"I just want to apologize to Mike's mom, and Josh's mom, and my mom. I am sorry, everyone. I was very naive. I am so, so sorry. For everything that has happened. Because in spite of what Mike says now, it is my fault. Because it was my project... Everything had to be my way. And this is where we've ended up. And it's all because of me that we're here now. Hungry, cold, and hunted..."
The Blair Witch Project is a horror movie, shot entirely in the style of a documentarygone horribly wrong. Three college students are researching "The Blair Witch", and go on an expedition into the local forest where the legend is supposed to have started. Things ultimately take a turn for the worse.Now what it's really notable for is having one of the best Viral Marketing campaigns ever, and certainly one of the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of internet advertising: fake online documents, footage, published dossiers, interviews, and even a couple of professional-looking television documentaries blurred the line between truth and fiction like few other campaigns had done before or since. Many were convinced that the movie was based on a true story, or even consisted of actual footage. Even more were subtly convinced that the "Blair Witch" was a real legend, as opposed to something the film-makers made up themselves.Had a poorly received sequel which upped the Mind Screw and pretty much killed the franchise off. The directors are still thinking of coming back for a third, though.
The Blair Witch Project contains examples of:
All There in the Manual: The tie-in materials flesh out the Blair witch legend and the back story, which makes the movie ten times creepier once you realize what a lot of things mean. For example, those three odd piles of stones they find around their tent one morning early on in their trip? Rustin Parr kidnapped kids to his house in the woods, murdered them, and buried them in the basement before making their graves with piles of stones. They were doomed from the start.
Chewing the Scenery: Heather Donahue's apology scene. She acted so hard that you could practically see the bite marks in the camera. She sobs, screams, and shakes so realistically that her acting convinced some people it was a true life account. Her scuffles with the other two were also unscripted, as was the entire infamous apology scene.
Cluster F-Bomb: Due mainly to the improvised script. It's not Casino levels of bad, but you can tell it's the favorite word of the movie.
This was parodied by humor columnist Dave Barry, who wrote a "sample" of the dialogue, replacing the f-bomb with the word "darn"
First Character: Darn you! You darned got us darned lost in these darned woods! Darn!
Second Character: Go darn yourself!
Squirrel: Will you darners shut the darn UP?
Covered in Gunge: Their equipment gets mysteriously slimed near the end of the movie.
Creepy Children: The crew hear some little kids giggling out in the woods late at night.
Creepypasta: The Viral Marketing for the film may well be the Ur Example, building up a legend about the ghost of a witch through the power of the '90s internet.
Daylight Horror / Freeze Frame Bonus: If you look closely as Heather turns away from the open bag fashioned out of Josh's shirt, containing his teeth, hair and blood, breathing hysterically, she pauses for three-odd seconds looking at a stick carefully placed behind her horizontally upon two small plants. Not a METER away. Definitely not there when she walked behind the tent.
Improv: The actors were given no more than a 35-page outline of the mythology behind the plot before shooting began. All lines were improvised and nearly all the events in the film were unknown to the three actors beforehand, and were often on-camera surprises to them all.
Literary Agent Hypothesis: The original marketing for the movie claimed that it was found footage of a true story, presented to the public by the producers.
Mind Screw: Who was hunting them? Was it really a witch? What was that ending all about? We'll never know.
Unless we take a look at the extended universe.
Mockumentary: And several Mockumentaries were made about the mockumentary.
Poor Communication Kills: Arguably one of the reasons why they get lost in the woods in the first place.
Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "FUCK!! YOU!!! LOG!!!!!!" A little easy to miss, but an underappreciated gem.
Oh, it's worse than that. The line, according to the feature-length commentary on the DVD, is actually "FUCK! YOU! GOD!"
Regularly Scheduled Evil: Though not operating on as tight of a schedule as some other supernatural woods creatures, the Blair Witch likes to pull some freaky shit every fifty or sixty years or so.
Rule 34: The Bare Wench Project and The Erotic Witch Project, etc. Both of which had more sequels than the film they're spoofing.
Too Dumb to Live: Why don't they just follow that river? You know, the one with the log...
Supernatural forces were at play. It's likely that no matter what they did, they wouldn't find a way out.
This is confirmed in the tie-games and other material. You will get turned around despite the fact you were following the map perfectly. Frankly, if those woods don't want you to leave, you're not going to be able to leave.
Unbuilt Trope: This movie spawned plenty of imitators, especially in the late 2000s (Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, The Last Exorcism, and now Unaware). However, those films all had pretty high budgets, slick editing, and plenty of scary CG monster/alien/whatever effects. This film's minuscule budget, realistic location, and rambling, unscripted nature make it feel like a deconstruction of the very films it influenced.
Likewise, Heather's insistence upon filming everything even when logic suggests she put the camera down for once, a staple of found-footage horror movies, is suggested by Josh to be her way of coping with the fact that she's lost in the woods — the screen on the camcorder all makes it feel less real. This also causes a rift between her and the rest of the group, with Mike and Josh telling her several times to turn the camera off and even attacking her over it.
It should be noted that, even though the Horror Mockumentary genre was an unbuilt trope at the time, it is not the first to do this. Cannibal Holocaust was perhaps the first and The Last Broadcast was released just before this film but to less fanfare.
The Unreveal: During the final sequence, Heather is heavily implied to have seen the antagonist, but drops her camera before she can get a shot of it.
Not to mention that we never find out the meaning behind...well, much of anything, really.
The Killer In Me: It is revealed that the three remaining main characters have been killing off their friends over the course of the movie, who they were hallucinating as evil people.
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