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| Heather Donahue in The Blair Witch Project |
Few horror films have ever had as much of an impact on audiences, both genre and mainstream, as The Blair Witch Project, the story of three young filmmakers lost in the woods who may or may not fall prey to something supernatural. 25 years on from its first screening, and with a limited edition coming out on Monday (11 November), I caught up with directors Eduárdo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick to ask them why they think it remains firmly rooted in the public consciousness.
“It's a mystery to us!” says Eduardo. “The movie became something that we didn't expect it to become. And you're right: it is crazy that after 25 years, people like you are still interested in talking to us about it. We feel really lucky that we've been a part of it. You know, there's a lot of collaborators that made this movie possible.
“As far as what makes the movie still resonate with some people, it's a mystery. Maybe it's the way that we shot it. It's very low-fi, you know, low tech. Maybe it's because of the being lost in the woods. I think all of us have, at one time or another, either gone through that or feared getting lost in the woods. I think it's something primal that we all share as human beings. But there's a lot of things that were very unique to the movie, and I think that, even 25 years later, people are discovering it again. A lot of people are showing it to their kids and there is this new age of fan that's coming up.”
There are two kinds of horror in it really, I suggest. There's a supernatural horror, but there is also that awareness of just how easily people can end up going off the map, losing where they are and potentially never finding their way out of the woods again.
Daniel nods. “Yeah. I think one of the tricks that Ed and I wanted to maintain in the movie was striking the balance between the supernatural potential of what was going on with the actors, with the characters, and could it be something more terrestrial? Could it just be, you know, rednecks out there messing around with them, or what have you? It plays on that same ambiguity that we grew up with shows like In Search Of, and UFOs and Bigfoot. Could it just be a bear or is it some quasi-intelligent being out there pursuing me? I think that has a real effect on viewers when they're not quite sure what's out there and if it’s supernatural.
“Those that believe in ghost stories let that part of their imagination run away with them. And those that think that it's just some psychopath or psychopaths out there messing with them, like The Strangers or something, they're just, you know, both are super scary. And the fact that you don't really come down on any one side, that we never came down on anyone's side with the movie, helped amplify the unsettled nature of the film. So yeah, I like thinking it could either be a supernatural presence or it could be something more terrestrial and sinister at play. I think it works both ways.”
I mention that I was recently talking to the director of Strange Harvest: Occult Murder In The Inland Empire, a film that's out on the festival circuit this year, and that he was saying that he thinks pseudo-documentaries are a really good way to tell horror stories because they ground the horror in something that people think of as normal, and that makes it much more shocking. Was that the perspective that they had when developing The Blair Witch Project?
“That's absolutely true,” says Eduardo. “I haven't seen that movie but Lake Mungo is a good horror documentary, really effective. And that's exactly what Dan and I were like setting out to do when we first came up with the idea for Blair Witch. We were huge fans of that show In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy, and particular movie called The Legend Of Boggy Creek, which is a weird pseudo-documentary with re-enactments. It's still, even to this day, very effective, and we just love the idea of it being laid out as fact, like this is really happening. We’ve got cameras down in these woods and this is what we're experiencing. I think it's a really effective way to scare people.
“Even the countless Bigfoot shows, reality shows and UFO investigation shows and ghosts and all that stuff, they're scary and they're effective, even though most of the time they don't show anything, because you're starting with the premise that this is real and we just have to find it. It's out there somewhere. We just have to discover it. And that's really compelling. That's why Bigfoot and UFOs and most supernatural stuff, the paranormal stuff, is still really popular to this day.”
Some of what we're seeing in the Blair Witch Project is real fear, because they didn't always tell the actors what was going to happen.
“Yeah, probably more aggravation than fear,” Daniel says, with a not unsympathetic laugh. “More exhaustion. I mean, their performances really were astounding. And as we've mentioned in the past, being in the woods at night is just kind of creepy. I do a lot of dispersed camping myself, and many times, in my tent, alone at night in the middle of the woods, I’ve heard something rustling in the leaves. It just triggers all those primal instincts in you, even if you know it's completely safe. There's probably an element of that at play, I think, through the performances. But most of the time I give them credit because they could get into that emotional place because just talented actors. They could really make it convincing.
“There's a lot of moments in the raw footage where you see them do this great performance and then when they snap out a character, they're all joking with each other. It's always humbling to see how well trained actors can pull that off and make it convincing. They were tired and exhausted and sometimes frustrated, so I think they just took that and brought it into their performances. But whether they were really scared or not – probably not. I mean, we were pretty close by, shadowing them, and there was always a way out. In a lot of instances we had to fake that they were really isolated because we were next to a road.”
“It’s hard to be scared when you have two goofy directors are out there running around making noises,” says Eduardo. “But like Dan was saying, it’s a testament to their acting ability. The final scene with Heather going down the stairs and screaming, the first day that we shot that, they camped out and they got to the house and we had a technical problem with the light, and we couldn't finish the end of the movie that night. So we came back the next night after they had already slept in a hotel room and they had showered, and we reshot the stuff from the moment when they start running up the steps. Both her and Mike just went right into this, being scared and being tired. Her scream at the end, you can't deny that there's something really crazy, really amazing going on there.”
