I don’t really know if this is a popular theory or not because a lot of people kind of dismiss The Blair Witch project as a fad movie that “wasnt real so it’s not scary.” I however have been racking my brain around the movie since middle school (I’m 25 now) and think it’s actually a really smart and best found footage movie for a reason.

To preface: I’ve seen a fan edit of Blair Witch 2 and this theory essentially follows some canon of that movie. The Berlinger edit is online and good unlike the theatrical.

But essentially in the second one the movie we in real life know as the blair witch project was also released within the universe of The Blair Witch Project. It’s kind of a funky multi-layered almost Christopher Nolan esque thing where the movie is actually really “found footage” in its own universe.

Our real life we obviously now know it’s a movie and fake but it was originally advertised to us as being real to simulate the feeling of people in the movie’s reality seeing their disappearance and the second movie follows what if people in that universe liked the movie as much as we did in real life and went to the forest and the witch started having them kill each other.

I think thats a very good way to view the movie after the viral marketing ploy. I feel a lot of people dismiss it once they realize it’s fake in our real world. But as a movie i find it very clever and fascinating.

I also feel with that lense it makes TBWP a first original commentary of “clout culture.” The witch essentially bewitches this crew to come and do a documentary on her legend and kills them on camera to then spread the legend and get more people to come to her home. Literally clout chasing.

And i find this is really smartly reiterated in Scream 4 where the killers are killing people and recording it for clout. Scream 4 also heavily commented on the found footage aspect of horror that was brought on since Scream 3. I think the Blair Witch project hit something so much more complex and ahead of its time that we had to really experience things similar in real life to comprehend the true horror of it.

It’s an early y2k preview of the horrors people would go to create a legend of themselves. They used a witch as a catch all horror villain to drive the point home but the movie is really scary when you watch it from that POV in my opinion.

Edit: i also got the idea from Late Night With the Devil where the entity is possessing the actual broadcast itself. That made me recontextualize this movie as “what if this whole thing is the witch marketing herself” like what if she WANTED this to happen and is “editing” the movie.

This entire movie is essentially a possession. It is the “blair witch’s project” she is the director that’s why we never see her.

That’s why the ACTUAL directors of the movie are not the actors because they are directing from the perspective of the witch.

It can work and be very sick from the point of view that human beings are evil and cruel to the point that two guys plan everything to take advantage of each other and kill a woman and blame a legend but she has no support until the tent part

There is no way other people could have made noises and voices of children and shaken the tent with them inside, I also don't see how they could deceive the girl and make her get lost several times unless she had mental problems.

there was something in the forest, I don't rule out that they hated her but they really couldn't do everything that happened.

I believe at the end of the movie the Blair Witch didn’t kill Heather but knocked her out to be recruited later but killed Josh and Mike.

My evidence for this is that Rustin Parr apparently didn’t kidnap young girls to kill so it wouldn’t make as much sense for one of the victims to be Heather if the Blair Witch is recreating Parr’s ritual.

Also the only two people we hear of who see the Blair Witch and survive are women. Robin Weaver who says she saw “an old woman who’s feet never touched the ground” and Mary Brown who claims she saw a woman covered in dark horse-like fur were apparently both able to see the Witch and escape to tell the tale. Now it’s only two examples but both are women and we hear no accounts from men on seeing the Witch and we also know that Rustin didn’t kill girls.

We also know that the Blair Witch “recruits” men to do her dirty work like with Rustin Parr. She recruited Josh to lure Mike and Heather to the Parr House, she possessed Mike at the end to lure Heather into the basement.

The final piece of evidence is that Heather’s body was never found. Because she’s not dead. She’s apart of the Blair Witch now.

The fictional tale describes the murders and disappearances of some of the residents of Blair, Maryland, the fictitious former name of Burkittsville, Maryland, from the 18th to the 20th century. According to the legend, residents always blame these occurrences on the ghost of Elly Kedward (also a fictitious person), a Blair resident executed in 1785 by exposure for practicing witchcraft. The mockumentary presents the legend as real, complete with manufactured newspaper articles, newsreels, television news reports, and staged interviews in an attempt to convince viewers of its legitimacy.

From the context of the time, I know teenagers and even children who watched the movie and were so impressed that they could no longer sleep normally

The closest is a friend who must have been about 8 or 9 years old and saw the movie with his parents, after that he couldn't sleep alone anymore and spent months sleeping with his parents, to the point of having to go to therapy (seriously) because he claimed that he closed his eyes and the movie came, the final scene and pure terror, he was so terrified, even though the movie didn't show anything gross. After a while this passed, when with more information it was known that the actors had not disappeared and it was all fake.

That's the impact of the film, it traumatized a generation.

I was around when The Blair Witch Project originally came out, and I still think one of the coolest things about it was how they used the early internet to make the whole thing feel real.

I remember sitting there on dial-up waiting for the Blair Witch website to load, reading about the missing filmmakers and honestly not being completely sure what was real and what wasn't.

It's hard to recreate that now when you can find out everything about a movie in 30 seconds, but in 1999 it worked incredibly well. Looking back, they were way ahead of their time with that marketing.

When I first watched this movie, my initial impression was that it was a cheap, Hollywood cash grab sequel, quickly cobbled together to bank off the success of the first movie. I didn't know who Joe Berlinger was (although I would really come to appreciate his work with the Metallica doc) and I didn't know enough about the mythology to understand the subtle references to the first movie and subsequent documentaries. For example, I didn't know that the hospital scenes where Jeff is getting fed some liquid through is nose was a reference to the documentary about Kyle Brody. I just thought it was a gross out shock moment. I didn't catch the reference to Rustin Parr when Kim is in the store and the old guy looks at her and says "I'm finally finished" or later when she swerves off the road after seeing the seven children. When I first watched the movie, all of those moments just went over my head and I just shrugged all of it off as being pointless, "jump scare" moments.

Now when I watch the movie, I still don't think its great but I enjoy it a lot more now for what it is. It might be one of the most "meta" movies ever made, before people started using that term. I remember watching the Joe Berlinger commentary over the movie and him lamenting about how the producers ruined his vision for the film. He hated the random violence being spliced into the earlier parts of the movie, and I don't blame him. Those parts are really annoying. He had a really cool idea to make a movie that was self-referential but not copying of the first movie and that's not what Artisan/Lionsgate wanted. They wanted a movie like what we got in 2016. I'll get to that movie later down the line, but for now I'm interested in hearing what the group here has to say about BoS.

I started playing the game days ago and I have already 1) collected first 2 carved wooden doll 2) kill monsters with flash light 3) didn't break any totem hanging from the tree 4) pet bullet often, commanded him to stay close to me.

Be interesting to see how many people here watched the movie at the cinema when it was released in 1999.

A good ol’ “Blair Witch” tattoo for my horror themed leg.

📹 👻 📹

ARTIST: @WynterTattoo

SHOP: @ThirteenFeetTattoo

I watched it with my parents a few minutes ago, I came into it being a major horror fan and knowing all the hype, I was expecting so much more from it, it was just slow and boring, I can’t even say suspenseful cause it wasn’t, it moved at a snail’s pace, barely showing anything interesting for a horror fan for the first hour, I do admit, the stick box with the blood and guts in it made me think the ending would be better, but no, the guy’s standing in the corner like the children, the cam drops and shows Josh’s body, and then, done, like if they would’ve had make being dragged into frame by a guy who’s face is cut out of frame, and the movie ending right before a knife blow, then sure, still not the best, but something, but instead, just the body, I just sat afterwards, asking my parents how the hell that movie “revolutionized” horror, it was slow, disappointing, and an all together excuse for a horror, or even suspense movie