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I remember the hype surrounding The Blair Witch Project in 1999 very clearly.
I was already a horror fan who stayed up way too late watching movies like The Exorcist and Carrie on TV reruns, and the idea that the movie showed real footage shot by three deceased student filmmakers gave it a forbidden air that was irresistible to my impressionable young mind.
Buy now The Blair Witch Project on Prime Video, DVD and Blu-ray
Unfortunately, I never got to see it. This had less to do with the fact that I was 11 years old, and more to do with the fact that I lived in New Zealand where the nearest cinema was roughly eight miles away and public transport was notoriously patchy then.
Time marched forward, and although I have since watched countless found footage films, I never got around to watching the one that started it all. So with the 20th anniversary of its release, there was no better time to revisit it and see if it held up to the hype.
The movie opens with shaky handycam footage that immediately brought on a bout of motion sickness, which was actually one of the biggest criticisms on its release. The second most jarring thing about its opening sequence is Heather's eyebrows: plucked into the then-fashionable sperm-like shape, they made all of us '90s and early 2000s girls look surprised and stoned at the same time.
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Triggering moments aside, the movie has aged surprisingly well and holds up as a good horror. The build-up of tension, anxiety and paranoia is masterfully crafted, the story progresses at a good pace, and the performances (which were drawn out of genuinely uncomfortable circumstances) feel authentic.
The juxtaposition between Heather's confidence when hosting her documentary, and the "candid" behind-the-scenes footage that makes up the bulk of the movie, makes her descent into fear and hopelessness all the more believable and terrifying.
And despite the fact I now know it isn't real, at the end of the movie I felt like my stomach was in my throat.
The Blair Witch Project is one of those horrors that you don't need to have watched in order to feel like you've seen it, because the production and marketing techniques it pioneered are now part of the very fabric of pop culture.
Its primary appeal was the veneer of authenticity, a concept that was novel at the time of its release. It was the late '90s, reality TV was in its infancy and audiences were ripe for voyeuristic entertainment.
The movie spawned the Blair Witch universe, the found-footage sub-genre, and introduced the tropes of unscripted entertainment that we now take for granted. Above all, it perpetuated the myth of the sleeper hit: that viral success is based on merit, anyone with a camera the right idea could create something novel and achieve success.
Of course, The Blair Witch Project didn't invent the found-footage sub-genre. That honour is generally agreed to belong to Ruggero Deodato's controversial 1980 thriller Cannibal Holocaust, which similarly features the disappearance of a young movie crew whilst filming a documentary.
A big factor of why the movie turned the found-footage genre into a cultural phenomenon is timing.
Reality TV started to hit its stride in the 1990s, and by the end of the decade shows like The Real World and Cops were extremely popular. The appetite for unscripted, voyeuristic entertainment was gaining traction and within a few years, reality TV would explode with shows like Big Brother, Survivor and Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
Reality TV has since evolved from "cheap" entertainment to forming the basis of multi-billion dollar and multi-generational empires.
The recent success of Love Island suggests that, 20 years on, the appetite for watching young people authentically react to inauthentic situations is only getting bigger. The success of The Blair Witch Project provided proof of concept: that audiences care less about slick production values than emotional connection.
Of course, the veneer of authenticity in the movie was manufactured by a meticulously planned production.
In 2018, director Daniel Myrick told The Guardian: "There's a common misunderstanding that not a lot went into it, but it took two years of effort to make it look like it was just shot by three students over a long weekend."
The actors kept their real names, improvised all of the dialogue, and were trained to use the cameras to self-shoot their performances. They were given daily GPS coordinates to their reach each location, and provided with diminishing food supplies to exacerbate their frustration and drive their performances.
The crew hid in the woods and used various methods to scare the living daylights out of them, and the film's producer Gregg Hale famously told them: "Your safety is our primary concern, but your comfort is not."
Reality TV shows are similarly constructed by meticulous behind-the-scenes planning and in its early days, reality TV was criticised for being less "real" than they proclaimed.
We are now at a point where we seem to be at peace with the fact that reality TV is a construction, and The Blair Witch Project arguably sowed the seed for this. "I see why you like this video camera so much," Josh tells Heather. "It's not quite reality."
The Blair Witch Project is also the first movie to use the internet to drive meaningful engagement, becoming a viral hit before we even had the terminology to describe it as such.
Co-director Eduardo Sánchez built the website himself, telling the BBC in 2009: "I was the only one with web-building experience and also, I didn't have a girlfriend at the time so I had a lot of time on my hands."
The original website can still be accessed, and using it takes me back to a time when downloading a single Christina Aguilera video could use up your family's entire bandwidth for the month and make your sister hate you.
It set the template for how TV shows and movies are marketed to this day; supplementary material, digital shorts, and exclusive online content is now part and parcel of almost all campaigns.
The material used on the website was actually unused footage that was going to be part of the film, so the website appears to have been born of an opportunity to make use of extra material.
It was launched in a fleeting moment where the internet was not yet a ubiquitous presence in our lives, and it wasn't as easy to debunk the site as fake news. It extended the experience of the movie into our personal lives, a concept that was truly novel at the time, but is now the aim of almost every content distributor's marketing strategy.
The Blair Witch Project also sold a false dream. When it became the sleeper hit of the millennium, it perpetuated the myth of the indie movie, made by students by the skin of their teeth, that succeeds on merit alone.
It's the same elusive 'tinkering in the garage' myth that every generation seems to have. It gave scores of young filmmakers hope that they too could create their own Blair Witch by coming up with a killer idea, and use the democratising power of the internet to market it.
As a film student in the late 2000s, I totally bought into this dream: I even entered a "found footage" competition with some classmates, which was part of the marketing campaign for REC 2. (We didn't win, and you can't find our movie online, thankfully.)
The rise of the YouTube star has only strengthened the notion of organic internet success, but the truth is that sustainable online success is usually backed by a marketing strategy that's inaccessible the average student filmmaker or YouTuber. There certainly are exceptions, but that's exactly what they are.
Watching the movie for the first time 20 years after its release, its cultural impact is striking. I've grown up in a world where the techniques used in its production and marketing are familiar to the point of cliché, and I was almost sure that I would be watching it with the detached view of a millennial horror fan who's seen it all.
But the feeling of having my stomach slowly rise, and then firmly lodge itself in my throat, tells me the most important thing about The Blair Witch Project 20 years on: it's still a damn good scare.
The Blair Witch Project is available to buy on Prime Video, DVD and Blu-ray.
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