Claim: The movie The Blair Witch Project is based on footage
shot by three student filmmakers who mysteriously disappeared while
making a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch.
Status: False.
Origins: It sounds like one of the spookiest movies ever. As the
ads for the film The Blair Witch Project state:
In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the
woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a
documentary.
A year later their footage was found.
The official
web site for The Blair Witch Project explains the mythology behind
the Blair Witch legend that these students were supposedly
investigating: In 1785, a woman accused of witchcraft is banished
from the village of Blair, Maryland, and a year later, her accusers
and half of Blair's children vanish. The town of Burkittsville is
established at the site of the abandoned village about forty years
later, and over the next 150 years a series of child murders and
mutilations takes place. In 1994, three students decide to travel
to Burkittsville to film interviews with locals about the Blair
Witch legend as a class project, and a couple of days later they
disappear in nearby woods. No trace of them is found until the
footage they shot is discovered under an old cabin a year
later.
Scary, isn't it? And early reports of the film indicate that it
lives up to its chilling reputation. We hate to spoil something so
deliciously horrific, but the truth is that the film isn't really
what it's described to be.
First of all, the "facts" behind the Blair Witch legend are
apocryphal. The rare 1809 book The Blair Witch Cult, which is
"commonly considered fiction" and "tells of an entire town cursed
by an outcast witch," isn't real. (As the web site informs us, only
one copy of the book exists, conveniently in the hands of an
unnamed private collector.) A hermit who allegedly "ritualistically
murdered and disemboweled" seven children in 1940-41 at the behest
of "an old woman ghost who occupied the woods near his house" was
"quickly convicted and hanged," yet none of the area newspapers
apparently saw fit to cover this sensational story. When the three
student filmmakers allegedly disappeared in 1994, the Maryland
State Police reportedly spent ten days and "33,000 man hours"
employing dogs, helicopters, a hundred men, and even a "fly over by
a Department of Defense Satellite" to locate them, but once again
media coverage of this sensational, newsworthy event was completely
non-existent. (The citizens of Burkittsville and the Frederick
County Sheriff's Department are happy to confirm the fictionality
of these events.)
So what's the film all about?
The legend of the Blair Witch was invented by the film's
writer/directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Myrick and
Sánchez hired three young actors (Heather Donahue, Michael
Williams, and Joshua Leonard), explained the outline of the film's
story to them, gave them advice about the characters they were to
play, then turned them loose in the woods with film equipment to
shoot movie footage. The actors received notes and supplies left
for them and carried a Global Positioning System (GPS) device with
them for tracking purposes, but they didn't know exactly what was
going to happen once they embarked on their movie-making venture --
thus the film has the feel of a documentary that captures events
genuinely surprising to the filmmakers. (If you're still convinced
the movie's premise is real, perhaps the fact that the "dead" film
students are giving interviews -- such as the one in Salon -- will
dissuade you.) Adding to the movie's pre-release build-up was the
airing on the Sci-Fi Channel of a fictional documentary, The Curse
of the Blair Witch, about the putative Blair Witch legend and the
making of the related film. (Remember, the "Fi" in "Sci-Fi" stands
for fiction.)
It sounds like a spine-tingling premise for a horror film, and it
has reportedly made for a terrific movie. But it's just a film, not
a true story.