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The Blair Witch Project
I am off on the Tom Tick at the moment so I took the opportunity to watch this on Netflix as Mrs finbaar has an aversion to scary stuff. She needn't have worried as there were no scary bits at all. I am disappointed. I can't imagine how it got so much hype.
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I don't know of anyone who believed it was genuine found footage, there was so much hype about it!
I saw it at the flicks on release day, this was after seeing the also 'supposedly real' documentary about the backstory of the students and Blair Witch myth which is worth watching in terms of fleshing out the story.
At the time it was a different (though certainly not new) way of doing things. The most weird/messed up bit that myself and friends found was the ending which left us thinking WTF?! Other folk in the cinema were screaming.
The film is pretty basic but it was hype and viewers who made it out to be much more than it ever was.
The Last Broadcast is a very similar film which came out around the same time, had more structure to it and some would argue is a better film but it lacked the hype and so is often overlooked.
I agree. Like MANY movies that were utterly terrifying when they were released...
Standards/quality/expectation of movies goes up each time the bar is raised.
It certainly was a game-changer!
There were 'found footage', hand held camera-type films in the 70s and 80s, possibly even earlier, some even got banned. It's nothing new.
The fact that HD cameras are now practically hand-held has done more for the industry than Blair Witch did.
All that happened, because of how much money BW made, was that we got a spike of clones and a couple of sequels.
At the time I must've read dozens of articles about how cleverly the whole thing had been conceived. It was noticeable how very little focus was put on the most important issue - was it any cop? Make of this what you will.
But it certainly did the trick. 'P. T. Barnum would be proud', noted a sage Sight and Sound.
I don't think anyone except the truly gullible thought that. It was more that they had 'blurred the lines' between reality and film-making. Cue a million, plodding media studies essays on how revolutionary this all was (i.e. it wasn't).
Not as much all the hyperventilating trendies would have you believe. We got a sub-genre, and set in motion a mode of film-making that swiftly showed its limitations, that's all.
No it didn't. All that had been done before.
Admittedly, as Johnny Clay commented, it did make very good use of internet marketing but everything else was treading old ground. It was new for folk who had never experienced that kind of thing before, though, sure.
Not for me, I nearly shat myself!!
3 snotty teenagers arguing in a wood.
yeh me too lol, i remember i was 14 and started grabbing my mates arm every time it got tense and scary
it was......awkward.
Besides, it was the technique-as-effect aspect that was the whole selling point of Blair Witch, rather than the subject. Given that horror has always traded on how effective it is (and at times regardless of subject), this was a sly move.
That is the point I was trying to make, joe public is not going to be an obscure horror fan and their knowledge of horror before was limited to Freddy Kruger, Night Of The Living Dead, Halloween, Friday 13th, Amityville, Evil Dead, Exorcist and things of that nature...nothing against those films, they were legendary but it took the Blair Witch project to be the first film they experienced to blur the line between reality and fiction and introduce them to a new kind of atmospheric cerebral horror.
I'll give you that it woke people up to 'found footage' films but cerebral horror? Cat People, 1942, massive for the time. Never heard of Rosemary's Baby? 1968 and also massive. The Wicker Man? 1973 version, that is... also huge...
Cerebral/psychological horror rather than cheap thrills horror has been going for a long, long time...
There was a similar film released a year before The Blair Witch called The Last Broadcast.
Good novel idea at the time, but I would never watch it again, ever.
And The Last Broadcast may have been similar and earlier but it's not a patch on The Blair Witch Project. I think the structure of it does more harm than good because there's always someone yapping all over the footage. Plus the ending is ludicrous.
Blair Witch now looks more curate's egg than jewel in the crown, and perhaps this is why. It's reputation seems to have stemmed from the shaky-cam technique it introduced to the mainstream, rather than the effect that technique achieved. It's all subjective of course. Some watched through their fingers, while some of us sucked a tooth and thought of money up in smoke. Same as with any other horror.
The historical point is that Blair Witch was the first movie to make a major successful use of the cross media possibilities provided by the web. That's not just a PR thing, the website filled out many aspects of the story in a highly creative way. The Blair Witch sound track is also a great example of atmospheric sound design which is often overlooked.
Easy to forget the internet was still a mystery to many back then, but it could be used as a launchpad to gain more established media interest. As I said, it was a period in which the rest of the media were looking at the internet with great interest with regards to what it was truly capable of as a public/media interface. Blair Witch certainly made its mark there.
Blair Witch is one of the biggest grossing independent movies of all time so it had a big number of viewers. Many might have been internet geeks who otherwise might have missed it.
As an indie film it showed at Sundance but had to use the internet as a marketing device, i.e. there wasn't much of an alternative. The historical bit is that the marketing via the web is unlikely to be as successful again.
The other important role of the website was the use of the 'found footage' which was a precursor to what we now describe as 'user generated content'.
Is it a scary movie? I think the soundtrack makes it scary along with the strategic use of some stick men props and a sudden, uncertain ending!