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Blair witch9/3/2023 ![]() The chilling final shot in particular stands out at the scariest moment in the entire film, and has become an iconic image.Title text: "Are you concerned the witches won't breed in captivity?" "Honestly, we're more concerned that they WILL. And even disgruntled critics would be hard-pressed to deny the effectiveness of The Blair Witch Project's last act. Plus, it isn't like the monster is totally absent: we see what it does, how it haunts and pursues and threatens those who enter its domain. The Blair Witch Project pushes us to recognize that our imagination can be scarier than anything filmmakers visualize onscreen. Rather than showing us the monster, it makes us afraid of the unknown - of what we don't see. This approach has turned some viewers away, and there are those who wish it revealed the titular Blair Witch early in the film. What makes it so effective is the way it slowly builds tension, becoming increasingly unsettling before it finally explodes into outright horror. Thankfully, The Blair Witch Project is incredibly scary, and has long been considered one of the most terrifying horror films ever made. Despite all it did to shake up the horror genre, the film would nevertheless have risked flopping at the box office if it didn't succeed in frightening viewers. Though highly innovative for its time, The Blair Witch Project was still a horror movie, meaning that audiences came to theaters with the expectation that they would be scared. These innovative marketing strategies helped the film garner nearly $250 million at the box office - a monumental achievement for something that cost only a few hundred thousand dollars to make. In the same year that the film was released, the website received 160 million visitors. Fake police reports, interviews, and other supplementary materials were used to enhance the sense of realism. This campaign included an official website that tried to pass off the movie as a real tragedy that left three young students missing ( per Braithwaite). Once The Blair Witch Project was picked up by Artisan Entertainment for distribution, they began an aggressive internet marketing campaign - one of the first of its kind. This gave audiences the feeling that what they were seeing was not superficially horrifying, but really and truly so. When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999, the cast members, who were credited under their real names, were listed as missing or deceased. Found footage was the perfect filmmaking model to make this presentation work, but it went further than that. The genius of The Blair Witch Project's marketing was they way it presented the events of the film as things that really happened. Sometimes, a movie is only as successful as its marketing campaign. Thus, where other found footage movies failed to create a guise of authenticity, The Blair Witch Project did so successfully, making found footage a staple subgenre of horror cinema. ![]() It's a convincing effect, one heightened by the low-quality camera and audio equipment used to capture it all. Because they truly are out in the woods, their terror when they realize they are lost and in danger comes across as believable. The Blair Witch Project does this especially well thanks to its cast, who do an excellent job of pretending that they're not acting. These choices serve to make the movie appear "real," in part because of how un-staged and stripped down everything is in comparison to most film productions. Of course, this is an intentional effect on the part of the director, who wanted to make it seem as though they had discovered the footage in the abandoned cameras of three missing filmmakers. Thanks to its amateur, handheld-camera-footage style, it appears that the events of the film really happened to the people involved. Although The Blair Witch Project didn't invent the found footage genre, it certainly popularized it. ![]() Oftentimes, found footage movies make use of first-person perspective and may be presented as pseudo-documentaries in an effort to trick audiences into accepting their authenticity. The meaning of the "found footage" style of filmmaking lies in the name: footage is presented as though it was discovered (i.e., found) rather than scripted, directed, and recorded by professionals.
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