Blu-ray Review: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT – Still Great 25 Years On
Horror cinema was taken to a whole new level 25 years ago when The Blair Witch Project came out of nowhere, broke box office records – and for better or for worse – single-handedly ushered in the ‘found footage’ sub-genre.
The set-up is simple, but the execution is exceptionally well handled. The 1999 pseudo-documentary opens with a title card that sums up the film better than I ever could:
”In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary called ‘The Blair Witch Project’. A year later their footage was found.”
Stars Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard – play the young filmmakers – fictional versions of themselves who go deep into the woods during the course of their film shoot. Tensions run high when the trio get lost – and then things start to go bump on the night.
The Blair Witch Project helped change film-making – and film marketing forever. It showed Hollywood that the internet was an important way to hype films, without having to spend $100 million on promotion. Audiences believed the footage contained within Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s low budget fright pic was real and the internet marketing campaign for the movie played this aspect up, propelling the film to almost $250 million at the worldwide box office – not bad for a film which cost just $60,000!
Blair Witch‘s documentary style (later re-dubbed “shaky cam” and ‘found footage’) has been copied ever since by a million other interchangeable low budget shockers – but none have the freshness, or the skill of this 1999 pic.
A sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 fizzled the following year. The budget of that film was increased to $15 million and while it grossed $47 million globally, bad reviews and audience feedback meant the franchise lay dormant until director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett ventured back into the woods with Blair Witch in 2016. That film was a moderate success, banking $45 million worldwide from a $5 million budget.
However, no sequel or remake will ever match the power of what The Blair Witch Project managed to do a quarter of a century ago. It came out of nowhere to shock and stun audiences across the globe. It changed how movies were made and marketed and opened up a whole new realm for budding film-makers. Now all you needed was a digital camera and a internet to realise your dreams. Not a bad legacy for a little movie which nobody saw coming.
Special Features
The mighty Second Sight Films have done it again. This new double disc release of The Blair Witch Project is another phenomenal package. The film has been remastered from the original Hi8 videotapes and 16mm film elements – meaning that… I don’t know exactly, but the film still looks like it was cobbled together from footage found in the woods.
It comes with three versions of the film (with varying differences) – Original Theatrical Cut and Festival Cut as well as the original-release version. The original release versions has a pair of commentaries – one from the directors and another with film critics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson.
It also features a feature length documentary which is the final word on The Blair Witch Project. Running almost an hour longer than the film itself, this features input from nearly everyone involved with the film except its stars (it’s complicated).
There are also trailers, deleted scenes, alternate endings and Curse of the Blair Witch – a faux TV documentary from 1999 that actually included some of the footage that was as shot for the feature film, but ultimately excised from it.
Stunning stuff.
