Posts Tagged ‘The Blair Witch Project (1999)’

Haunting

It’s now ten years since The Blair Witch Project (1999) brought the power of cinema and the (then fledgling) internet together, with its faux-true story/documentary approach to what was actually nothing more (but certainly nothing less) than a well-told (and very creepy) spook story.

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Wicked Witch of the Web…

Can it really be already ten years since writer-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s horror revolution, The Blair Witch Project (1999), took the world and Web by storm?

In a promotional gimmick worthy of the late, great William Castle, young cineastes Myrick and Sánchez, who could see exactly how big the internet was going to get, decided to sell their grim ‘tale-to- be-told-round-the-camp-fire’ for real – the pitch, which was among the very first examples of ‘viral marketing’, and which was communicated via ‘for real’ news stories etc on the fledgling internet, was that a film made by three young student filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Joshua ‘Josh’ Leonard and Michael Williams, who all ‘play’ themselves) had been found a year after they had disappeared in the woods near the town of Burkittesville (formerly Blair), Maryland.

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‘They won’t stay dead!’

Thus screamed the tagline for George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead way back in 1968, and it would appear to have been on the money as here we are, more than 40 years later, with the world still ending not with a bang, nor for that matter a whimper, but rather with the sound of relentless shuffling, moaning, screaming and chewing.

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Redundant reboot

Oh dear – another ill-advised US remake of a European horror classic…

Regular Picturenose and Expatica readers will recall that I have previously raved over the recent work of Spanish horror directors, with [Rec] by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza a particular standout. Their tightly constructed nightmare for the The Blair Witch Project (1999) generation provided further evidence that the young directors are among the finest working in the genre today – Balagueró’s previous work, for example, also includes the excellent Fragile (2005), Darkness (2002) and, perhaps his best, Los Sin Nombre (The Nameless) (1999).

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