Heather Donahue in The Blair Witch Project. Photograph: Pathe/Allstar
‘It soothes me’: why The Blair Witch Project is my feelgood movie
The latest in our series of writers highlighting their most rewatched comfort films is a dread-filled journey into the woods
I’m not sure I could blame anyone for choosing, as their feelgood film, a film in which the characters feel good. Cinema is supposed to manipulate us emotionally - that’s the whole point. Nemo feels good when he’s found, and we feel good for him. By this logic, horror films should make us feel bad. So, when it was released in 1999, why did The Blair Witch Project – a film in which three film students are hunted, terrorised and presumably killed by an unseen entity – make nearly $250m at the box office? That’s the same as Love Actually. Of all the millions of people who paid to sit and watch Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s claustrophobic found-footage nightmare, I’m sure that not a single one of them entered the cinema hoping for their day to be ruined.
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I was technically too young to see The Blair Witch Project when it came out, but like so many other children of laissez-faire 90s parents, I found a way. And that way was a friend’s sleepover. Fingers slick with Pizza Hut grease, we slid the 15 certificate VHS cassette into the player and gleefully waited to have the shit scared out of us. And it did. But not in the way we were used to. Up until this point, I’d seen the likes of Hellraiser, Candyman and Nightmare on Elm Street – horror meant guts strewn across the screen like party streamers. But what Blair Witch lacked in viscera is made up for in pure, uncut dread. The fact that you never even see the titular witch somehow made it even more terrifying. Believe me, in the imagination of a child who’d been fed horror films like multipack breakfast cereals, that witch was scarier than Pinhead and Freddy Krueger’s bastard baby. And I … loved her?
The found footage format of Blair Witch was so innovative at the time that, paired with clever marketing, a lot of people thought it was real. While I can’t remember being caught up in this particular wave of hysteria over the film, it did remind me of something my older brother might have shot on his handheld camcorder. One such film involved our dad running around a graveyard in a werewolf mask. And while I’m not sure Werewolf of the City could have been mistaken for proof of the existence of werewolves, it is maybe the found footage masterpiece you’ve never heard of. But aside from it reminding me of my brother’s early work, I was transfixed by Blair Witch.
The scares creep up on you and permeate your bones. We watch three film students – Heather, the irritating type-A calling the shots, flanked by two cynical gen X guys – descend into the Maryland wilderness to make a documentary about a murderous witch who supposedly haunts the area. Hashing out the horror trope of the hubris of young people, the students find themselves psychologically tortured by eerie twine handicrafts, lost and ultimately lured to their death in a derelict house. Real feelgood stuff. Sure, not in the traditional sense. More in the sense that every shaky, handheld frame capturing their downfall is so compellingly realistic that it momentarily deletes whatever real-life angst may be on the mind of you, the viewer. In the film’s climax; Heather’s hyperventilating, tearful speech to her and her fellow students’ parents, she says, “I’m scared to close my eyes. I’m scared to open them.” This is the paradox at the heart of so much horror; you don’t want to look, and yet you can’t look away.
When you’re so torn between looking and not looking, all that matters in the world is what’s onscreen. Which is probably why I, a deeply anxious person, have now watched Blair Witch so many times. It soothes me. If I’m on the point of a panic attack, why on earth would I want to watch a film about people who aren’t? Good for them? No. Nothing is more comforting to me than comfortably observing others descend (fictionally speaking) into hell. I suppose it’s a similar feeling to being at home, curled up on the sofa during a thunderstorm. I’m not being chased through the wilderness by a mad, cackling wraith, but by watching this very thing happen to actors, the small amount of their fear that I get to experience acts as a vaccine against fear itself. Think of it as medicinal dread. I don’t think I’ll live to see doctors prescribe Blair Witch or any other horror film as a treatment for anxiety. But it sure as hell beats adult colouring books and breathwork. The Blair Witch Project is available on HBO Max in the US, Netflix in the UK and Stan in Australia Explore more on these topics
