The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project is a film about being lost, and almost nothing else, and it is still the most frightening thing anyone has done with that.

The first act is a mockumentary and plays as one: interviews in Burkittsville with people who half-believe, a fisherman at Coffin Rock, a woman with a baby who talks about Rustin Parr. Then the three of them walk into the woods and the film quietly stops being about a witch. The map goes into a creek. The compass does not help. They walk south all day and arrive back at the same log. The tent gets surrounded at night by something that makes children's noises and does not come in. Nothing is ever seen.

That absence is the whole method and it is a harder trick than it looks. The directors gave the three actors a rough map, a GPS, dwindling food and a set of daily note-drops, and then genuinely harassed them at night without warning — the shaking tent, the voices, the piles of stones left outside. What is on screen is three real people getting hungry, cold, frightened and unpleasant to each other. Heather's insistence on filming is a character flaw the film actually prosecutes: Mike's "I see why you like this camera so much — it's not quite reality" is the best line in nineties horror.

The folklore is doing real work

The film's three legends layer deliberately: Elly Kedward, banished for witchcraft in 1785; the 1940s hermit Rustin Parr, who killed seven children in a house in these woods, taking them in pairs and making one face a corner while he worked on the other; and a modern disappearance. None of it is confirmed. All of it supplies the final shot.

Where it is hard going

It is genuinely slow and a large part of the running time is three people arguing while walking. The handheld footage is punishing and the 1999 theatrical experience made people physically sick. And the film's reputation was built on a marketing campaign — missing-person posters, a website presenting the three actors as dead, an IMDb listing — which no longer exists, so a modern viewer has to supply the uncertainty themselves.

For the found-footage grammar it created, applied with a static camera, Paranormal Activity; for the best film ever made in this form, Lake Mungo; for the same unseen-folklore dread, The Wicker Man.

The short answer: Josh disappears in the night. The next morning Heather finds a bundle of sticks and cloth outside the tent containing what appear to be teeth, hair and a piece of tongue. That night she and Mike hear Josh screaming somewhere below them and follow the sound to a derelict house in the woods. Inside, the walls are covered in children's handprints. Mike runs to the basement, shouts, and his camera falls. Heather follows, screaming his name; in her camera's light Mike is standing facing the corner of the basement, motionless. Something strikes her, her camera drops, and it films the floor. Nothing is explained, nothing is seen, and the film ends.

What does the ending of The Blair Witch Project mean?

It is the Rustin Parr legend being completed. The film established, in a first-act interview, that Parr took children in pairs and made one stand facing a corner so it could not see what he was doing to the other. The last thing Heather's camera records is Mike standing in a corner. The implication is that whatever Parr was obeying is still operating, and that Heather is the one being worked on.

What is in the bundle of sticks?

A parcel of sticks bound with scraps of Josh's shirt, containing something wet that Heather unwraps off camera and reacts to with total horror. She says it contains teeth, and the fragments are generally read as teeth, hair and a piece of tongue. The film deliberately never shows it clearly. Whatever it is, it arrives the morning after Josh vanishes and it is left where she will find it.

What happens to Josh?

He is taken on the fifth or sixth night, out of the tent, while Heather and Mike hear him shouting and cannot find him. His screams are heard again the following night from inside or beneath the house, which is what leads Heather and Mike inside. He is never found, and the film's audio is ambiguous about whether what they are following is Josh at all.

Is the Blair Witch legend real?

No. Elly Kedward, Rustin Parr, Coffin Rock and the town of Blair are all invented for the film. Burkittsville, Maryland is a real town and was not previously associated with any such legend; it was renamed from nothing and became a minor pilgrimage site, to the considerable annoyance of the people who live there. The Black Hills Forest and the Parr murders do not exist.

Why does nobody see the witch?

Because the directors' rule was that there would be nothing to see. No creature was ever designed or shot. What produces the fear is a set of signs — stick figures hanging in the trees, three cairns outside the tent, the sound of a child, footsteps circling at night — and the fact that the woods are a closed system the characters cannot navigate out of. The film's position is that an unseen cause is worse than any possible reveal, and three sequels have since proved it right by trying.

Why is the handheld camera so rough?

Because the actors shot it. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams operated the 16mm camera and the Hi8 video camera themselves, with no crew present, while hiking and while frightened. The two formats are a plot device as well: the black-and-white film stock is Heather's documentary and the colour video is her behind-the-scenes record, which is why the film cuts between them.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Viscera 006 is at the floor — only 1 work scores lower. There is no injury, no blood and no body anywhere in the film. The most explicit thing in it is a bundle Heather does not show you.

Tone 014 is bleak — 30 works score lower. All three die, nothing is learned, and the footage exists only because it was recovered.

Pace 018 is very slow — only 18 works are slower. The film is a walk, and the dread comes from repetition rather than incident.

Era bias 030 reads analog — 42 works score lower. 16mm black-and-white and Hi8 video, both degraded, with no digital correction anywhere.

Reality anchor 026 is grounded — 14 works score lower. One forest, consistent geography that the characters cannot read, and no image that cannot be explained by something walking around outside a tent.

The threat at 035 leans supernatural — 47 works score lower, though the film is careful to leave a human reading available: three people could in principle be being stalked by a person.

On jump scares: almost none. There are perhaps two, and both are sounds.