Blair Witch Project
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Blair Witch Project |
| Original title | The Blair Witch Project |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1999 |
| length | 78 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Daniel Myrick Eduardo Sánchez |
| script | Daniel Myrick Eduardo Sánchez |
| production |
Robin Cowie Gregg Hale |
| music | Tony Cora |
| camera | Neal Fredericks |
| cut | Daniel Myrick Eduardo Sánchez |
| occupation | |
| |
| chronology | |
|
Successor → |
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Blair Witch Project is an American horror film from 1999. The pseudo-documentary found footage film was produced by Haxan Entertainment, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez . The film became popular on the Internet even before it was released in theaters, where - due to deliberately disseminated misleading information from the film studio - it was discussed whether it was an actual documentary or a feature film.
action
The film begins with the following text overlay: “In October 1994, three students disappeared in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland, while making a documentary. Her film recordings were found a year later. "
Then the "found" footage is shown: The three students Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard and Michael "Mike" C. Williams are planning a trip to Burkittsville , Maryland and the surrounding area to shoot a documentary about the Blair Witch . All of the film material that the viewer gets to see comes from the three students, who have a video camera and a 16 mm film camera with them during the entire time.
First the three of them drive to the small town of Burkittsville, formerly Blair , to ask the local residents about the Blair Witch cult . They hear contradicting opinions. While some of the city dwellers believe this myth is a horror tale, others believe it is true. An elderly woman named Mary Brown claims to have seen the Blair Witch with her own eyes. The students also receive some information from the local residents about Elly Kedward , Rustin Parr and the Burkittsville 7 , which are said to be seven of the local children who were killed. Heather also finds out that these were allegedly killed by the hermit Rustin Parr: one child had to stand in a corner facing the wall while another was murdered in the same room, after which the other child was killed.
After being questioned in town, the three students drive to the Black Hills Forest , where the Blair witch is said to live. They park their car on the side of the road, shoulder their rucksacks and enter the forest. After a short time they meet two anglers who disagree about the existence of the witch, but neither of them would go deeper into the forest. Undeterred by this, Heather leads her companions to the first destination of their expedition : Coffin Rock . Here the trio spends its first night in the forest. After a long search and a lot of trouble reading maps , they reached an old cemetery the next day . There they find seven piles of stones; each of which is said to be for one of the seven Burkittsville children. Soon after, it begins to get dark. In order not to have to wander through the darkness, Heather, Josh and Mike decide to pitch their tent again and spend the night before hiking back to Coffin Rock. In the middle of the night they are woken up by strange noises, but cannot tell who or what is causing them.
The next day they want to return to their car, as the expedition has been completed for the time being and the cameras they have borrowed have to be returned the next morning. However, Heather is having more and more trouble finding her way around the map. When Josh and Mike intervene, they become completely disoriented and an argument breaks out. As night has fallen again, the return journey has to be postponed. Scary things happen again during the night: New noises, including some that sound like children's screams, cause the three of them to panic. It always seems like someone or something is sneaking around their tent, but when Mike looks there is no one to be found.
The next morning the students find three piles of stones scattered around the tent. Heather is convinced that they weren't there the night before. Slowly the students just want to escape the strange forest. The remaining days consist of desperate wandering after Mike, who like the others is slowly losing his nerve, has thrown away the card. Soon afterwards they reach a small clearing where strange figures made of twigs and twine have been hung all over the trees. The nights are also getting worse and worse, again the trio hears noises and supposed children's screams. When an invisible force shook the tent, the three of them flee and spent the night in the open.
The next morning Josh disappeared without a trace. Heather and Mike are desperately looking for him, but there is no trace to be found - until the following night they hear Josh screams in pain from afar. Mike and Heather call for him but get no answer. Only the screams can still be heard. The next morning there is a bundle in front of her tent in which something bloody can be found: the individual teeth, perfectly cut out of the jaw, and individual fingers of the missing Josh. Heather disappears the bundle without telling Mike about it. Heather and Mike hardly believe in their own survival, let alone in Josh's survival, and are on the verge of a mental breakdown.
