The series A posteriori le cinéma is intended to be an opportunity to celebrate the 7the art by revisiting flagship titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
In 1994, three film students ventured into a forest in Maryland to film a documentary about the witch supposedly haunting the place. We never saw them again. A year later, the discovery of their camera revealed more about their fate. When The Blair Witch Project (The Blair Project) had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999, 25 years ago, a large part of the public believed in a documentary made from material filmed by the unfortunate students. This is because, upstream, a clever and innovative promotional campaign ensured that this was so. Shot for an initial cost of 35,000 US dollars, the film grossed 250 million, and revolutionized not only horror cinema, but the way we view reality.
The mystification was methodically orchestrated. In an article celebrating the film’s twenty years, Steve Rose summarizes in The Guardian : “Creators Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez have produced a short documentary aimed at investors, presenting the mythology [du film] and the disappearance of the three students as if it were a true story. They took the same approach online, creating fake websites, excerpts from news reports, newspaper clippings and police reports, interviews… A site went online in June 1998, six months before the The film premiered at Sundance, where the filmmakers handed out flyers about missing people. »
Before the expression was consecrated, The Blair Witch Project went “viral”. You have to understand that at the time, the Internet was a recent invention, and social networks did not exist. As for the notion of fake news, or “ fake news », on which the promotion of the film was based, it was not part of the media landscape.
In other words, the majority of people still believed what they read on the Internet.
“A lot of moviegoers thought the film was a documentary,” Rose continues. The film remains one of the most deliciously frightening ever, and its ingenious concept required it to break all the rules: no storyline, no shock effects, no music, no professional crew, no effects special, not even a witch. What the film did have, however, and this often goes unnoticed, was three totally convincing actors. »
And for good reason: the latter — Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard — experienced a grueling shoot, designed to bring them as close as possible to their respective characters (who also bear their real first names).
In interview at Entertainment Weekly ten years after the release, Eduardo Sánchez reveals: “We didn’t have [écrit] no dialogue, because we wanted complete improvisation. We decided to leave the actors in the woods and direct them remotely. We developed this system where we left them notes in little boxes of 35mm film, and these notes contained logistical information about where to hike and what time to go to a certain location that we had already entered into their GPS units. We would give them character notes, like “Heather is driving me crazy” or “You need to get away from Mike” or “Josh is slowly losing his mind.” And then we let them go. We provided them with cassettes and new batteries, and we gave them food. Towards the end of filming, we started to deprive them of food: on the last day, they basically lived on a banana and a little juice. »
Sánchez immediately clarified: “Our producer, Gregg Hale, was in the army and had undergone special forces training. He therefore directed the entire “ensuring the safety of the actors” part, and had determined emergency routes for all locations. [Les acteurs] had a walkie-talkie with them. If they needed anything, all they had to do was call. »
A visceral experience
The result was a diabolically effective “documenter”. In 2019, Jake Kring-Schreifels recalled in the New York Times : “What ultimately emerged—a feature-length film composed of scenes stitched together from shaky home video footage—made the disappearance of the three characters all the more authentic and terrifying. »
“Tremblant” is in this case the appropriate adjective to speak of the images imitated many times subsequently. If this bias increased the impression of authenticity, it was above all inducing nausea, making the experience even more “physical”, and therefore visceral.
In this regard, Roger Ebert, who in 1999 gave the film a perfect score, returns in his review to a close-up that has become emblematic: “Finally, the courageous attitude [d’Heather] disintegrates in a remarkable shot during which she films her own apology (I was reminded of explorer Robert Scott’s notebook notes as he froze to death in Antarctica). In an age where digital techniques can show us almost anything, The Blair Witch Project reminds us that what really scares us is what we can’t see. »
What followed was a small revolution within horror cinema. In his work Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of RealityAlexandra Heller-Nicholas explains: “From as far back as the radio theater Tea War of the Worlds [La guerre des mondes], by Orson Welles, fictional (or hybrid) horror products with a patina of “truth” gradually developed a formal system that signifies “the real”. The veneer of authenticity of the horror subgenre of “found footage” [ou “images trouvées”] is the result of a formal code that has developed over time. »
Mentioning Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) as a pioneering documenter, the author believes that The Blair Witch Project gave birth to the contemporary version of found footagewhose ersatz abound on digital platforms: “The creation of YouTube in 2005 and its spectacular rise in 2006 sparked a growing taste for amateur media, which in turn saw an increase in 2007 in the production of cinema films. horror found footage with the appearance of [rec] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza), Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero), and Cloverfieldat the dawn of 2008. Paired with YouTube, these films in turn paved the way for the phenomenal success of Paranormal Activity (Paranormal activity, Oren Peli; filmed in 2007, but released theatrically in 2009). »
Post-factual mush
That being said, the influence of Blair Witch Project goes beyond the boundaries of horror cinema, or even cinema, period. Certainly, the Hollywood bosses obviously quickly understood the promotional power of the Internet, but they are not the only ones to have taken note of the demonstration of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez.
In his article from Guardian, Steve Rose asks the question this way: “Looking at our current post-factual stew of fake news, conspiracy theories, fabricated mythologies and unreliable sources, trust in “stuff read on the internet” is at most down. Could it be that someone noticed the effectiveness of the viral campaign of Blair Witch, based on lies, fear and gullibility, and decided that this one was too good to simply promote films? »
Therefore, we can wonder if the creators of Blair Witch Project did not play, despite themselves… the sorcerers’ apprentices.
The film The Blair Witch Project is available on several platforms.