By Zach Goldberg
“In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary… A year later their footage was found.”
This is the first thing I remember. Before even seeing the film, this little line of synopsis was seared into my mind. The Blair Witch Project was a strange, foreign concept to me at the age of 11 in July 1999, dropped into a year that had already featured The Matrix, Phantom Menace, the second Austin Powers movie, South Park, and American Pie.
But I was already terrified.
That summer of 1999 was, for me at least, the last summer of childhood innocence. Teenage years were approaching. And I’m sure seeing the adventures of Jim and friends in American Pie jump-started some latent hormonal feelings. But it’s more than that and, strangely, I’ve always considered The Blair Witch Project a peculiar part of this transition.
The turn of the century was curious period. The 90’s were a time of (relative) peace. The economy was strong. People were, for the most part, content. Happy. Complacent. Everything appeared in its right place.
Of course, that’s never truly the case, is it? Hell, the decade began with Kurt screaming, “Here we are now. Entertain us!” It was a rallying call for Generation X, unsure of what to believe in… or if they should even care.
That lingered and bubbled underneath as the decade progressed. We consumed. We shopped at The Gap. In Fight Club(also released in 1999) Tyler Durden laments, “We’re the middle children of history, man. No prupose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression.. Our Great War is a spiritual war.. our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that onde day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
When the explosion came, it dumped its guts and (lack of) glory into my generation—the #selfie-involved Millennial generation
Blair Waitch came out not three months after the school shootings at Columbine. As anyone my age can attest, that day in April changed everything for our generation. Because if we couldn’t feel safe in school, if our fellow classmates became so desperate and despondent that they acted out in horrific violence, where could we feel safe?
Here’s what the pundits got wrong back then and it’s what they continue to get wrong now. These acts of violent do not occur because of violent movies or violent music. The art is simply reflecting back what already exists—sometimes bringing to light what we’re not ready to discuss. Art is a reflection of culture and society. In 1999, we were beginning to see the seams come loose. And they would fully be torn apart when we entered into the first decade of the new Millennium.
Alongside this, we have the advent of the Internet as we know it today. Yes, our dial-up modems were still singing their lovely tune back in 1999, but we had already become fully indoctrinated. There was no turning back. We could search for anything and everything. Be connected to anyone and everyone.
As a kid, there was something alluring and dangerous about the web back then. It was uncharted territory. What were we going to find on this thing? Who else is out there? Looking back, those days feel like the Wild West to me.
Enter The Blair Witch Project.
I remember seeing the poster at my local movie theater. I remember reading that promotional line. I remember thinking, “There’s no way this is real… but what if it is?”
My friends and I were abuzz about it, quickly realizing there was a website that tied into the movie. And the website perpetuated the idea that not only was the content of the film real, but there was a much larger, centuries old, backstory at play. And before the release of the film, there was a documentary premiering on television, providing further context.
For a glorious couple of weeks, there was the distinct possibility that this was terrifyingly real. The film was released on July 30, 1999. It cost a little under $1M and ended up doing $248M at the box office worldwide. This was unheard of.
15 years later, with the glut of found-footage movies, it might be difficult to understand just how impactful The Blair Witch Project was. It revolutionized and popularized an entire genre. It went “viral” before it was even a catchphrase in our known lexicon. And it was a harbinger of the world to come in the decade to follow.
Because if the 90’s belonged to Gen-X, the augts belonged to Gen-Y. And we weren’t screaming, “Here we are now. Entertain us!” We could do the entertaining ourselves.
The Blair Witch Project was the first massively popular film in which the audience did not just watch, it actively participated. We were a part of the experience. We looked for clues online and shared theories with friends. The found footage featured in the film? That could be taken from any one of us. We all have home-movie cameras. We all shoot things.
The lines between media and reality were becoming blurred. Reaching back to Columbine, do you remember our first glimpse of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? A school security camera in the cafeteria captured the pair towards the end of the massacre. It’s found footage in a way, isn’t it?
1999 marked the beginning of the end of childhood for me. No, The Blair Witch Project, wasn’t actually real. It was simply a tremendously made piece of filmmaking. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t actual monsters in the woods.
Towards the end of the film, Heather Donahue turns the camera towards her face. She is crying, coming to terms with the fact that she probably won’t make it out of the woods alive. She apologizes repeatedly, first to her fellow filmmakers, and then to their families. A little later, they hear the cries of their friend who had disappeared earlier, only to stumble upon a creepy, abandoned house. They run inside, hoping to find him, cameras still rolling. Their lives are in jeopardy, but they keep filming.
And the camera still records even after Heather releases her final scream.
That, to me, is the legacy of The Blair Witch Project, 15 years later. A generation raised in the shadow of Columbine, 9/11, and the Iraq War took our cameras… and instead of pointing them outwards, we turned them towards ourselves. We invented Facebook. And Instagram. And Snapchat. We took selfies and continually released our own little found-footage pieces online for people to discover and engage with.
The world was going to hell around us. We couldn’t control it. Couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t make sense of it. It was all too tangible and abstract at the same time. Reality and fiction began to blend together (hello reality television and the boom of found-footage movies).
We escaped into our own self-constructed worlds.
In July 1999 The Blair Witch Project was released to enormous box-office success. 15 years later we live in its afterglow. A video goes viral every other day.
Like the characters in The Blair Witch Project we kept filming, but filming what?
I guess it’s up to us to decide what that is and whether or not that’s a good thing.
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