The next night the two startle because they think they can hear Josh's screams again. You get out of the tent and follow the tortured voice. She comes from a small, dilapidated, two-story house. Mike immediately storms into the building, and believing he can hear the screams from the upper floor, he runs up the stairs. But only a little later he says that the screaming comes from the cellar, which is why he runs down again. Meanwhile, Heather struggles to follow Mike's hasty movements. Shortly after Mike arrives in the basement, his filming breaks off after an audible hit on the camera and its fall to the floor, and the viewer now only follows Heather, who - also with her camera - runs down the stairs. Once in the basement, she sees Mike standing in a corner with his face to the wall. Shortly afterwards this camera also falls to the ground, Heather's voice falls silent, and the credits begin.
History of origin
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, two film students at the University of Central Florida , have known each other since 1990 and spent a large part of their student days making short amateur films together. In 1993 they had the idea of making a horror film that was to be presented as a documentary . At the time, they were very impressed by the TV documentary series In Search of ... from the 1970s, in which an eerie voice led the viewer through broadcasts full of - allegedly real - photos of UFOs , aliens and other monsters. This inspired Myrick and Sánchez and wanted to give the moviegoers a similar feeling to what the series had created for them back then.
In 1996, they selected three unknown young actors from 2000 applicants who would play the leading roles in The Blair Witch Project under their real names - Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams .
The film was shot in Burkittsville, Seneca Creek State Park and Patapsco Valley State Park (both in Maryland). The three actors, who had previously attended an introductory camera work course, equipped with a 16 mm and a handheld video camera, were sent into the forest and had eight days to get the film into the box. Their only connection with the directors was a walkie-talkie , which gave them more detailed information about where their next filming location was going to be. They could reach this with the help of a GPS navigation system.
When they arrived at the location, the actors found food for the next day and a slip of paper outlining what the following scenes should look like. There was no precise script , the entire text was improvised . During the course of the shooting days, the food rations that were leaked to Heather, Josh and Mike were constantly reduced, so that their physical and mental condition deteriorated realistically. So the slow loss of nerves and mental clarity should be played as realistically as possible. In fact, however, the actors' situation was very different from that of their roles, as they had escape routes and radio links in case of an emergency.
Originally, the two directors planned to combine the material shot by the actors with a background story. The fictional newsreels of the 1940s and an (alleged) television program that cleared up mysterious events should be used for this purpose. These technically higher quality recordings would have complemented the improvised Hi-8 handheld camera scenes. In eight months in the editing room, two very different versions of the film were made - one by each director - after which Myrick and Sánchez gave up the idea and only used the actors' material.
In August 1998, ten months after the film was made, Dan Myrick and Ed Sánchez put a website on the Internet, disguised as a factual report, about the disappearance of three film students in the woods around Burkittsville in 1994 and the search for them informed them as well as the discovery of their equipment, including the footage. The legend of the Blair Witch was also explained and described in great detail. Fictional interviews with family members and acquaintances of the disappeared made the deception perfect. The website soon reached the one million visitor mark.
In January 1999, the finished product, The Blair Witch Project, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival . In June 1999 the film was shown in only 27 US cinemas for the time being. Due to the huge influx of viewers, however, more cinemas were found, and ultimately the work was shown in a total of 1,100 cinemas. The cost was just $ 60,000 , most of which was invested in the two cameras and the trip to the locations. On the first weekend, the film had grossed just under 29 million dollars, and total worldwide revenues at the end of 1999 were over 248 million US dollars. This makes The Blair Witch Project one of the highest grossing films relative to its cost. Only the US porn film Deep Throat by Gerard Damiano from 1972 shows an even better return on sales with sales of 600 million dollars compared to costs of 25,000 dollars . In the Guinness Book of Records , Blair Witch Project replaced the then record holder Mad Max .
According to director Eduardo Sánchez, the budget for the Blair Witch Project was originally around $ 25,000, but when it was completed the film cost around $ 500,000 to $ 750,000.
The film premiered in Germany at the Fantasy Film Festival .
Backstory of the production
Not only does the film fake its documentary character, but the creepy myth of a witch in Blair, an abandoned place in northern Maryland, sprang from the filmmakers' imagination. With meticulous imagination, they developed a historical timetable . They went back 200 years in history. The focus is on an enigmatic woman who is later only called the Blair Witch . Over the years, more and more legends have grown up about this person.
