‘I’m going to die out here’
Film students Heather (Rei Hance, then credited as Heather Donohue) Josh (Joshua Leonard) and Mike (Michael C Williams) head out into the woods in Burkittsville, Maryland, to make a documentary about local legend the Blair Witch.
They interview locals, all who have their own creepy stories about the woods, and events over the years that have happened there.
After their first night in the woods, they get very, very lost. Eerie noises wake them in the middle of the night, and mini cairns appear outside their tent in the morning. Strange stick figures hang from the trees and they lose the map and run out of food.
As fear, exhaustion and hunger take hold, the three descend into paranoia and hopelessness. Then Josh disappears over night and all that’s left of him appears to be a parcel of blood, hair and teeth wrapped in a scrap of his shirt. They can hear him screaming for help in the darkness, but they can’t find him.
They spend 8 days lost in the woods before finding an abandoned cabin that’s a callback to the townsfolk interviews that we see at the start of the film. It’s here that the film ends, in a final shocking scene that would either have you saying ‘fuck!’ if you paid attention to the dialogue at the start of the film, or, ‘what the fuck?’ if you didn’t.
The Blair Witch is often credited as the first found footage film. It’s not – it’s preceded by Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Last Broadcast (1998). It can be credited for the first viral marketing campaign, though, with a website dedicated to the missing film makers and a pre-release mockumentary called The Curse of the Blair Witch that convinced early-days internet audiences that what they were watching was real, and not fiction.
The actors, who also operated the cameras and sound equipment, had to keep out of the public eye once the film was released to keep up the idea that this was a real film made by real missing students. While the film was a critical and commercial success, the three actors suffered in the early days of the film’s release. Rei Hance in particular was never really able to shake the legacy of Heather Donohue – she retired from acting in 2008 and changed her name in 2020.
I can remember going to see Blair Witch, at the Empire Cinema in High Wycombe in the autumn of 1999. I thought, and still do think, that it’s a very scary film. Like Wolf Creek, the terror comes from isolation, and being lost in a wilderness you don’t know. I remember at the time thinking how easy it would be to lose your mind if you were in that situation. Hungry, sleep-deprived, cold and scared, how long would you survive?
Content warning: motion sickness is a big issue in this one. Other than that, there’s not much to fear except your imagination.
Final thoughts: If you go down to the woods today, you better KEEP HOLD OF YOUR FUCKING MAP.
