Day Nine: The Blair Witch Project

I will be the first to admit that I totally got wrapped up in the hype of this movie leading up to its release. In my opinion this movie had some of the best marketing to ever accompany a movie. I think the biggest problem with this movie is the people that did not get into the web hype that built up before the movie was released in the theatres.



The thing is, the movie was presented to people as a real-life story of three documentarians that went off in the woods in search of footage of the Blair Witch of Burkittsville, Maryland. A web-site was launched way before the movie was released, to stir up interest in the movie. The web-site had "unedited" video content to show some incidents and interviews of people that came into contact at some point with the people making the documentary. The website also contained tons of information on the mythology of the Blair Witch, and the history of the "real-life" accounts and police reports that led to the mythology. I knew soooo many people that bought into the chance that this may be a true story. The only mistake that the movie-makers made, in my opinion, was to have the actors and actress playing the documentarians make an appearance on the David Letterman show a day or two before the movie released.



Sitting in the theatres on the first day it was released, I was surrounded by tons of people, more than half of which believed that this was a true story. I do not want to spend the time in this blog about how people actually believed this was a true story, but still think that was brilliant on the movie-makers part, to know that the population would believe that the story was real.



The movie on its own is only marginally good. It is just some kids walking around the woods getting into arguments and hearing noises at night. It played heavily on the hopes of the website building the premise and the mood, which worked during the initial theatre run of the movie. Watching this movie again, I began to get pulled into the original spectacle that was the Blair Witch. I can imagine that if someone did not get to experience the original website before the movie was released back in 1999, then the movie is probably pretty boring and even irritating up until the movie pick up around 45 minutes in.


I am pretty torn about this movie, mainly because I am now watching it almost ten years after it was released, and a lot of my feelings about this movie are related to that original experience leading up to the theatre release. The movie does play on your emotions. If you have ever been camping, then the thought of getting lost scares the hell out of you. If you have ever heard noises in the middle of the night while camping then you also know how scary that is. The movie on the surface is not very scary until the end, and each character does a pretty good job of being realistic in their meltdowns and paranoia. I find it hard to recommend this movie, unless you have already seen it in its originally intended context with the website supplement.


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