The story goes that in 1994, three student filmmakers (Heather, Josh and Mike) disappeared while shooting a documentary investigating the legend of the ‘Blair Witch’ in the woods around Burkittsville, Maryland. One year later their footage was found.
This exceedingly low-budget film was promoted like the real thing and many people, in the beginning, believed that it was. It’s done in documentary style, shot by the kids turning the cameras on themselves as they search the woods and subsequently get lost. They fight hunger, cold and each other because big mouth Heather, who headed up the project, gets them lost.
After interviewing a few people in town so we get the feel of the horror behind the Blair Witch, they end up hunting the woods for signs that the legend might be true. They bicker endlessly as they travel in circles trying to find the way back to their car when they get scared by strange sounds and little piles of rocks. Then they find larger and stranger symbols of witchcraft that surely send them scurrying. Still, they don’t know which way to go.
After a very long time of watching them make their way through woods and over streams, fighting all the way, one of them disappears or runs away and something happens to the other two. Cut to Black!
For what they were trying to do with this film, they did a decent job and I think the acting was good, but to be perfectly honest, I found it boring and completely unscary. There wasn’t much of a script; the dialogue proved that. More creativity here would have been welcome because I doubt Heather could carry on a conversation without using her favorite curse word which appeared in just about every sentence she spoke. It was very annoying and consequently I didn’t care much for her which means I didn’t care much for what happened to her too. If gophers got her or the Blair Witch, good riddance. Josh and Mike were a little more palatable but I can’t say I cared about how they may have met their ends either.
Lotta says: I’d rather have sung “Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead” than watch this sparse effort unless I were back in college studying the art of mock documentary filmmaking. It only goes to show you what good promotion is capable of.