Blu-ray Review: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT - Still Great 25 Years On - Movies In Focus
Horror cinema was taken to a whole new level 25 years ago when The Blair Witch Project came out of nowhere, broke box office records – and for better or for worse – single-handedly ushered in the ‘found footage’ sub-genre. The set-up is simple, but the execution is exceptionally well handled. The 1999 pseudo-documentary opens with a title card that sums up the film better than I ever could: ”In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary called ‘The Blair Witch Project’. A year later their footage was found.” Stars Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard – play the young filmmakers – fictional versions of themselves who go deep into the woods during the course of their film shoot. Tensions run high when the trio get lost – and then things start to go bump on the night. The Blair Witch Project helped change film-making – and film marketing forever. It showed Hollywood that the internet was an important way to hype films, without having to spend $100 million on promotion. Audiences believed the footage contained within Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s low budget fright pic was real [...]
