FAQ

No, not really. The effect created by The Blair Witch Project can be attributed to the fact that when it was originally shown in theaters, it was unclear whether the story was real or not. Most of the audience, of course, assumed it was fake, but they did not know for sure and that added quite a bit to the suspense and tension. Now that we know it's just a fictional story, the movie loses a lot of its potency. It was also one of the first major "found footage" movies, which gave it an extra layer of feeling real.

Extremely popular. It had a budget of $60,000 and grossed over $140,000,000. It's the film that essentially launched the "found footage" genre.

In October of 1994, three film students—Heather Donahue (Heather Donahue), Mike Williams (Michael C. Williams), and Josh Leonard (Joshua Leonard)—equipped with a 16mm camera, a Super 8 camcorder, a DAT recorder, and some hiking gear, go into the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland to film a documentary about the legendary Blair Witch. The three are never seen again. A year later, their footage is uncovered. The recovered footage is made into a film in order to show what happened to them in the woods.

The Blair Witch Project is based on a screenplay co-written by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, who also co-directed the movie. The movie is shot in faux documentary style. It's this "recovered footage" that forms the basis of the film. A companion piece, Curse of the Blair Witch (1999), a 44-minute mockumentary about the Blair Witch, was released concurrently. Due to the success of The Blair Witch Project, it was followed by two sequels, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000) and Blair Witch (2016). The film genre which these films popularized has come to be known as "found footage".

Before the students go searching for the Blair Witch, they interview some of the Birkettsville residents to get a perspective on the legend. The younger residents are rather blasé about the Witch, generally referring to her as a "ghost" or saying that the woods are "haunted" and they don't go there, but basically describing it as a myth or a story that their grandmothers used to tell them to get them to go to bed, i.e., if you walk around the house too much at night, the Blair Witch will come and get you. However, the old-timers are more forthcoming, describing piles of rocks, bundles of sticks, disembowelments, and a hermit named Rustin Parr who lived in a cabin and killed seven children during the 1940s by luring them in twos into his basement where he would make one child stand in the corner while he killed the other after which he killed the second child. In the companion mockumentary, Curse of the Blair Witch (1999), directors Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick attribute the Witch's origin to the ghost of Elly Kedward who, in the late 18th century, was accused of luring several children into her home to draw blood from them. Found guilty of witchcraft, Kedward was banished from the village during a harsh winter, generally sentencing her to death by exposure. By midwinter, all of Kedward's accusers and half of the town's children vanish, and the residents vow to never speak her name again.

Deer, locals, the Blair Witch herself? It's really unclear. But if the continuity of the Blair Witch videogames applies, it could have been a number of objects or persons under control of the Blair Witch and other forces, like animals. In actuality, the directors and crew were the ones making the noises to simulate the supposed Blair Witch.

Through the expository dialogue at the start of the film, it is assumed to be the house of Rustin Parr, the Burkittsville child murderer who claimed to be under the influence of the Blair Witch. This "fact" is supported in both the film's sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), and D.A. Stern's companion book, The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier. However, according to the backstory outside of what is mentioned within the film, following the execution of Rustin Parr his house was burnt to the ground by irate Burkittsville citizens. So how then did Mike and Heather find it near the end of the movie if it had been destroyed over fifty years earlier? Like most of the questions in the film there are no solid answers. A widely accepted theory is that Mike, Josh and Heather somehow got trapped or taken back in time by the Blair Witch (or a similar supernatural being), which explains how the house appears to still exist and why they can't get out of the woods. Apparent confirmation appears in the videogame Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr (2000); in 1941, after the destruction of the Parr house, it is revealed that the Black Hills possesses supernatural powers that manages to distort time, briefly sending the main character back in time to the still standing Parr house, where ghostly visions of Mike and Heather being killed in the basement are seen, suggesting that Parr killed them. Whether or not the Rustin Parr Volume should be considered to be in line with the mythological arc of the Blair Witch franchise is both open to viewer interpretation and further study.

The legend of the Blair Witch is fiction although this is something that not even the actors knew when they were making the movie. This was to help get realistic reactions out of them when they were filming. Some claim that the Blair Witch story was inspired by the legend of the Tennessee Bell Witch, but the stories have little in common. Some Marylanders have noted similarities between the Blair Witch story and a real legend around a witch named Moll Dyer who lived and died in Leonardtown, MD, and who supposedly cursed the area. However, it is unknown whether the Blair Witch was truly based on the Dyer legend or just coincidence.

Yes. The videogames reveal that an evil force recognized by the Native Americans as "Hecaitomix" inhabited the hills and forest long before civilization grew there and helped to influence Elly Kedward as she lived out there. In the movie, it is possible that animals, stickmen and various creatures could have done the foul play against the main characters. It is also suggested in the videogames that, when Heather toys with the talismans, she could have opened a time warp back to when Rustin Parr was still killing, resulting in the characters stumbling into the house and possibly meeting their deaths and never being found.

Burkittsville is a real town, but it was never called Blair. Other locations given in the film and its mythology—Coffin Rock, Tappy Creek, the "Black Hills" region of Maryland—are completely fictitious. The forest scenes were not even filmed near Burkittsville; in the movie, the forests are all on flat land, while the only forested areas near the real Burkittsville are on a sloping mountainside. The forest scenes were mostly shot in Seneca Creek State Park near Gaithersburg, Maryland. The house used in the film's final scenes was in Patapsco Valley State Park near Ellicott City, Maryland; it has since been demolished.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) is a good example of found footage mockumentary in which a fictitious story is presented as a documentary based on lost or recovered film footage and was probably the most recent movie that led to the popularity of mockumentaries. Following The Blair Witch Project, we've seen Paranormal Activity (2007), REC (2007), Cloverfield (2008), The Last Exorcism (2010), Troll Hunter (2010), Grave Encounters (2011), V/H/S (2012), and Supernatural Activity (2012). If you'd like to see found footage movies released before The Blair Witch Project, look into Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Last Broadcast (1998). Some non-spooky found footage pictures that deal with man's inhumanity to man are Zero Day (2002), Snow on tha Bluff (2011), The Dirties (2013), and Mockingbird (2014).