Historical “evidence”, such as the edition of a book published in 1809 entitled The Blair Witch Cult , or an allegedly cinematic document from around 1940 reporting a serial killer acting on behalf of the witch, were also found by the producers in set the world. The myth is also based on photos of scenes associated with events related to the Blair Witch phenomenon.
The book The Blair Witch Project by DA Stern (1999) now spins this legend further - with new, fictional documents of the mysterious disappearance of Heather and her film crew. With Heather's diary that she wrote while she was in the woods, with police photos of crime scenes, with the discovery of the reels and Joshua's car parked on Black Rock Road, which seems to be full of clues. There are also “real” interviews with detectives and the parents of the film crew, which were recorded after they disappeared. The Blair Witch Myth is a nested, multi-layered puzzle with many questions - and more than one possible answer.
All events surrounding the three students between October 20 and 25, 1994 were allegedly found on film reels, processed and are now known as the film The Blair Witch Project . The bodies of the characters featured in these film roles were also found by a research team five years after their death.
The producers deliberately composed the legends surrounding this film, using a mixture of facts and fictional elements. The biographies, some of which were made up, can still be found on some film websites.
The story of the hermit Rustin Parr was additionally embellished by DA Stern in the book Blair Witch: The Confessions of Rustin Parr (2000) and provided with further "historical photos".
Reception and reviews
Despite the great success with the audience, the reactions of the critics to the film were mixed. The generally benevolent prisma-online rates the Blair Witch Project as “lousy” and finds it “astonishing that this work made waves in the USA and grossed around 250 million dollars with a low budget of around 60,000 dollars worldwide. Because the concept of a quasi-documentation is inconsistent and the students apparently too stupid to go down a river. ”The criticism admits that if you don't ask yourself about the inconsistencies in the alleged“ state of panic fear ”, you think of it Film “could get goose bumps every now and then”.
The film is viewed more positively by the lexicon of international film , according to which Blair Witch Project “cleverly combines human primal fears, archaic fairy tale constellations and references to national myths with current tendencies in media use” and represents a “very clever debut film with many cultural, historical and cinematic references” .
In the Frankfurter Allgemeine , the film, together with Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic - Power of the Cartel , was seen as the “aesthetic answer” to the film production manifesto “ Dogma 95 ”.
The Blair Witch Project has been used as a comparison for other films or books on various occasions, whereby it is rated partly positive, partly negative. In a report on the film Wolf Creek in the magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung , the Blair Witch Project was rated as "silly [...], like an over-constructed prank". In a review of a Stephen King book in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, however, the “efficient […] use of effects” of the Blair Witch Project was recognized, in which “so much tension and sympathy is generated with so little means”. In an article about M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung certified the film as "uniquely haunting" to evoke the human "primitive fear of forests".
Awards
The film received several awards. At the International Film Festival in Cannes , a jury of 18 to 25-year-old scriptwriters awarded the directors the Prix de la Jeunesse in the Foreign Film category . Blair Witch Project won a further ten prizes in 1999 and 2000 and was nominated for a further 16 prizes, mostly for less well-known film prizes or for film prizes specializing in horror (e.g. Saturn Award ) or in less central categories ( Best Action Sequence at MTV Movie Awards ).
Soundtrack
The pseudo-documentary character of the film was also reinforced by the soundtrack. In fact, none of the songs, which mainly belong to the Gothic and Post-Industrial environment, can be heard in the film. Instead, it was said that a cassette was found in Joshua's car after he disappeared. Their content was then released on CD as Josh's Blair Witch Mix . The only title that really has anything to do with the film is The Cellar - this was used to underpin the nighttime recordings and the credits.
The CD contains:
- Lydia Lunch - Gloomy Sunday
- Public Image Ltd. - The Order of Death
- Skinny Puppy - Draining Faces
- Bauhaus - Kingdom's Coming
- The Creatures - Don't Go To Sleep Without Me
- Laibach - God is God
- The Afghan Whigs - Beware
- Front Line Assembly - Laughing Pain
- Type O Negative - Haunted
- Meat Beat Manifesto - She's unreal
- Tones on Tail - Movement of Fear
- Antonio Cora - The Cellar
Sequels
- 2000: Blair Witch 2
- 2016: Blair Witch
Adaptations and imitators
Because of its great success, three PC games were created based on the film. In addition, it was later alluded to in several television series (e.g. Charmed - The Magic Witches , The Simpsons , One Tree Hill , Bones - The Bone Hunter or Dawson's Creek ) and the feature film Scary Movie on Blair Witch Project . The first "TV" series produced for German mobile phones but not yet broadcast, Kill Your Darling , in which three young people get lost in Berlin's underground, is intended to be reminiscent of the American horror film in its plot and its hand-held camera aesthetic, which prefers close-ups.
