TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECTTERRIFIED EVERYONE – INCLUDING ITS CO-DIRECTOR, EDUARDO SÁNCHEZ. THE MONSTER HIT CONTINUES TO CAST A LONG SHADOW OVER HIS CAREER, AS HE DIVES DEEP ON HIS FOUND-FOOTAGE TRAILBLAZER, PASSING ON J.J. ABRAMS AND HOW HE FINALLY FREED HIMSELF FROM ITS ‘CURSE’.
In 1999, The Blair Witch Project scared the world. ‘It was so profoundly terrifying that I didn’t watch it again for another decade,’ Host director Rob Savage remembers. Co-directed by duo Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, who met during university, it signalled the arrival of an untapped style of genre filmmaking and shocked [Rec] co-director Jaume Balagueró ‘because it was a completely new approach to horror’.
The faux-doc horror follows a filmmaking trio who venture into Maryland’s Black Hills Forest in pursuit of the mysterious ‘Blair Witch’; only their tapes are ever recovered. ‘I just remember it was all anybody wanted to talk about for, like, two weeks straight,’ Deadstream co-director Vanessa Winter recalls. But no one was more terrified of the movie than co-director Eduardo Sánchez: ‘How do you follow The Blair Witch Project?’
Although Sánchez grew up on a diet of classic 70s horror, it was the pseudo-documentary shows In Search of… (hosted by Leonard Nimoy) and Unsolved Mysteries that truly got under his skin. But before Cannibal Holocaust, even before COPS, Sánchez’s number one inspiration for found footage? Bigfoot. ‘For me and Dan, the Patterson-Gimlin film was the impetus for us to get into found footage. That film was the creepiest thing we’d ever seen.’ These cinema-verité documentarians, alongside Sánchez’s lifelong uneasiness around the deep wood, inspired the stew of ideas for what would eventually become The Blair Witch Project.
In The Blair Witch Project a lingering malevolence hangs over the film. Even as Sánchez cranks up the horror, there’s a purposeful ambiguity and control – something he learned from Spielberg. ‘In Jaws, you feel its presence from the beginning – but you need to tease the shark. It’s everything else that warns you of the danger, like John Williams’ score.’ The next time you watch The Blair Witch Project, close your eyes for a moment and just listen. Every sound is purposeful – a mandate from the directors that everything the audience can see and hear be authentic to the woodland setting. That is, apart from the unsettling sounds of children distantly playing through a boom box (recorded by Sánchez’s mother) and the sinister effigies of sticks and stones scattered around. ‘The iconography of the weird things in the woods – still so iconic, and still so scary,’ Watcher director Chloe Okuno tells TF.
The Blair Witch Project opens with interspersed interviews featuring Burkittsville locals, their seductive naturalis
