October 10, 2025

Kids These Days Don't Wander Around the Woods Like Idiots Anymore

Hi all, welcome back to week one of the 2025 So Desensitized Spooky Season Spooktacular! Today we are covering my least favorite movie of all time, The Blair Witch Project (1999)! There’s no charity or small business for this post, but a fun fact for you is that Rei Hance, who played Heather Donahue, quit acting after this movie to grow weed. The more you know. Happy reading and stay spooky!

Before I begin, I do want to clear something up. I said that The Blair Witch Project is my least favorite movie of all time, and that is true, which is saying a lot for me. I tend to like movies. All of them. I go into watching movies wanting to like them, and I usually do. For me, if I had fun watching a movie, or if it was doing interesting things, or what have you, it’s good. It doesn’t even have to pull it off particularly well for me to give it a truly huge amount of credit because those people worked hard, damnit! So when I say that Blair Witch is my least favorite movie, it means I  really well and truly hated it. And whenever I say that, people get weird, especially considering that I am a huge horror fan and it undeniably changed the genre forever, like many of my favorite horror movies did. I hear a lot of the ‘but don’t you know what it did?’ and the ‘but it created found footage and used brilliant marketing techniques that changed the industry!’ and yes, it did, and that’s what I’m going to write about here. Now, the reason I’m saying all this is that it’s something you should keep in mind while reading this analysis of it. I will analyze the themes, the genre, the marketing and all of the things that were good about it because it is very cool and important. Just keep in mind throughout that you are hearing my best attempt at an unbiased take on a movie I don’t like at all, and that some of that is because it gave me motion sickness.

The Blair Witch Project caused a stir before it even came out. It marketed itself as something real, listing the actors as ‘deceased’ on IMDb, spreading missing posters throughout America, and creating a huge conspiracy around whether or not what you were about to witness in the theatre was real. And, from what I can tell, anyway, most people thought it was. On opening weekend, a majority of moviegoers thought they were really going to watch these kids go into the woods and die. That marketing campaign would change the way movies worked forever. It created the subgenre that we now know as ‘found footage’, which is based on the idea that what you are watching is a record that was recovered from the events you are watching unfold. This format had existed on the fringes of filmmaking before Blair Witch, but Blair Witch brought it to a different level entirely.

Part of the reason that Blair Witch had the impact it did was because some of that grittiness and mystery was genuine. They really had those shitty handheld cameras and nothing else to film. They did take those poor actors out into the cold, dark woods and make them film for hours on end. Even one of the people they interview in town about the witch early on, the woman with the baby, is just a random person they stopped and asked to be in the movie. But that genuine feel had unexpected repercussions. None of the actors in that movie liked working on it. Joshua Leonard, who played Josh says he was relieved when his character died because it meant he could leave. Part of the reason Rei Hance quit acting was because it’s pretty hard to continue your career when a majority of people have been made to believe that you’re actually dead. Some of the effects - the rock sculptures, the hands on the tent - were really just things the crew did to the actors to get genuine reactions, scaring them out of their minds all for the sake of cinema. It was not a good film to be in, for many reasons. But it took America by storm, and not just because it was good (it’s not, really, but we’ll get there later). It was such a success because it was lucky.

1999 was the perfect time to debut that marketing campaign. The internet was just becoming widespread, with most people having a computer that they could use chat rooms on. People were starting to get worried about the end of the world, come New Year’s. It felt like anything could happen to anyone. America was connected enough that technology turning on itself was a serious worry, but not so connected that you couldn’t wander into the woods and never come back out. If no one knew exactly where you were, there was no way to change that unless there was a pay phone nearby, and there aren’t exactly those in the woods. Or wi-fi, for that matter. The idea of a group of kids going missing forever was still very real, and the internet just further exacerbated the effect of the Blair Witch. If they’d tried that marketing even a year later, it might not have worked. But they set it all in motion in the summer of 1999, and so it took off more than anyone could have imagined. Audiences left the theatre sick to their stomachs, suddenly questioning their enthusiasm to see that movie, knowing that they were going to watch those people die, now that they felt like they really had. 

