Watching everyone's memories of watching Blair Witch pour in is incredible. Person after person talking about dead silence in the theater, whole crowds flattened, people sobbing in the parking lot for 20 minutes, not being able to sleep. That's cinema, baby, and that's down to Heather Mike and Josh.
Speaking personally, I got an advance screener thru work, and after it was over it took me fully 45 minutes to work up the courage to leave my chair & use the bathroom. I had to drive a friend home; we spent the whole time terrified of the back of the car. I waited to make sure he got in his house.
Saw it in a small, independent theater. Terrifying. Especially when we exited after into a completely dark lobby with little piles of rocks strategically placed on the stairs and walkways and little stick effigies hanging from the rafters. The theater'd gone ALL OUT while we'd been inside.
No revisionism on this point shall be accepted from The Children Who Weren’t There: this movie *murdered* in theaters. Total buy-in. Totally rapt audience. Complete audience blowout at the end.
in my theater, there was a sizeable "i want my money back" chunk; everyone else looked liked they'd just been in a car wreck where one of their passengers died
This is how it was at my theater too. There was a substantial minority - maybe 20% - who didn't like it because "nothing happens." The rest of us went through a harrowing experience.
The campaign lead up was so great. It really felt like it was real, even though you knew it wasn't, or were pretty sure it wasn't but also maybe? They really sold it as found footage, which for me made the viewing experience terrifying (in a way that I would do again)
Right, we really shouldn't talk about the movie without talking about the build-up, the stuff online and the "documentary" on the Sci-Fi channel (which some might argue is better than the movie) and such. We went into the theater *primed*, not cold.
Context is so important here. Like explaing to kids why Nirvana was a big deal. Or Ramones. People, not everyone, but people actually thought that shit was real at my theater. They thought those kids died.
Another thing: nobody had any idea what was happening next in the last scene; the movie didn’t tip its hand. The audience was paralyzed as she ran through the house and I still remember the sound of people involuntarily moaning in the audience, building into wails.
A pure cinematic experience.
Oh absolutely! We didn't have trailers that gave away the ending, no websites/ YouTube spoilers, I remember saying to my wife, "I mean, this can't be real. The liability alone for something like this would be ridiculous." But there absolutely was that possibility in the back of your mind!
Evil Dead scared me wayyyyyyy more as a youngin than Blair Witch...Blair Witch was just novel for the time in terms of its style (and some people are big babies with horror). Something about old tattered spooky books and demon stuff feels a bit too real sometimes. And the car scene!!! OMG
I saw it with my boyfriend and did the meanest prank imaginable: after the movie, he went to the bathroom back at his apartment and when he came out, I was standing in the corner facing the wall. (I then apologized heavily for scaring him & we watched Dazed & Confused to clear out heads!)
I saw it opening day with friends, I mainly remember the silence and people staring wide-eyed at the screen. Immediately after it we went camping. Me and a friend stayed up and made little piles of stones and wooden figures. We laid them around the campsite. We woke up to screaming. 10/10 experience
When it came out I got to see it in a tiny, weird little old theater in Washington DC (sadly now closed). It was the perfect kind of place to see it, and it totally killed.
I don't usually watch horror movies, but I thought that one was totally fantastic. It was just such a neat idea at the time.
Halloween party that year, one group came as the Blair Witch Project. Every so often, they'd meet up and do a routine on, "Wait... we're back by the kitchen again? Gimme that map."
And later in the summer, we went to the “other side of the lake” for some alone time together and I confused a statute (of the Camp’s founder’s late wife), as it was dark at night in the woods, as a person watching us. We sprinted back like we were being chased by a literal monster.
i don't have nightmares. if i'm afraid i don't sleep or sleep lightly/fitfully for short periods while experiencing scary sensations. after seeing blair witch in movie house i could barely sleep and i kept imagining a woman covered in horsehair floating above my bed all night.
Yes. God. It was like, a barbenheimer level phenomenon that summer. Fkn everyone saw it, everyone was taking about it. I literally remember nothing about it except being too wound up to sleep that night.
To preface, before the movie we went camping at least once a month, usually more.
It was the first video on demand movie we ever rented, and as it ended, we sat in the dark, and my dad quietly said "maybe we won't go camping for a while."
And they haven’t been properly paid for their work, given that they basically improvised the movie based on a storyline they were given. There’s a story in Variety the NYT reposted today.
Just remembered this one: My parents went to go see it second-run, and I decided NOT to stand in the hallway coming out of the garage in a plaid shirt, facing the wall, when they came back. Would have been AMAZING and I'm sure they would have calmed down by now.
growing up 15 minutes from where this supposedly happened and seeing the damage done to the community because of this movie made it a big joke in our part of Maryland.
Burkittsville, at the time, was a few houses and a church with a graveyard. the graveyard kept getting broken into and the stones tipped over, or stolen, defaced. Since the only police were sparse patrols by the sheriffs, they couldn't really keep up. The church had to close access, put up fencing