In addition, several films were made using the found footage principle of Blair Witch Project in the following years , including the monster film Cloverfield and the horror films [REC] , Paranormal Activity , Trollhunter and Grave Encounters .
literature
- Christoph Elles, Dominic Grzbielok: The phenomenon of counterfeiting in the media. Fiction and reality. VDM Müller, Saarbrücken 2007, ISBN 978-3-8364-0710-6 (Chapter The Blair Witch Project. ) Pp. 16–81.
- Norbert Groeben, Margrit Schreier, Christine Navarra: The disappearance of the boundary between reality and fiction. A content analysis study of the reception of the movie "The Blair Witch Project". In: Achim Baum (ed.): Facts and fictions. About dealing with media realities. UVK, Konstanz 2002, ISBN 3-89669-351-4 , pp. 271-282.
- Jane Roscoe: The Blair Witch Project. Mock-documentary goes mainstream. In: Jump Cut. No. 43, 2000, pp. 3-8. (Full text)
- Margrit Schreier: Please Help Me; All I Want to Know Is: Is It Real or Not? How Recipients View the Reality Status of The Blair Witch Project. In: Poetics Today. Vol. 25, Issue 2, 2004, pp. 305–334. doi: 10.1215 / 03335372-25-2-305 (full text, analysis of the film's reception)
- DA star: Blair Witch Project. Goldmann Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-442-44666-X .
- DA star: Blair Witch. The Confessions of Rustin Parr. Goldmann Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-44974-X .
- DA Stern: Blair Witch 2. Goldmann Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-44975-8 .
Web links
- Blair Witch Project in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- Blair Witch Project atRotten Tomatoes(English)
- Official Film Website (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Certificate of Release for Blair Witch Project . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2013 (PDF; test number: 140 709 V).
- ↑ Indie Horror Month Tip of the Scalpel: The Blair Witch Project
- ^ A b Anthony Kaufman: Season of the Witch. The "Blair Witch" Directors On the Method to Their Madness. ( Memento from January 5, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) In: The Village Voice . July 13, 1999, accessed March 1, 2008.
- ^ The Blair Witch Project , boxofficemojo.com , accessed March 1, 2008.
- ^ John Young, "The Blair Witch Project," 10 years later: Catching up with the directors of the horror sensation , Entertainment Weekly, July 9, 2009.
- ^ The Blair Witch Project , goodreads.com, accessed March 12, 2015.
- ↑ The Blair Witch Project , lovelybooks.de, accessed on March 12, 2015.
- ↑ David A. Stern: Blair Witch: The Confessions of Rustin Parr , buchwurm.org, accessed March 12, 2015.
- ^ Blair Witch Project grossing income , IMDB.com
- ^ The Blair Witch Project , prisma-online.de , accessed March 1, 2008.
- ^ Blair Witch Project in the Lexicon of International Films , accessed March 1, 2008.
- ^ Andreas Kilb: A Kingdom for a Revolution , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 2, 2005, No. 125 / page 39, accessed March 1, 2008.
- ^ Helmut Krausser, Neo Rauch: Die Deutschlandreise. 31.7. Rostock. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Süddeutsche Zeitung , accessed March 1, 2008.
- ↑ She has to hike for nine days and eight nights , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 15, 2000, No. 12 / Page V, accessed March 1, 2008.
- ↑ Andreas Maurer: A little man stands in the forest. M. Night Shyamalan's “The Village” , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , September 3, 2004, accessed May 9, 2019
- ↑ (Interview) Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett Talk 'Blair Witch' #SDCC
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↑ Senta Krasser: Lost in Berlin , Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 4, 2006
Kurt Sagatz: Blair Witch for the cell phone , Tagesspiegel , October 11, 2006, both accessed on March 1, 2008.
