The reason ‘The Blair Witch Project’ never shows the witch: “A lot of work for no results”
Throughout Hollywood history, there have been countless examples of filmmakers working within shoestring budgets to achieve a final product that is much more than the sum of its parts. In truth, sometimes limitations can be better than having all the money in the world to throw at a problem, because they force a filmmaker to get creative. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, the directors of 1999’s cult phenomenon The Blair Witch Project, know this better than most.
The story of how Myrick and Sánchez put together their found-footage chiller has gone down in horror folklore over the last two and a half decades. They hired three unknown actors to play film students Heather, Josh, and Mike, put them in the woods in Maryland, and then led them through a mostly-improvised story by giving them instructions for each of their eight shooting days in 35mm film cans spread throughout the woods. The directors and their crew would set up spooky things for the actors to come across and secretly harass them at night, all while depriving them of food and sleep.
Somehow, this unique approach yielded a film that instilled a sense of primal fear in audiences with little more than a shaky home video camera, a few creepy stick figures, and a genuinely brilliant marketing strategy—all on a budget that wouldn’t even cover catering on most Hollywood productions.
As you watch The Blair Witch Project, you become aware that these limitations lend the movie its power. Myrick and Sánchez didn’t have the money to show their characters encountering a monstrous witch in the woods, and they didn’t have the time to shoot scenes repeatedly until they were perfect. Instead, taking their cues from Steven Spielberg, who realised the shark in Jaws was more frightening to an audience when it was barely glimpsed beneath the waves, they decided only to show hints of the malevolent forces tormenting the terrified students.
Fascinatingly, though, just as with Jaws, adopting a ‘less is more’ approach wasn’t actually the director’s initial intention. When Spielberg made the thriller that gave birth to the concept of modern blockbusters, he very much intended to show the shark a lot more than it appears in the final cut. However, because the production experienced such trouble with its mechanical sharks, which kept malfunctioning, he was forced to change tactics and embrace suspense.
Similarly, one aspect of The Blair Witch Project that received praise is how Myrick and Sánchez showed incredible restraint in not showing the witch. Amusingly, that wasn’t for a lack of trying, because the directors did want to show at least one glimpse of their mysterious villain, and they even shot the scene.
One of the movie’s most infamous sequences occurs when the students’ tent begins shaking in the middle of the night, as if some unseen force is trying to get in. Unsettling children’s voices can be heard in the darkness. The actors playing Heather, Mike, and Josh all leave the tent in a panic and begin running through the woods, culminating in a terrified Heather screaming, “What the fuck is that?!” The audience can’t see what she is referring to, but we know it must be the most horrifying thing she’s ever seen.
Interestingly, this was supposed to be the scene in which the audience first laid eyes on the witch, but things didn’t exactly go to plan. “We had this trail marked out where they were gonna run out of the tent, follow the trail and then hunker down,” Myrick once revealed, explaining, “One of the people we were working with, we had them in white Long Johns, and this idea we had, taking a page from the old documentaries, it would be so cool if…in the background, you could see a little ghostly image —like a humanoid image—between the trees in the darkness.”
Myrick and Sanchez envisioned audiences catching the unsettling white figure out of the corner of their eye, but not being sure what they’d seen until they later paused the VHS tape or DVD to get a better look. It was an undeniably good idea, but on the night, even though Heather had been prepped to catch the white figure played by art director Ricardo Moreno on camera, in the commotion of running through the woods and acting terrified, she didn’t quite get the shot.
“She’s running and the camera’s shaking around, and she says, ‘What the fuck is that?!’ and for whatever reason, it just didn’t register. The image of the guy did not register, and we were kind of bummed out at the time. We made that poor soul go out there, in the middle of the woods; he even fell in the water. It was so freezing, we had to take our clothes off and cover him up.”
Initially, the crestfallen filmmakers felt like they’d committed to “A lot of work for no results”, but when they edited the movie together, they soon realised the sequence worked better when the audience couldn’t see what had frightened Heather so much. “It’s one of those happy accidents, right?” Myrick admitted. “Let the audience’s imagination envisage what she’s reacting to. Who’s to say it wouldn’t have been obvious that it was a guy in Long Johns standing there, and we [would have] had to cut that out!” Just goes to show that the truly horrifying is the faceless fear that lurks beneath the surface.
