I didn’t see my first horror film until I was eleven, but I knew the entire plot of The Blair Witch Project the summer it came out, when I was ten. Someone (I can’t remember who, but presumably one of my friends with an older sibling) walked us through the entire movie at a slumber party, in the basement of Naseem’s apartment. Laying in my sleeping bag, staring into the dark abyss of a subterranean window, I imagined the final shots: Mike facing into the corner, the handheld camera falling to the floor, static. I don’t remember a lot from elementary school, but I remember that, vividly.
The Blair Witch Project is often credited with popularizing the “found footage” cinematic technique, in which a film is presented as real (usually raw, unprofessionally filmed) footage, discovered after some sort of event that resulted in the footage becoming lost or hidden, being revealed for the first time. The Blair Witch Project remains somewhat unique in that it was also largely unscripted; the three cast members were really recording themselves while camping in the Maryland woods, being harassed, surprised (and at one point abandoned) by the directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, whose directing approach during filming was largely to leave them GPS locations and individual instructions in 35mm film canisters.
The found footage gimmick is particularly effective in the horror genre, because from the start it implies an absent (ie: dead/missing) protagonist. There is never any hope, you know the reality you’re entering into. In marketing the film, the directors did their best to extend the boundaries of this reality by grafting that absence onto the actors themselves. Their IMDB listings were updated to say that they were “missing, presumed dead”. At screenings, missing flyers were handed out, with grainy photos of their faces. There were no Q&A’s with the cast. Audiences were so convinced that the actors’ families received condolences and flowers from friends. The actors struggled to secure their next role.
It is these, the sort of across-the-board muddy ethics of directors and the film’s small marketing team, that I’m especially interested in. I’m in a constant navigation of whether or not I’m bothered by the effective employment of transmedia storytelling (or “guerilla advertising” as it’d be called in this context) when it’s primary purpose is my literal buy-in. I start to feel like I’m the target audience, not the people who get fooled, but those of us who get the stunt and think it’s fun. I love the original website that was created to market the film. It probably in some ways informed this site.
to add:
idk if it’s necessarily relevant but another transmedia element is that they aired a mockumentary Curse of the Blair Witch (which then also had additional narrative elements like newspaper articles and news reports) about the mythology of the film on the SciFi channel the summer the film came out.
the website is probably worth mentioning, which continues the narrative that the filmmakers are the cast, with no mention of the directors. the cultural moment the internet was at feels relevant here, too. (the site also uses hyperlinks in a way that in some way has probably informed what i’m doing here-there’s a lot of content that’s not accessible through the menu, but through links within the site’s text)
the last scene of the blair witch project is one of my favorite movie moments but overall i think i’m way more interested in everything around the film, like the film itself wouldn’t be as exciting to me if it weren’t made and marketed the way it was. like i love that stupid website, why????
where it sorta really tips into unnecessary elements for money-making for me: there was also a comic, a young adult book series, and a trilogy of video games (and the sequels?? which i haven’t seen)
should i mention that while it’s usually credited for popularizing the genre, there was precedent for it in the horror genre at the time (particularly Cannibal Holocaust, which has way more explicit ethical issues around the way it was filmed, and maybe is a can of worms i don’t want to open? even though the whole murder charge thing is wild) maybe something about how cannibal holocaust employs a lot of the same tactics as the blair witch project but couldn’t become culturally popular in the same ways not only bc of how graphic it was (and the increased unethical filming situations) but because it’s actually pushing against something. convincing you that it’s real had a purpose beyond just being a marketing tactic
“Sight Unseen” by Spencer Williams in Joe Vallese’s It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror : the importance of the blair witch’s “nonpresence” in the film, that she is “at once omnipresent and undetectable” (198) how this relates to the eerie and to the structures of our culture (sort of over-talked-about through the lens of the panopticon), and the way Williams uses their lens as a trans person to (re?)claim that nonpresence as a space of power and potentiality.
“It is only when the performance fails——when control ceases——that the work becomes interesting” (200) (as related to Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism value of nonperformance/refusal)
“…it’s the footage that survives … where a body once was, an apparatus remains” (197) (re: tech and the body)