July 13-14, 2024: Found Footage Stories: The Blair Witch Project

[25 years ago this weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of such examples, leading up to this weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On the groundbreaking film’s most obvious legacy, and two other compelling ways it foreshadowed our moment.

As I hope this week’s series has proven quite definitively, the found footage genre was a very longstanding and well-established one in American culture by the late 20^th century. Yet at the same time, there’s no arguing with the ways in which the hugely successful film The Blair Witch Project (1999) revitalized that genre and created an entire subgenre of horror films (about which I wrote in yesterday’s post). For an indie (to put it mildly) film with a $60,000 budget (I didn’t forget any 0s, that’s really sixty thousand) to become the 10^th highest-grossing release of 1999 (grossing nearly $250 million worldwide) was a cinematic Cinderella story the likes of which we rarely see, and that striking success led not just to a plethora of imitators but also, again, an entirely new subgenre within the already broad and deep genre of film horror. If that subgenre has perhaps run its course to a degree 25 years later, that shouldn’t lead us to minimize Blair Witch’s transformative effects.

Like most any cultural work, of course, Blair Witch has multiple things going on, and I would say in at least two other ways it likewise foreshadowed the quarter-century since its release (perhaps more as a reflection than a direct influence, but nonetheless). The more obvious one has to do with the viral marketing campaign that helped make Blair Witch such a hit, and that depended entirely on a thoroughgoing blurring of the lines between fiction and reality. The filmmakers went to extreme lengths to convince audiences that their found footage was documentary rather than fiction, including keeping their three main actors hidden to suggest that they really had died at the hands of the titular witch. Obviously they planned to reveal the truth at some point (and did so not long after the film’s release); but at the same time, the campaign depended on genuinely fooling as much of the audience as possible for as long as possible, and thus on making it as difficult as possible for folks to distinguish fact from fiction. I’m not sure any trend has become more dominant in our 21^st century moment than such confusion—“alternative facts,” anyone?—nor that any late 20^th century moment foreshadowed it more than Blair Witch’s marketing campign.

That’s a bit of a downer point, I know, so I’ll end this post and series on a different and hopefully more inspiring note. By the late 20^th century, it would have been easy to say that a great deal of the mystery and magic of the world was disappearing, or at the very least that ongoing and deepening trends like the rise of the internet and the ubiquity of cell phones were making it harder and harder not to feel like we knew what was out there, and thus to feel cynical and even jaded about the possibility of finding wonder in our world (rather than, for example, in escaping into fantastical stories). There are various ways that cultural works can challenge such trends, and certainly many of them are less dark or disturbing than horror films about murderous creatures haunting the most ordinary of woods. But any work and genre that can portray those weird and supernatural layers to our world—and that can even convince audiences that they are genuinely present in their own world—offers a compelling reminder that mystery and magic remain with us.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?