YMMV / The Blair Witch Project

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Heather seems to be filming almost constantly for the whole time they are in the woods, long after almost anyone would have stopped. Her motivation for obsessively documenting everything becomes less and less clear, and throughout the film she gets a lot of footage she couldn't reasonably expect to use even if they did manage to get out of the woods, such as her and Josh violently berating and briefly physically attacking Mike for destroying the map, and multiple instances of herself sobbing, during which she makes sure the camera is pointed at her. Mike even has to stop her from recording Josh's breakdown, and throughout the film a major source of conflict among the group is the fact that Heather just won't turn the camera off. Toward the end of the film, Josh suggests that the reason Heather is "still making her movie" is because it allows her to disassociate from the reality of the situation; the danger and hopelessness are less real if she is only watching them through a camera lens as a movie, not something which she is a part of.
  • Eventually, Heather realizes she might not make it out of the woods alive, so she may be filming to provide evidence of what happened to her, Mike, and Josh.
  • MatPat from Film Theory proposed that the movie is really a (fictional) snuff film of Josh and Mike luring Heather into the woods to murder her.
  • Some theories as to the true nature of the Blair Witch include that everything supernatural that happens to the trio can be rather logically explained. Case in point, the Eldritch Location of the woods, where compasses don't work and landmarks repeat themselves: A Compass can be easily fooled with powerful, natural magnets and landmarks can be convincingly faked (even a river can be diverted with some preparation). While the terror may be real, and someone's after the kids, there may be nothing supernatural involved (though this theory and the above snuff one may be undermined by the Parr house, which was burned down decades prior to the events of the film, reappeared for the trio, and then returned to a demolished state afterward, with the camera being found in the undisturbed foundation).
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Burkittsville, MD is a real town with a population of less than 200. It was flooded with tourists after the film's release, angering its residents.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Miramax passed on the opportunity to acquire and distribute the movie. The decision was made by Jason Blum who didn't think the movie would be a hit.
• Complete Monster: Hecaitomix, from the 2000 video game trilogy, is the evil spirit behind Elly Kedward and Rustin Parr, starting the Blair Witch legend, and the true source of the curse. Angered that he is no longer worshipped, Hecaitomix spent centuries torturing and killing, children specifically, with the goal of wiping out the human race and ruling over what's left. Hecaitomix disemboweled a child, dubbed the "bleeding child", and kept him alive to feed on before trapping the child in his realm. He also conquered a spiritual realm and turns the spirits there into demons. Hecaitomix has Robin Weaver abducted and attempts to possess her, and in the ritual traps children's souls and keeps mutilated victims alive and conscious. Hecaitomix bargains with a man to cure his blindness and turns him into another demon to do so. After Rustin Parr's killing spree, Hecaitomix possesses Kyle Brody to use him as a new vessel, before moving on to a local pastor, and plots to abduct Mary Brown to subject her to the same fate as he did the bleeding child.
• Delusion Conclusion: A common interpretation is that there is no Blair Witch at all, the students just got lost and went mad because of hunger and isolation. Some of this stems from an early draft of the script, where the two fishermen would have been revealed to have pranked the whole thing.
• Epileptic Trees: Fans have gone on for pages and pages debating what is attacking the main characters in the movie.
• Genre Turning Point: While it didn't invent the found footage film, it did help popularize the genre in its wake and show how it could be used to make an effective horror film on No Budget. Going beyond film, its unique marketing campaign not only popularized online Viral Marketing, it's been cited as an important progenitor to the creepypasta.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The misery and despair Heather Donahue (the character) goes through in this film stings harder knowing that Heather Donahue (the actor) struggled terribly with being typecast for her role, ultimately leading her to leave her acting career behind for pot farming. Though she doesn't hold contempt for the film and still attends conventions honoring the role, it's telling that her first reaction to hearing of Blair Witch in 2016 was a depressed bourbon binge over the thought of the first film and her "signature" role being thrust into the limelight again.^note Fortunately her worries were for naught, as Lionsgate avoided using the original actors' names and images in promotion of the film.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At one point, Heather asks "Do we have any weed?" When her actress, Heather Donahue, dropped out of acting, she got work as a legal grower of medicinal marijuana.
