Made 25 years ago for $35,000, 'The Blair Witch Project' earned $248 million and changed horror movies for decades to come.
After The Blair Witch Project made $248 million on a $35,000 budget, studios rushed to create the next found footage sensation. Now, at the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary, there’s much less in the way of direct formal imitation. But the movie’s triumphant demonstration that shoestring horror films can lead to big paydays, and its grungy willingness to show without ever explaining, has continued to inspire. The Blair Witch Project remains important for its gimmick, for its business model, for its craftsmanship, and for its audacity.
Directors Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s high concept was to create a movie about the creation of a movie. The film is supposedly composed of footage discovered in the Maryland woods, shot by three would-be filmmakers creating a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch. In glimpses from their own cameras, you see the three actors—Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard—wander into the woods and get more and more lost, and more and more angry with each other.
And then you see them slowly realize they’re not the only things out there. The movie’s most iconic scene is a so-close-you’re-up-her-nose selfie video shot of director Heather, apologizing to her colleague’s mothers in a trembling, weepy panic attack. “And this is where we’ve ended up and it’s all because of me that we’re here now—hungry, cold, and hunted,” she gasps, in terror and self-recrimination. It’s great (meta-) cinema.
The Blair Witch Project has many obvious predecessors. The shaky-cam horror in the woods conceit owes a debt to Sam Rami’s first Evil Dead film. Deliverance is mentioned explicitly in the film itself. The discovered document trope goes back at least to that famous epistolary novel, Frankenstein. And the irritating-kids-get-murdered-one-by-one is of course a slasher staple.
But in embracing the micro-budget and the meta-narrative of gritty filmmaking, The Blair Witch Project created something new and extraordinary: a horror film virtually devoid of effects, mostly made up of three actors wandering around in the woods and shouting, which manages to be imaginative, suspenseful, and terrifying precisely because of how little you can see even when the cameras are on.
Hollywood and horror are both eager to chase the latest profitable trend, and The Blair Witch project had many, many imitators. Of course, there was a sequel (Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2) organized just about as quickly as the studio (Artisan) could hire a van to ship people off to a nearby woods.
But there were also a range of efforts to tweak found footage for slightly different narratives and subgenres. Lake Mungo (2008) is a haunted house film; Cloverfield (2008) was a found footage monster film; Trollhunter (2010) was mockumentary; V/H/S (2012) was a found footage anthology film. Chronicle (2012) was—of all things—a found footage superhero film.
Blair Witch didn’t just inspire individual films, though; it inspired entire business models. Blumhouse was founded in 2000, but it didn’t really become the studio we know today until 2007’s Paranormal Activity—a movie that adapted found footage to a story of demonic possession. Director Oren Peli shot the feature for $15,000—less than half of Blair Witch’s budget. Even with studio tweaks that cost $200,000, it far outgrossed its budget, drawing in $194 million and launching a hugely successful franchise.
Blumhouse returned to the found footage genre multiple times, with a range of variations. Creep (2014) is arty psychological horror; Unfriended (2014) is a screenlife horror film—a found footage variation in which all the action is shown entirely on a computer-screen group chat. But more important was the fact that Paranormal Activity established Blumhouse’s direction as a horror studio capitalizing on hot trends and exploitation concepts to create low budget hits.
Admittedly, and inevitably given the nature of the business model, a good number of Blumhouse films were utterly forgettable garbage (Truth or Dare—we shall not speak thy name.) But there have also been aesthetic and commercial successes. The Purge series has become one of the go-to cultural touchstones for discussing American Christofascism. And Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is arguably the most important horror film of the last decade at least. The recent renaissance in Black horror, across multiple mediums, might not have happened at all, and certainly wouldn’t have happened in the way it has, without Blumhouse. And Blumhouse wouldn’t be the studio it is without The Blair Witch Project.
The Blair Witch Project’s influence on the other big indie horror studio, A24, has been less obvious. But it’s there. One of A24’s early successful horror films, Robert Eggers’ The Witch, features mysterious woods and witches who are frightening in part because you don’t see much of them. Films like Talk To Me (2022) and Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) are both low budget movies about young people making a series of bad decisions which end…well, badly.
Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies is especially interesting to think of in light of Blair Witch’s legacy. It’s not a found footage movie, but its final gut-punch plot twist hinges on the protagonist’s finding gruesome video footage. The movie is about how a bunch of rich kids destroy each other because they’re too knowledgeable about horror tropes; they scare themselves to death. Including video footage as a plot point echoes Blair Witch, which is also about how being horror-film fans can be a risky proposition (especially if you happen to be in a horror movie.)
Found footage horror films still get made; it’s an established subgenre with its own niche fans. Blumhouse recently announced it’s planning a Blair Witch remake (without the participation of the original cast, who, unforgivably, did not benefit from the film’s massive financial success). More important than these direct homages, though, is that The Blair Witch Project’s approach, business plans, themes, and look have over the last quarter century become inseparable from the horror genre itself. Like the witch herself, you don’t have to see the film’s influence directly to know it’s there, just out of sight, ready to pounce.