A lot of the thrill around Blair Witch came from the first ten minutes, and the last. The first is just before the kids go out into the woods, where they’re interviewing townspeople about the Blair Witch for their project. It’s interesting, and builds excitement around what they’re about to do, builds hope and intrigue. Because maybe she’s real, and maybe they’ll find her. The last ten minutes are so good because they have found her, and that’s awful. It was all true, and they’ve learned that now, but at what cost? The ending asks if it was worth it, all the fear, the pain, the death? Why couldn’t it have been enough to just hear about her? And that is where the redeemable feature of this movie (for me, other people like the whole thing very much) lies: the Blair Witch herself, in all her glory. 

The Blair Witch, to me, is like Bruce the shark in Jaws. She is scarier because you don’t see her. You see what she does. She is everywhere in the forest, in the rock sculptures, the noises, the confusion that might also just be these kids being idiots. There, at the beginning of the new technological age, she represented an escape. Because really, who among us hasn’t considered just walking off into the woods and staying there of our own accord? But who would actually be crazy enough to really do it? And that’s the beauty of the Blair Witch, is that she was. She left before the computers got there, and damned if anyone’s gonna find her ever again. She’ll curse the whole forest, she’ll steal your car, she’ll kill you and leave your friends her teeth, because no one finds the Blair Witch and lives to tell. She’s scarier for not being seen, because, while you don’t know what she is, you don’t know what she could do. Whatever’s in your mind is much, much scarier than anything that could be made real. It’s like reading a scary book and then watching the movie and not being as scared, because it’s just right there, and if you can perceive it, it seems less likely to hurt you. Really, because of all these things - the marketing, the moment, the unseen menace of the Witch - The Blair Witch Project should be a very good movie. But I don’t think it is.

The thing that ruins this movie for me, and I mean really, truly ruins it, is the kids. Heather, Josh, and Mike. Because I hate every one of them. They’re grating, and genuinely stupid, and just really awful to see interact. The best parts of the movie, the beginning and the end, are not about them being lost in the forest, but instead about the legend of the Witch herself, which, as I just established, is very effective. It’s just that seeing three people yell at each other and make objectively stupid decisions for the hour in between those parts is not at all pleasant. To write a good horror movie, you have to have characters that the audience can sympathize with. No matter how much a horror audience enjoys a good kill, they should not want too many characters to die. And while I understand that ‘deserving victim’ has its place in horror, and is very effective if done well, I also understand that that’s not what the writers of Blair Witch were trying to do. If you have film like Blair Witch with only three characters, at least two of them should be sympathetic, or your audience will just be annoyed. And, from where I stand, all three characters in Blair Witch are pretty insufferable. They’re all awful to each other in different ways, have terrible navigation skills, and are really just kind of annoying in all directions. I know that some of that is an attempt at showing that the Blair Witch’s woods make people go insane, but it doesn’t quite land, and just left me wishing the movie would end. If viewers are relieved when one of your characters dies, you’re doing it wrong.

Overall, The Blair Witch Project is an undeniably important movie to the genre. It established the kind of found footage that is still being expanded upon to this day. It created a more widespread appreciation for horror, and led the genre into the new millennium. Its villain, while never shown onscreen, is one of the best done villains in all of horror, and the film’s success owes a lot to her. And those last ten minutes are absolutely terrifying, for all the sort of boring unpleasantness that came before. The thing is just that not every movie is for everyone, and this one’s not for me. I know that it’s cool and important and all, it just didn’t land, and that’s OK. I really do wish I liked it better. I would also like to reiterate that part of my dislike is that the camera motion did make me nauseous, and I know that’s true for a lot of other people, too. So if you’re reading this and love The Blair Witch Project, I hope I still did it, and its impact, justice.

Thanks for reading, all! I know this one had a bit of a different tone than normal, but I spent a lot of time thinking on how to write about this movie, and this was what I settled on, because I do want to set the record straight about the impact I know it had. I hope you all enjoyed, and look forward to week two, with some current crones raising some mayhem with modern witch movies! Happy reading and stay spooky! 📷📼🏚️🔪🩸