Watching The Blair Witch Project 25 years on, we see a cautionary tale about tech

Cut to the Feeling is a monthly column by Anne T. Donahue about the art and pop culture that sparks joy, grief, nostalgia, and everything in between.

In July 1999, I was consumed by "found footage." As The Blair Witch Project promo began rolling out that summer, my fellow ninth graders and I began shaping our own worlds around the internet and the multiple versions of its reality we were naive enough to consider monolithic. 

To us, what we saw online was real. The people we met in the Seventeen chat room were real. The theatrical version of Center Stage I spent days trying to download (before my dad found out and grounded me from the computer) was the realest. Thus, the concept of "found footage" — the foundation on which The Blair Witch Project is built — felt like a tangible, viable truth. It was months after its release when I clued into the fact that The Blair Witch was not only a work of fiction, but one that necessitated viewer participation. 

Directed, written and produced by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, the film revolves around a group of college students who, in 1994, hiked into the haunted Black Hills in Maryland to film a documentary about the mythic Blair Witch. The group are never seen again, but their camcorder is found, which documents their slow march toward an unseen villain. 

The found footage (and actual movie) ends abruptly, leaving the audience to assume the worst without having seen much at all. That's exactly what adhered critics and audiences to Myrick and Sánchez's efforts: as the characters' fear and paranoia increases, so does the viewer's. Ultimately, how scary one finds The Blair Witch Project completely depends on their willingness to suspend disbelief and just imagine.

Even when I finally knew better (see: the following year), I was still consumed by its novelty because the movie offered an authenticity I hadn't seen before. Horror movies were slick, well-produced and cast with actors whose faces I recognized, while The Blair Witch Project felt achingly amateur. Myrick and Sánchez were as novice as their cast (unknowns Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard) and made this new realm of filmmaking feel achievable; any of us could create fiction like The Blair Witch if we could get our hands on some camcorders.

Of course, 25 years later and we know that some have taken this DIY concept a little too far. On top of the avalanche of found footage films that followed The Blair Witch across the 2000s, advances in tech in the last quarter-century have sparked a new wave of creativity in the form of manipulating truth. Catfishers, scammers, digitally-altered photographs and AI all sprung from our Y2K-era obsession with "found" media and the way we interact with it. 

Despite knowing better, we still believe manipulated images of celebrities on magazine covers represent a reality we can achieve through diet and exercise. Upon being asked, we still turn credit card information over to people whose faces we can't see, assuming their best intentions (or that the government really is going to send us to jail). And most recently, we watch as AI systematically decimates the creative industry, all while telling ourselves that maybe our jobs will be safe — that we are not replaceable. We know The Blair Witch Project is just a movie, but for a while it suited us more to believe it was fact.

I doubt Myrick and Sánchez foresaw the way their independent feature would balloon into a cultural touchstone, or that it would be copied and mimicked and spoofed for what feels like an eternity. I also doubt they approached it as a future benchmark for the way we, as audiences, would choose willful ignorance because sometimes it suits us a little better. They were just two filmmakers who cleaned up at Sundance and broke box office records — the end goal was not to elevate The Blair Witch Project to be the precursor for a generation's tendency to refute fact in favour of fiction.

Ultimately, the legacy of The Blair Witch is a cautionary tale. It's a warning against DIY documentary filmmaking in a haunted forest. It's a warning against forests in general (which is the excuse I use when anybody suggests I go camping). It's a warning against trying to disprove legends and against ghost-hunting, and above all, against ignoring mysterious symbols as well as that bad feeling in the pit of your stomach. Most valuably, however, its legacy lies in its reception: The Blair Witch Project shook and changed us with its "found footage" premise. We were given the facts, but chose to ignore them and let our imaginations lead the way.