on Saturday, we realize we're doing what the clueless protagonists of a horror movie did: We're the people who shouldn't be coming into town coming into the town anyway. Giordano/City Paper)Īs Joe and I pull into Burkittsville just shy of 2 p.m. The grave of "Infant Pfeifer" seen at the begining of "The Blair Witch Project" (J.M.
He says he's hoping to eventually sell the site and focus on building up another staked digital domain:. The owner of the page, a man named Bill Swartwout, said via email that he lives an hour outside Burkittsville. gov page and , a website completely unaffiliated with the town which features an embedded trailer for the new film (misidentified, bizarrely, as "Into the Woods"), along with Amazon ads for Halloween costumes. Still active are Burkittsville's official. The site, in its original unaltered form, fittingly only exists today in archived form as a digital ghost. Today, is something of a haunted house itself: hosting of the page has expired and the URL directs to a Hindi porn site. "But it was mainly people emailing and asking stuff, not showing up." Yeah, the marketing and the fake police reports, they got some attention," she says. Even if you didn’t believe that a major studio would actually release what could be considered a recovered snuff film, everything about “The Blair Witch Project” is sinisterly designed to help audiences imagine they are watching the final days of three real people.Ĭox insists that the hype surrounding "The Blair Witch Project" was jumpstarted by hungry news outlets. In those hazy pre-Wikipedia days of the internet, people fell for the lie. And it was even set around an actual town, Burkittsville. “Heather Donahue” was played by an actress named Heather Donahue, and so on. The actors played fictionalized versions of themselves on screen and improvised their own dialogue off a bare-bones script. The film is so fascinating because it lives on the edge between what’s real and what isn’t.
In classic horror movie sequel tradition, the more conventionally filmed follow-up forgot what made the original so compelling: “Blair Witch Project” was a spooky video artifact that felt like it could have come from the real world, our world. A pseudo-sequel from acclaimed documentarian Joe Berlinger, “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” was released the following year but panned. “The Blair Witch Project” was the first movie in the found footage form to become a household name. We never see who or what is chasing these characters, but we know it got them. The powerful ending is all the more remarkable for its simplicity. Audiences were left hanging at the moment something unseen knocks Heather to the ground just as she comes across Mike standing in the corner, a callback to one ordinary Burkittsville resident's account of the Blair Witch myth in the film's opening. The film doesn't end with a jump scare or crazy monster effects, nothing cheap like that. Heather and Mike, lured by their lost companion's screams, enter an abandoned house they've stumbled upon deep in the woods. While "The Blair Witch Project" largely coasted on atmospheric dread, the movie's final moments are really what it is remembered for. Over the course of an hour and 45 minutes, audiences watched as invisible forces and tensions drove group members Heather, Josh, and Mike to petty infighting, exhaustion, and eventually terror before their implied deaths at the hands of a supernatural tormentor, presumably the ghost of a woman named Elly Kedward. The movie follows three college students as they self-document their journey into the fictional Black Hills Forest of Burkittsville, the site of numerous supernatural phenomena and murders over the town's lifetime. It boasted the second highest domestic gross for July of 1999, coming in second after the Julia Roberts romcom "Runaway Bride," oddly enough, also shot in Maryland. An indie cobbled together by directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick on a shoestring budget that would go on to gross nearly $250 million worldwide, "The Blair Witch Project" had no special effects, starred a cast of total unknowns, and was filmed almost entirely in rural Maryland.
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