THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) Four stars

I occasionally find myself looking back fondly on all the multiplex experiences I had during 1999 and 2000.

Please bear with me as I rattle off the titles: THE PHANTOM MENACE, SOUTH PARK BLU, SLEEPY HOLLOW, AMERICAN BEAUTY, GLADIATOR, THE PATRIOT, THE LEGEND OF DRUNKEN MASTER, and CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. Just for variety and to balance the bad with the good, there was also DRACULA 2000, THE LADIES MAN, ROMEO MUST DIE, and THE SKULLS. There’s even one more.

I shall never forget when I watched THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT on the first night it played at the Pittsburg 8.

This was a major event for my generation (let’s say those of us born from 1965 through 1981), because the BLAIR WITCH hype was inescapable that summer and fall in 1999 and the seemingly inevitable backlash proved even stronger and more lasting. For at least a couple years, you just had to watch THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and form your own strong opinion. You either loved or hated THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT with no middle ground whatsoever and everybody felt like expressing their opinion about it, something that cannot be said for the average movie. Nowadays, though, how many people give this 20-year-old movie the time of day.

Anyway, I myself walked into the late show that night stoked, not only because of the insane buzz around the film but also because of the four-star review written by Roger Ebert that I read when the film opened July 16. “At a time when digital techniques can show us almost anything, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can’t see. The noise in the dark is almost always scarier than what makes the noise in the dark. Any kid can tell you that. Not that he believes it at the time” finishes off Ebert’s review. BLAIR WITCH later rounded out Ebert’s list of the 10 most influential films of the 20th Century.

Of course, leading up to whenever we first watched it, we heard all the noise about THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT being the “scariest movie ever made.” How many times have we heard that about the latest horror movie and then found it out to be a lie, a hype, a con?

Sitting down in the Pittsburg 8 that night, though, we knew that we were in for a treat, a transcendent experience. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, whether you love it or hate it, delivered.

I have never seen a movie in a theater setting before or after create such an intense reaction. As the end credits rolled, members of the packed house cheered and booed. I remember more people cheering, but the boos were both louder and longer. Debates broke out across the theater as we slowly exited. I loved the film and defended it in the midst of some intense hostility from individuals who felt they had been cheated. They expected something different than what they got from THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. And hated main protagonist Heather Donahue and found her incredibly annoying. And hated hated hated that darn ending. I started thinking even more positively about the film after each hate-filled editorial I heard.

A strange thing happened in the first couple years after THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT: I encountered several people who enjoyed the sequel BOOK OF SHADOWS more than the original. It was here that I developed a little theory: People who hated THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT but liked or even loved BOOK OF SHADOWS wanted a more traditional horror movie or at least one more beholden to the conventions of the late 20th Century horror movie. Meanwhile, people who loved THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT loved it partly because it broke away from the conventions of contemporary horror movies. It was not SCREAM, not I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, not URBAN LEGENDS, et cetera, populated by late 20th Century pretty boy or hip actors and lovely actresses with that nudge-nudge wink-wink we’re so contemporary and hip tone. I know I dig BLAIR WITCH mostly because it is different from the horror movies of its time and belongs to another tradition. At the time, most of us had probably never seen a found footage movie before, although everybody who believed the whole “true story” bit should have known better. I mean, come on, after THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and FARGO, you fell for that jive?

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT set itself up perfectly for a backlash of epic proportions. We already mentioned anything touted as “the scariest movie ever made” will create large numbers of viewers laughing and scoffing at such a ridiculous claim. The film made nearly $250 million on a $60,000 budget … with the help of a groundbreaking marketing plan that ultimately backfired, at least in terms of perception of the film itself.

Here’s the third paragraph of a story by MWP Digital Media, “So perhaps you’d be surprised to learn the most successful viral marketing campaign of all time took place before social media existed. Even before mainstream use of the Internet. The most successful viral marketing campaign of all time centred on a small, low-budget indie flick in 1999 called THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.” Just thinking about it even now, yeah, it’s crazy to conceive of a frenzied audience in small college town Pittsburg, Kansas, for a low-budget horror movie with no-name performers.

The filmmakers decided to use a website to promote their little movie, not just any website though since this one creates an entire world treating THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT like it really happened rather than it being a fictional work. More than 20 years later, we can still check out blairwitch.com/project. We’re greeted with a familiar title card upon visiting the site, “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”

There’s “Mythology,” a timeline of major events in the history of the Blair Witch: February 1785, November 1786, November 1809, 182, August 1825, March 1886, November 1940-May 1941, and several dates from October 1994-October 1997. The front page of “Mythology” ends on this note, “The found footage of their children’s last days is turned over to the families of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams. Angie Donahue contracts Haxan Films to examine the footage and piece together the events of October 20-28, 1994.”

