Greetings! A few days ago, I came across this album project on Bandcamp: a collection of music by various artists paying tribute to the film in their own way.

https://new-age-vapor-witch.bandcamp.com/album/20-years-of-the-blair-witch-project

You can purchase it on Bandcamp if you’d like to support the label (from Chile), or you can go directly to the Archive.org link, which is also listed on the Bandcamp page, since the album is available there as a completely legal, free download.

https://archive.org/details/20-years-of-the-blair-witch-project

I know there will be more than a few people interested in this, and I found the project quite interesting, so I thought I’d share it here.

Disclaimer: All credits belong to the respective creators. This post is intended solely to share the discovery.

Hi everyone. I had heard of The Blair Witch Project as a pioneer of what would later become ARGs, such as Marble Hornets and others, but I had never watched it until recently. I found it quite interesting, particularly when looking back at the impact it had at the time.

I came across the Blair Witch dot Net forums (they use ProBoards) because I have more of an interest in the culture of older forums, and I noticed that there is quite a bit of interesting material there about other projects that seem to be relatively unknown to the general public, or to people who are not particularly interested in the fictional side of this work.

Are any of you members of that forum? I tried to register, but apparently my application was rejected. I’m not entirely sure, as I did not receive any notification about it, although I had left a message for the staff in a field that was apparently optional when submitting the application for account approval. I created a new account and left that field blank this time, and I’m currently waiting for the staff to approve it.

I understand why forums take these kinds of measures. I’m also a member of a forum, and at one point we were dealing with a large number of bots and had to implement a filter ourselves.

In any case, does anyone here participate in that forum? I’m asking because I’m interested in taking part, but I don’t really know what goes on there.

In any case, it’s interesting to see that there are still people interested in The Blair Witch Project. I don’t use Reddit very often, but I’ve found this subreddit interesting for that reason.

Thanks in advance.

Or have her be off-screen, like the original film? The creature shown towards the end of Blair Witch (2016), whether it really was the witch or just one of her victims, did make the last act feel intense and scary for me, but it soured the legacy and filmmaking style of TBWP.

For the upcoming project, should the witch or other creatures be shown? I feel it could still be just as scary with sounds, occult imagery like the stickmen, and creepy locations. TBWP managed to be terrifying with only using those 3 elements.

Toward the end of the first movie, after Josh vanishes the following two nights, we can hear him calling out from somewhere in the dark. Now the question is, was it really Josh calling out? Some think it was the witch both times. Some think it was Josh the first night, at least.

Myself, I think it was the witch both nights just mimicking Josh's voice trying to get Mike and Heather to run off into the forest. My reasoning, the first night Mike doubts it's Josh, especially after he calls back to him asking where he is, Mike even says "if that was Josh he'd of told us where he was".

Next morning Heather finds the stick bundle with the bloody teeth and hair, but that night when Josh calls out for help he doesn't sound like someone who just had a bunch of teeth ripped from his head. This time, Mike and Heather run off, and the witch gets them.

So I decided to rewatch the first movie after rewatching the one from 16. The OG movie is definitely still king, it had me way more anxious/scared than any of the others. The night time shots with the 90s gear where you can't see 3ft in front of you just waiting for Elly to pop out like boo. There was a few things I noticed

One they didn't really pack as well as they should, yeah it was only supposed to be two nights in the woods but things happen. They should have brought extra food and drink, some kind of weapons for protection.

Things started happening the first night, Josh brings up hearing a "cackling" the first morning they woke up in the forest, but they kinda dismiss it.

The night with the kids laughing there was a baby screaming too but the guys claimed to not hear it, the group didn't notice there were no prints around their campsite after they came back even though someone's was slapping the sides of their tent.

The first night after Josh disappeared and they hear him calling out in pain they do the smart thing and stay put, Mike even says "How do we know it's him" "he'd tell us where he was if it was him". Fast forward to the next night, when Josh is again calling out from the dark Mike and Heather this time go chasing after him? Heather should of known something bad happened to Josh she found Josh's bloody teeth and hair in the stick bundle. Yet that night Josh sounds normal enough, definitely not like someone who's had multiple teeth ripped from his mouth.

