Scary Facts About The Blair Witch Project That Will Make Your Camera Shake

There are horror movies that make you feel old. 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” is a prime example. This movie, considered one of the most successful horror films of all time, revived the Found Footage subgenre so that some people (mistakenly!) define it as the first Found Footage film ever made. It featured a great marketing campaign with minimal expense and minimal production and filming process. Many Found Footage films followed it until, eventually, the formula seemed to have become a cliché, and in recent years, we have seen fewer and fewer films of this type.

Twenty-five years have passed since “The Blair Witch Project” hit the screens and stunned the world. After two mediocre sequels (actually, the sequel “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” and then “Blair Witch,” a direct sequel to the first that ignores the previous sequel), and before the production company “Blumhouse” would present its remake of the horror hit, we have collected for you 15 interesting, strange or scary facts about the story, the unique production process and the effects of the film.

What Is The Blair Witch Project About?

If you haven’t seen “The Blair Witch Project” in the 25 years since its release, here’s a quick recap of the events. We follow a film student named Heather, played by Heather Donahue (all the characters in the film were named after the actors to create the feeling that it was a true story). Heather is interested in making a documentary about mysterious urban legends surrounding the town she lives in: Brickettsville, Maryland (known as Blair) – and, in this case, the legend of the Blair Witch.

Heather heads out into the woods with her friend Josh (Joshua Leonard), who is supposed to be the film’s cinematographer, and he brings his friend Mike (Mike C. Williams) to handle the sound. Very soon, strange things start happening in the forest, like signs the guys find, unintelligible voices of children, and even someone or something attacking their tent. All this leads up to the film’s final scene, where we see the last thing one of the characters saw before something horrible happened.

Here is the trailer of “The Blair Witch Project”:

The Production That Got Complex

According to reports, “The Blair Witch Project” was shot in just eight days, which probably explains the film’s minimal budget. The plan was to shoot the movie for seven days, but on the last day, the camera battery died, so the crew needed an extra day of shooting.

On the other hand, the editing and post-production process was much longer and took an estimated eight months. The original edit of the film was about 150 minutes long. Ultimately, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez decided to leave most of the material on the editing room floor, so we left with 81 minutes.

The Blair Witch Project Broke The Box Office, And A Guinness World Record

“The Blair Witch Project” is one of the most successful films ever. The main reason is its budget is ridiculously low: the film was shot on a super tiny budget of about $60,000, which comes to about $250,000-300,000 if you add the post-production process and marketing. The filmmakers tried to cut costs, returning one of the cameras to the store after filming to get a refund or selling another camera used in the film on eBay for something like $10,000.

“The Blair Witch Project” was an incredible success at the box office. It grossed more than $248 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. The meaning is – in a simple calculation that people did because I have trouble with even simple calculations – that for every dollar spent on filming, the film returned almost $11,000.

When the film was released, it broke the Guinness World Record and was considered the film with the most enormous gap between its budget and its box office achievements. In 2007, “Paranormal Activity” came along and took that title from it, with about $193,000 in grossings compared to a budget of only $15,000. The film also held the title of the most profitable independent film until “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” overtook it in 2002.

This Is Not (!) The First Found Footage Film

Now, a little challenge: try to define found footage films without using a sentence like “Yeah, you know. Films like “The Blair Witch Project”.

Found Footage is a subgenre of films in which the plot is presented as raw video footage, which the characters or those involved in the film shoot, ostensibly to create a feeling that these are authentic shots. In practice, some of these films have become clichéd over time and even difficult to watch, for example, with the shaky camera, which mainly causes pain and makes you want to kill yourself.

Although “The Blair Witch Project” revived the Found Footage subgenre, mainly thanks to its huge success, many films of this type existed before. Ruggero Deodato’s scandalous 1980 “Cannibal Holocaust” is widely considered the first Found Footage film, although a relatively unknown 1961 film called “The Connection” was probably the first to use the technique.

Most Of The Film Was Improvised

“The Blair Witch Project” started with a script, but it was minimal. The actors got only 35 pages, which described the legend of the Blair Witch in a rather general way. Such a short “script” is insufficient to fill a film’s running time of about 80 minutes.