We can see a picture of “Montgomery College film students Michael Williams, Joshua Leonard, and Heather Donahue less than a week before their disappearance” and several stills from their documentary.

The “Aftermath” section includes evidence, search, interviews, and news. Evidence includes crime scene photos from the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office and anthropology professor David Mercer describing how there is no scientific explanation for a certain event. Search provides a MISSING poster for Donahue, Leonard, and Williams with their photos, measurements, and features; “Last seen camping in the Black Hills Forrest area, near Burkittsville.” If you look closely, you can see the famous 555 extension listed for the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office. Interviews are clips featuring such figures as Sheriff Ron Cravens and search party members. News offers clips from coverage by Channel 11 and Channel 6.

“The Legacy” takes in discovered footage, audio, and Heather’s journal, which was found buried beneath a 100-year-old cabin in the woods. Her journal amounted to 37 pages; from Page 21, “It is freezing and we are still out here. We’re completely fucking lost now, we’ve decided basically to just keep heading south, but it doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere fast and weird shit keeps happening which is, to be totally honest, sitting here with gloves and sweaters in a cold tent in the middle of nowhere and the guys asleep – beginning to scare me. I’m hungry. I’m cold. I want to see what we shot. We didn’t light a campfire tonight because we wanted to lay low. Not that there’s anything left to cook on it anyway. I feel like we are bound to cross a road of something soon, it’s not like Maryland has wilds that go on forever or some shit. We have got to get out of here. As much as I would like…”

Personally, I appreciate that THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT deals in myths and legends and makes a valiant effort to create its own timeless story. It belongs most to a tradition of American storytelling that started with Washington Irving (1783-1859), namely his 1820 work “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” This tradition also involves more local stories, like, for example, haunted McCray Hall at Pittsburg State; “Sightings of a lady in a black dress. The Pipe organ is heard playing at night. Sudden temperature variations. Strange movements from corners of eyes” highlights the listing on “Dark Kansas.” BLAIR WITCH remembers the power of imagination.

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, BLAIR WITCH directors, talked about the genesis for their movie in Little White Lies, “We came up with the basic premise for what eventually became THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT back in the early ‘90s. We were studying at the University of Central Florida at the time, and like most college students we didn’t have any money. … One day we got to talking about this show called “In Search of…,” which Leonard Nimoy hosted in the ‘70s. We started thinking about all these pseudo-documentaries like THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, IN SEARCH OF NOAH’S ARK, CHARIOTS OF THE GODS, exploratory, investigative films linked to paranormal encounters, and how they really freaked us out as kids. So we rented a bunch of those movies and we were surprised how much they still freaked us out. …

“We shot [BLAIR WITCH] in two sections: Phase One, which is everything in the woods, and then Phase Two, which ended up being used for the “Curse of the Blair Witch” TV documentary. The Phase One stuff was shot over about eight pretty intensive days. It was a continuous shoot, where the actors were the cameramen and all the dialogue was improvised.”

Lead performer Donahue took a great deal of the backlash against BLAIR WITCH, as she was the most publicly visible; she won Worst Actress from the Golden Raspberry Awards, for example, beating out Melanie Griffith in CRAZY IN ALABAMA, Milla Jovovich in THE MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC, Sharon Stone in GLORIA, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in ENTRAPMENT and THE HAUNTING. Her acting career persisted until 2008, for example she appeared in the billion times worse than BLAIR WITCH romantic comedy BOYS AND GIRLS, and she left the profession to grow medical marijuana. She then became an author and delivered the 2012 memoir “Growgirl: How My Life After the Blair Witch Project Went to Pot.”

Two movies from 1999 became parodied to what seemed like no end at the time, THE MATRIX and BLAIR WITCH. This endless parodying did not help either film. I especially got beyond exasperated at MATRIX parodies. Anybody who lived during that era knows which two scenes that we’re talking about without even mentioning them. Just say THE MATRIX and BLAIR WITCH, and we can bet they’re the first scenes that come to mind.

Myrick and Sanchez filmed apology scenes for both Donahue and Williams, and decided upon Donahue for the finished product because she had the most reason to apologize. Reactions to her apology are the most extreme in a film that creates extreme reactions. Ebert said that it reminded him of explorer Robert Scott’s notebook entries as he froze to death in the Terra Nova expedition (1910-13). Others have laughed at it like it was the funniest thing they have ever seen.

Leonard and Williams have both maintained acting careers, Leonard being far more busy. BLAIR WITCH marked the feature debuts for Donahue, Leonard, and Williams and I like them all because they have an everyman appeal not typically found in horror movies of the late 90s and early 00s.

The promotion for BLAIR WITCH proved so effective that Donahue’s mother even received sympathy cards from people who believed that her daughter was either dead or missing. Sanchez’s experience in web design proved to be a godsend. It was probably just some elective that he barely thought about at the time he took it.