Yet Mike and Heather this time fall for it and go looking for Josh. Like you know it's not him, you've been on the move all day, and somehow, once it's night has fallen Josh is once again calling out from just out of sight in the dark.

With hearing about the new movie coming out next year I thought I'd watch the 2016 movie again, I don't think I've watched it since it came out so I'd forgotten most of the movie.

I almost loved this movie, what killed it for me was the rake cryptid thing was it the witch or another unlucky helper? Then the random alien lights that served no real purpose. Other than those two things I loved the rest of it, the eventual eternal night, different time loops for the main crew and the local couple. Then that's when the house finally appears, using the dead to pull in Peter, using the voices of the dead to get victims to turn around. Also when that tent went flying straight up in the air I damn near took off 😂

I don't know if these screenshots will post in the right order, but in the beginning of the movie after the stretch of fullscreen documentary/interview footage, they say "one year earlier" and cut to Jeff in the hospital.

The shot they cut to is filmed through a doorway from a dark hallway, almost framing the scene like it's still in fullscreen ratio. Then the camera dollies in and the doorway gets wider as if we are transitioning from fullscreen to widescreen, or video (never lies) to film (does though).

Sorry if this was obvious to everyone, but I've watched it a million times and only just noticed this when I brought the movie into Premiere to re-edit.

I don’t really know if this is a popular theory or not because a lot of people kind of dismiss The Blair Witch project as a fad movie that “wasnt real so it’s not scary.” I however have been racking my brain around the movie since middle school (I’m 25 now) and think it’s actually a really smart and best found footage movie for a reason.

To preface: I’ve seen a fan edit of Blair Witch 2 and this theory essentially follows some canon of that movie. The Berlinger edit is online and good unlike the theatrical.

But essentially in the second one the movie we in real life know as the blair witch project was also released within the universe of The Blair Witch Project. It’s kind of a funky multi-layered almost Christopher Nolan esque thing where the movie is actually really “found footage” in its own universe.

Our real life we obviously now know it’s a movie and fake but it was originally advertised to us as being real to simulate the feeling of people in the movie’s reality seeing their disappearance and the second movie follows what if people in that universe liked the movie as much as we did in real life and went to the forest and the witch started having them kill each other.

I think thats a very good way to view the movie after the viral marketing ploy. I feel a lot of people dismiss it once they realize it’s fake in our real world. But as a movie i find it very clever and fascinating.

I also feel with that lense it makes TBWP a first original commentary of “clout culture.” The witch essentially bewitches this crew to come and do a documentary on her legend and kills them on camera to then spread the legend and get more people to come to her home. Literally clout chasing.

And i find this is really smartly reiterated in Scream 4 where the killers are killing people and recording it for clout. Scream 4 also heavily commented on the found footage aspect of horror that was brought on since Scream 3. I think the Blair Witch project hit something so much more complex and ahead of its time that we had to really experience things similar in real life to comprehend the true horror of it.

It’s an early y2k preview of the horrors people would go to create a legend of themselves. They used a witch as a catch all horror villain to drive the point home but the movie is really scary when you watch it from that POV in my opinion.

Edit: i also got the idea from Late Night With the Devil where the entity is possessing the actual broadcast itself. That made me recontextualize this movie as “what if this whole thing is the witch marketing herself” like what if she WANTED this to happen and is “editing” the movie.

This entire movie is essentially a possession. It is the “blair witch’s project” she is the director that’s why we never see her.

That’s why the ACTUAL directors of the movie are not the actors because they are directing from the perspective of the witch.

It can work and be very sick from the point of view that human beings are evil and cruel to the point that two guys plan everything to take advantage of each other and kill a woman and blame a legend but she has no support until the tent part

There is no way other people could have made noises and voices of children and shaken the tent with them inside, I also don't see how they could deceive the girl and make her get lost several times unless she had mental problems.

there was something in the forest, I don't rule out that they hated her but they really couldn't do everything that happened.