The cast improvised many of the dialogues and events in the film. The scenes took place mainly at the production staff’s initiative, without the actors’ knowledge, to maintain tension and horror.

There Was Not Supposed To Be A Girl In The Film

The original plan of the creators was that “The Blair Witch Project” would star three men. However, among the test subjects were also women, and Heather Donahue impressed the creators so much that they decided to give her a place. They gave her the role of the lead filmmaker in the film while the other men served as her assistants.

The actors themselves may not have trusted each other. At least, if we are to believe the reports that Heather Donahue arrived on set with a knife because she was afraid to sleep in the same tent with two men she didn’t know (and come on, these actors are not known).

The Blair Witch Project Actors Were Scared To Death

According to legend, the production staff sometimes scared the actors, so their fearful reactions in some parts of the movie seem authentic. The three main actors had to sign a release form at the beginning of filming, essentially allowing the producers to “mess with their heads.”

The actors were unaware of a few scenes in the film, such as the tent shaking after about 45 minutes, which did not appear in the film’s minimal “script.” One of the production staff shook the tent without informing the actors, of course.

In the scene where Heather shouts in panic: “What the hell is that?” she is actually reacting to the sight of the film’s art director, Ricardo Moreno, running around the set with white tights on his head. According to other stories, in this scene, we were supposed to see the Blair Witch for the only time in the film, running in the background. Unfortunately, the cameraman forgot to move his camera.

In another scene, the production crew broke and threw trees to give us the cracking noises we hear in the forest.

The Blair Witch Project Actors Got Traume

Some voices in the background were pre-recorded, especially the children outside the tent. These voices were actually recordings of children playing inside the director’s mother’s house. Actor Michael C. Williams later claimed that these children’s voices scared him the most during filming. Heather Donahue said that the final scene made her hyperventilate and cry, and she had difficulty recovering even after filming.

In the final scene, we hear Josh’s screams before that terrible end. These screams were pre-recorded and played loudly through speakers that the production hid in the forest.

The Actors Ate Less And Less

In general, “The Blair Witch Project” producers tried to take the actors to the edge. This is not physical or even scandalous abuse like Shelley Duvall in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” to take a very extreme example. However, it is said that the amount of food the actors received each day of filming gradually decreased. The goal was to increase their feelings of distress and the tensions between them.

And speaking of food, the actors were asked to stay in character for the entire eight days of filming. If a particular actor felt the need to go out of character, he could only do so if the other two actors also went out of character. For this to happen, all three main actors had to say the word “Taco.”

The Actors Filmed Most Scenes Themselves (And You Can See It)

The main actors filmed almost all the shots you see in the film. They were given a two-day crash course in photography and tried to cope with the camera. In some cases, it worked, but in others, it did not. Joshua Leonard, for example, had difficulty handling his 16mm camera, especially in the early days of filming. That’s why the interview he conducted with one of the interviewees in the town was clearly out of focus, with the frame grainy and not very high quality.

Is The Blair Witch Project Real? No, But The Marketing Was Awesome!

Today, we know that Found Footage films only pretend to be accurate, so the manipulation is evident to the average horror viewer. When “The Blair Witch Project” came out, on the other hand, it confused a great many viewers. In the run-up to the film’s release, a website was launched, which included excerpts from Heather’s diary.

A brilliant marketing campaign presented the film as a documentary and the actors as real missing persons, including the caption at the film’s beginning. Some viewers remained seated after the terrifying final scene because they didn’t realize the film was over. Even the fact that a caption appears at the end of the film that actually says that the story is one significant invention wasn’t enough for them.

The mother of Actress Heather Donahue said that years after the film was released, she received letters and messages of sympathy expressing her grief over the “disappearance” or even the death of her daughter.

The Legend Of The Blair Witch Wasn’t Real Too

Some horror films are based on a particular legend or myth. “The Blair Witch Project” is not like that because there is no legend about a witch in the woods who kidnaps people or puts them against a wall. On the other hand, the actors believed this legend existed, explaining the reactions that seem authentic to some scenes. They knew, of course, that they were filming a film that was not authentic, but thought that the legend behind it was true.

