The Blair Witch (1999) Dir. Eduardo Sánchez & Daniel Myrick

The Blair Witch Project is one of those films that becomes divisive due to the amount of discussion around it. First off there’s the innovative marketing, which utilised the internet to convince moviegoers that what they were going to see was real.

While found footage certainly wasn’t new – in her talk at Paracinema, Sarah Appleton noted that The Last Broadcast used similar techniques to The Blair Witch Project the year before – this was the film that really caught the imagine of audiences, making it one of the profitable films of all time.

So, 25 years on, with a sequel, a reboot and now another film in the making, not to mention the seismic shifts we’ve seen in found footage from the likes of Paranormal Activity and Host, how does The Blair Witch Project hold up?

Like all films that rely on a single scare at the end, the power of this has been diminished. It’s also one of those rare films – a little like Host – that doesn’t benefit from being on the big screen. It makes it feel too official, too polished, whereas a home viewing adds to that idea that this is videotape footage made by people we could know.

Still, it’s hard to deny the ingenuity of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, or the performances of Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard. As the three budding documentarians head into the woods, their chemistry is clear from the off and the deterioration of their friendship as they find themselves deeper in the woods and haunted by the Blair Witch is realistically cut together – with each of them having moments of utter despair before rallying and trying to push the others forward.

That’s one of the real benefits of a rewatch of The Blair Witch Project, and a reason why it holds up better than Adam Wingard’s 2016 reboot. A rewatch allows us to appreciate the character moments. So much has been said in the last 25 years that we’re all aware that filming was essentially Myrick and Sánchez leading the cast to a location, not telling them anything and then psychologically torturing them throughout the night. This naturally creates a bond between the three leads that is very apparent on screen.

Another positive that can be missed on a first watch is the depth of the lore that was created before they even step into the woods. While the Blair Witch is the focus of the team’s documentary, the more disturbing aspects come from the stories of Rustin Parr – a child killer supposedly possessed by the mythical witch. This addition of a human, tangible threat to the team, and the disturbing way in which he killed his victims, gives the ending a huge amount of power – even if it’s lessened slightly by knowing what’s coming.

Finally, The Blair Witch Project trusts its audience. Not to pile onto Wingard’s reboot, which was a perfectly passable film, revealing the unworldly creature at the end of that destroys the mythos of the Blair Witch. Here Myrick and Sánchez give the audience just enough information to let them imagine something far worse than what could be produced on screen.

This is one of the main reasons why nothing has been able to reproduce the exact formula of The Blair Witch Project and why it remains so celebrated a quarter of a century later.

★★★★

4/5

Matthew Tilt

Twitter/X @Matthew_Tilt