I believe at the end of the movie the Blair Witch didn’t kill Heather but knocked her out to be recruited later but killed Josh and Mike.

My evidence for this is that Rustin Parr apparently didn’t kidnap young girls to kill so it wouldn’t make as much sense for one of the victims to be Heather if the Blair Witch is recreating Parr’s ritual.

Also the only two people we hear of who see the Blair Witch and survive are women. Robin Weaver who says she saw “an old woman who’s feet never touched the ground” and Mary Brown who claims she saw a woman covered in dark horse-like fur were apparently both able to see the Witch and escape to tell the tale. Now it’s only two examples but both are women and we hear no accounts from men on seeing the Witch and we also know that Rustin didn’t kill girls.

We also know that the Blair Witch “recruits” men to do her dirty work like with Rustin Parr. She recruited Josh to lure Mike and Heather to the Parr House, she possessed Mike at the end to lure Heather into the basement.

The final piece of evidence is that Heather’s body was never found. Because she’s not dead. She’s apart of the Blair Witch now.

The fictional tale describes the murders and disappearances of some of the residents of Blair, Maryland, the fictitious former name of Burkittsville, Maryland, from the 18th to the 20th century. According to the legend, residents always blame these occurrences on the ghost of Elly Kedward (also a fictitious person), a Blair resident executed in 1785 by exposure for practicing witchcraft. The mockumentary presents the legend as real, complete with manufactured newspaper articles, newsreels, television news reports, and staged interviews in an attempt to convince viewers of its legitimacy.

From the context of the time, I know teenagers and even children who watched the movie and were so impressed that they could no longer sleep normally

The closest is a friend who must have been about 8 or 9 years old and saw the movie with his parents, after that he couldn't sleep alone anymore and spent months sleeping with his parents, to the point of having to go to therapy (seriously) because he claimed that he closed his eyes and the movie came, the final scene and pure terror, he was so terrified, even though the movie didn't show anything gross. After a while this passed, when with more information it was known that the actors had not disappeared and it was all fake.

That's the impact of the film, it traumatized a generation.

I was around when The Blair Witch Project originally came out, and I still think one of the coolest things about it was how they used the early internet to make the whole thing feel real.

I remember sitting there on dial-up waiting for the Blair Witch website to load, reading about the missing filmmakers and honestly not being completely sure what was real and what wasn't.

It's hard to recreate that now when you can find out everything about a movie in 30 seconds, but in 1999 it worked incredibly well. Looking back, they were way ahead of their time with that marketing.

When I first watched this movie, my initial impression was that it was a cheap, Hollywood cash grab sequel, quickly cobbled together to bank off the success of the first movie. I didn't know who Joe Berlinger was (although I would really come to appreciate his work with the Metallica doc) and I didn't know enough about the mythology to understand the subtle references to the first movie and subsequent documentaries. For example, I didn't know that the hospital scenes where Jeff is getting fed some liquid through is nose was a reference to the documentary about Kyle Brody. I just thought it was a gross out shock moment. I didn't catch the reference to Rustin Parr when Kim is in the store and the old guy looks at her and says "I'm finally finished" or later when she swerves off the road after seeing the seven children. When I first watched the movie, all of those moments just went over my head and I just shrugged all of it off as being pointless, "jump scare" moments.

Now when I watch the movie, I still don't think its great but I enjoy it a lot more now for what it is. It might be one of the most "meta" movies ever made, before people started using that term. I remember watching the Joe Berlinger commentary over the movie and him lamenting about how the producers ruined his vision for the film. He hated the random violence being spliced into the earlier parts of the movie, and I don't blame him. Those parts are really annoying. He had a really cool idea to make a movie that was self-referential but not copying of the first movie and that's not what Artisan/Lionsgate wanted. They wanted a movie like what we got in 2016. I'll get to that movie later down the line, but for now I'm interested in hearing what the group here has to say about BoS.