When the characters interviewed the townspeople about the legend (they were, of course, unprofessional “actors,)” one of them made up the story of the Blair Witch on the spot. The directors tried to track her down afterward to get her to sign a release form but were unsuccessful.

The Blair Witch Project Theory That Went Viral

One of the most effective points in the film is that we never see the witch at any point. The absence of the witch is effective because the viewer can imagine who that witch is, and it tends to be scarier than a low-budget witch. One can imagine if she is an old, decrepit witch, as we’ve come to know her, or is she some kind of sexy witch who seduces the hormone-laden men to kill them.

The critical point is that as long as we don’t see the witch, we might think that she doesn’t exist, which means that there are no supernatural events here and that there may be other killers.

Over the years, many fans and experts have tried to analyze the film, including some that have taken its reasonably simple but unclear plot in other directions. The most common theory is explained in a video from The Film Theories, which spends over 17 minutes explaining – quite impressively, to be honest – why there’s no witch here. According to this theory, based on clues from the film, Heather’s diary, and more, the two guys conspired together to murder Heather and present the death as related to the urban legend.

This video got into YouTube in 2016 and has received about 13 million views on YouTube. You are welcome to watch all the clues that these serious guys have collected and decide for yourself:

The Crew Had Navigation Problems

One of the scariest elements of “The Blair Witch Project” is that at some point, the actors lose their orientation in the spooky forest. The truth is, it happened. The actors were equipped with GPS devices (remember, we’re talking about 1999, not the current era when every phone has a built-in GPS) and walkie-talkies to contact the production in case of emergencies.

Despite this, the actors got lost in the woods at least three times, including in one of the scenes where the characters got lost in the woods. In the scene where they get stressed out because they’ve been walking in the woods all day and still end up in the same place, that’s what happened to the actors, according to the report.

The Blair Witch Project Wasn’t the Movie’s First Title

The film’s original title was “The Black Hills Project,” after the Black Hills Forest in Maryland, where the film takes place. The filmmakers then changed the name to “The Blair Witch Tapes” and later “The Blair Witch Project.”

But what is “Blair” anyway? Well, it’s not a real place. The place’s name reportedly refers to Blair High School, where the sister of director Eduardo Sanchez once attended.

Many Viewers Vomited (But Not From Disgust)

You know those stories, usually fictional, about a particular movie being so gross and scary that it makes viewers faint, leave the screening in a panic, commit suicide, or turn into colorful unicorns? So there were stories like this around “The Blair Witch Project,” but for different reasons.

Many viewers had difficulty dealing with the shaky camera and footage; some say they felt nauseous or vomited. According to reports, in some Toronto movie theaters, the ushers asked viewers who were seasick to sit at the edges of the theatre and, in general – to be careful not to vomit on other people because this is disgusting.

Heather Donahue Retired From Acting And Started Growing Marijuana (Medically!)

Heather Donahue came out with severe trauma from filming. After the film, she got harassed by some viewers. She and the other actors were instructed not to appear on television shows or in films out of the desire of the creators to continue presenting what happened in the film as a factual event. The production wanted people to think they were missing persons and printed flyers.

In retrospect, Donahue had difficulty dealing with the situation and later regretted the film. She failed to make a living from acting, partly because they wanted to cast her in a typecast reminiscent of her character in “The Blair Witch Project.”

In 2008, Donahue decided to retire from acting. She turned to a completely different field of play, growing medical marijuana, and even launched skin care products. The request by the creators of the 2016 sequel “The Blair Witch Project” to use her name and character brought back the trauma, she says, and she felt that “her name and face are someone else’s intellectual property.” In 2020, she changed her name to Ray Hance.

The Blair Witch Project Hurts Hunters

It is said that the hunting season in the late 1990s in the forests of the United States was particularly weak, and “The Blair Witch Project” may have been to blame. Hordes of young people and aspiring filmmakers have come to the forests, hoping to film their version of a Found Footage film that will, hopefully, be as successful as the film that influenced them.

When they were in the forest, filming horror tropes and looking for strange things, the animals were frightened and sought shelter. The ones who were affected by this, you guessed it, were mainly the hunters – and that’s a good thing.