  • Additionally, an early idea for the ending would reveal that either the fisherman or his son-in-law would have been pranking the main characters all along. But this was rejected for sounding too similar to Scooby-Doo. Then Cartoon Network made a short called The Scooby-Doo Project parodying the film for a Scooby Doo marathon. The ending even showed that the whole thing was a prank by some guy...until the real monster shows up.
• Hype Backlash: Upon release, The Blair Witch Project was praised as one of the scariest movies of all time, but some of this reputation was due to its Alternate Reality Game-esque advertising, which painted the events of the film as real. Modern viewers are well aware that the movie is fictional, so they may be less impressed as a result. (Even at the time, older viewers may have been less affected by the viral marketing campaign and rumors that the story was true.)
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • If the film scared you, watch it with the DVD commentary and that'll quickly change. The producers all goof around discussing things like getting the rights for the groceries in the movie, Josh being "abducted" so early because he had to go to work on the third day of filming in the woods, and how the actors tried to jokingly catch them on camera when making noise in the middle of the night. The creepy image of the children's hand-prints on the halls of the old house is a bit hard to take seriously when the producers talk happily about bringing a gaggle of kids in in and just how much fun they had smearing their handprints all over the walls.
  • Heather's apology is a chilling scene, but the booger hanging off of her nose has taken more than a few people out of it. Scary Movie parodied it by having a geyser of snot pouring out of Cheri Oteri's nose during its take on the scene.
• Once Original, Now Common: The Blair Witch Project was the film that brought both found footage and internet-based Viral Marketing into the mainstream, allowing the micro-budgeted indie horror flick to become a box-office smash and a cultural touchstone for the late '90s/early '00s. At the time, the idea that it really was the "recovered footage" of a group of documentary filmmakers who went missing was the entire gimmick. Between the many, many, many found-footage horror films that have employed similar concepts, and the fact that the passage of time has distanced the film from its revolutionary marketing campaign, this can be lost on modern viewers.
• Paranoia Fuel: Try going to the woods after watching this movie and not feeling like something's watching you...
• The Problem with Licensed Games: There were three Blair Witch games made using the Nocturne (1999) engine, with the first one tying into that game as well. The general consensus is that the first game is good, the second is lousy, and the third is all right.
• Realism-Induced Horror: The potential ghost aside, the film captures the very real feeling of getting lost in the wilderness and how disconcerting that can be. Especially in an age before smartphones, GPS or widespread internet (the film is set a few years earlier in 1994, where the students most certainly wouldn't have access to any of those things).
• Signature Scene:
  • The apology scene, quoted atop the work page, in which the camera focuses on half of Heather's face as she stammers through an apology, alone and scared out of her mind.
  • The second to last scene of the film of Mike standing in the corner of the cellar, facing away from the camera, in complete silence.
• Special Effect Failure: A special variant of this occurs in the 'extra found footage' sometimes called a deleted scene. It's supposedly part of the documentary footage, but it's much clearer than the film in the original footage, and the actors really don't look like they've been under the same physical circumstances they were in during the making of the film proper.
• Tear Jerker:
  • After the students realise they're lost, they have a discussion about how they're sure it won't be for long; Josh notes that his girlfriend will surely know something's wrong when he doesn't come home, and there will be people out looking for them. Heather reassuringly says that it's hard to stay lost in America these days.
  • Heather and Josh panicking when the map goes missing, the former convinced the others took it and are pranking her and the latter is sure she had to have lost it. Then Mike has to go and reveal he kicked the map in the creek in fury.
  • The apology scene. Heather realises she's likely never going to get home and see her friends or family again, and she apologises to the mothers of Josh and Mike - saying that since it was her film, they'll never see their children again because of her.
  • "You gonna write us a happy ending, Heather?"
  • Josh going missing and Heather desperately screaming his name into the woods.
  • The spin-off novels The Blair Witch Files revolves around Heather's cousin trying to figure out what happened. In the final book, we get to meet her mother, who's still keeping Heather's room exactly as it was in the hopes she'll return one day. The books take place in the year 2000, while Heather disappeared in 1994.
• The Woobie: All of them. Although Josh and Heather go into Jerkass Woobie considering how nasty they become during the course of the film, Heather especially after all she's endured and feeling guilty for what happened to Josh, to Mike, and to her.
  • The poor little girl trying to cover her mom's mouth to stop her from talking about scary stuff. You have to wonder if she's already had her share of nightmares about the Blair Witch "getting" her, poor kid.

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