The cast members, Heather Donahue, Michael C Williams and Joshua Leonard, have spoken out recently and said that they were unhappy with some things about the film, particularly the business of having to keep their identity secret for several months around the release, to pretend they had disappeared. Was that something that was a part of the plan for the outset, or did it develop later on?
“It really came later on,” says Daniel. “I mean, that was a strategy Artisan wanted, and we set the stage for that conceit early on in our own little bubble when we were making the movie. We felt that was effective for marketing and also heightened the fear factor in the film itself. And then when John Hageman, head of marketing and art, came on board and they embraced our approach to that, they amplified that whole conceit. So when were in Cannes, they had Missing posters of the film students, which meant a lot to everyone talking about it and ‘Is this real? Is this not real?’
“So that they could keep that up for a little while – and they did for few weeks, until we were on the cover of Time magazine and Newsweek and stuff like that; then the gig was up - they tried to maintain it for a while. I can understand the actors’ frustration with not being able to go to Cannes and do all the fun stuff, but at the end of the day, everyone deemed it helpful to marketing the movie and making the movie more successful, so it's a bit of a mixed bag. You're doing what's best for the film, but you also want to take part in all the hoopla that's going on around it as well. So I get where they're coming from.”
We talk about the townspeople who the student filmmakers interview in the film, who were not professional actors. Some of them didn’t know what was going on at all.
“Most of the people that they interview were plants that we hired, and we gave them a little bit of backstory and then put them in a store or restaurant or, with the fishermen, fishing by the rock. And then we told the actors, in directing notes, ‘Go check out these guys and see what you can find out about the Blair Witch.’ But the woman with the little girl, that was a townsperson, somebody that we hadn't cast, and there's a couple of others in there. Susie Gooch, who was the mother, and the little girl, Ingrid, well...
“They were going around trying to interview people, and most of the people were just not into it. You know, just small town shying away from cameras. And they want to be interviewed about a documentary? No, not really. Susie felt sorry for them, and she was like, ‘Hey, yeah, you can interview me.’ She had never heard about the Blair Witch or anything. She just kind of played along. And luckily her little daughter Ingrid was just ready to go home, so it looks like she's scared of talking about the Blair Witch. It's just this perfect moment that when Dan and I saw it in the raw footage, we were like, ‘Holy crap!’ Because you can't direct that.”
“Hey, little kids, action! Yeah,” says Daniel.
“That was just another bit of really good luck,” Eduardo continued. “Another bit of the serendipity that we had during the shoot. It just worked out that enough people came out and helped us out with the interviews, but that one really is the main one. And, you know, I just saw them a couple of weeks ago. We had a screening in Burkittsville, the town where we shot some of the movie. Ingrid is married now. She's a psychologist. She's in her late 20s. And Susie comes out, they come out and talk, they get a kick out of the whole Blair Witch thing and being part of it. They're really good sports.”
It’s pretty well know that parts of the film were being written and rewritten whilst it was being shot, but, Daniel reveals, the creative process was really a lot more complex than that.
“When we were shooting the film in the woods, we still had the notion that it was going to be more of a traditional documentary,” says Daniel. “That the footage that we shot in the woods was going to constitute maybe 15, 20 minutes of the final film. Which is why we were fairly confident we'd get a few good moments that we could use in that overall scheme. We first had to tackle all this raw footage that we shot in the woods, find out what we had and didn't have, what worked, what wasn't working, what was moving the plot along, and then we shot a whole bunch of backstory stuff in Orlando. You know, the Rustin Parr footage.
“We had a lot of the supporting material with experts and family members being interviewed, and we cut all that stuff in to support the stuff we shot in the woods. And over time, we just kept whittling it down and reducing more and more of that secondary footage because it was taking away from the scare. It was taking away from the immersion that the woods footage was giving you. And that's what I love about the process. It starts telling you what it wants.
“Over time, we came to the decision – it was a tough decision to make – but we eventually jettisoned all that second footage and went solely with the woods footage. And I was the last one to really want to do that. I was like, ‘You know, we put all this time into this secondary footage.’ It was a tough choice to make, but it was ultimately the right one. So much of the direction of this film came in the edit. We not only had to make that choice, but also working with just that woods footage, make that whole plot work and those moments stand out and be an effective scare. So, yeah, this was very much a film that was created in the edit, much like most documentaries are.
“Even at the point where we stepped back from it, we needed to have it screened several times to audiences to give us their input on whether or not what we were doing was working. So that was a pretty long process as well, and we had mixed reviews. We screened it once for film students at UCF, where we got beaten up pretty bad. So much like any movie, we've become really close to it, and it's hard to be objective over time. It took about eight months for us to whittle it down to a place where we felt it was at a length that we could submit to festivals.
“Even after it went into Sundance, we did another cut, and went back and shot new endings, and they didn't work. And then we shot that one interview that explains why Mike is standing in the corner. That was put in after the Sundance cut. And then we did a whole new remix on the sound, which was a huge enhancement to the film. It’s always in flux, even to this day. There's a new version now, so you never really end up finishing the film, but hopefully you're making it better each time.”
