[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 20th
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 10th 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 21st century moment than such confusion—“alternative
facts,” anyone?—nor that any late 20th 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 20th 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?
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