors were sent into the woods to film with the filming equipment and a GPS tracker. According to co-director Daniel Myrick, “Using GPS, we directed them to locations…where they’d leave their footage and pick up food and our directing notes”. Which often encouraged the actors to bicker with one another. And the crew would pull gags on the actors at night such as shaking their tent. This means that much of the acting feels close to reality because, for most of the production, the cast were living like their characters.

The Blair Witch Project wasn’t the first found footage film of course. Cannibal Holocaust and The Last Broadcast used many of the same tropes to appear real. But Blair Witch reached a wider audience and cemented its authenticity in the public’s eyes through its promotional material.

The filmmakers made a website before the film’s release to play up the legend behind the film. The website showed pictures of police investigations, interviews with Heather’s mother and “uncovered” audio clips from their expedition. The filmmakers also put up missing posters at film festivals. They directed a short mockumentary, disguised as a traditional documentary which aired on the sci-fi channel called The Curse of Blair Witch. All this material combined, made many audiences believe that the film was real and that the actors really were missing, presumed dead. IMDb even listed the actors as missing.

Which eventually resulted in a film with a $60,000 budget, making back $248,639,099 – Over 4000 times its budget. Making it one of the most profitable movies ever made.

The Blair Witch Follow-Ups

Inevitably for a film that was successful, franchise appeal came calling. The film spawned a sequel in 2000, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and a soft-reboot/sequel in 2016’s Blair Witch. Despite its financial success, it never received the same recognition as the original. And it isn’t hard to see why.

Book of Shadows traded in the found footage conceit and was shot like a conventional horror movie. It also attempted to satirise and explore the impact of the first movie and the power of media to influence people. But many didn’t appreciate the typical presentation after the ground-breaking feeling of the original.

And while Blair Witch went back to the found footage conceit, even following the original lead with a viral marketing campaign capitalizing on the secrecy of the production, the film didn’t garner much praise upon release. Despite its nods to the original film, this film focused more on jump scares and was more slickly produced. Using professional actors and multiple high-quality cameras. Making it ironically seem again like a conventional movie. And because of the prevalence of found footage films released since the original, Blair Witch 2016 ultimately seemed like pointless brand reinforcement.

The Influence and State of The Blair Witch

Because everyone is now fully aware that found footage films aren’t real. And with the atmosphere of the marketing campaign forgotten, many feel that the original Blair Witch Project doesn’t hold up today. But it is important viewing from a historical standpoint.

Of course, all modern-found footage movies owe their existence to Blair Witch. Paranormal Activity, Unfriended and The Visit all became box office successes using small budgets and found footage tropes to tell their stories. But there are also movies like 28 Days Later, which took stylistic influence from Blair Witch by using low-quality footage to make the film more gritty and real and made back over 10 times its budget. And it was, of course, the forerunner of viral internet marketing, which has since become so prevalent. With every movie and TV show uses its online presence to get viewers interested.

However, even with everything that came afterwards, the original Blair Witch Project remains a testament to ingenuity. It proved you don’t need a big budget or a monster to frighten an entire generation. Just an idea, an internet connection, a camera and a committed cast.

Also Read: The Human Centipede: A Love / Hate Story

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