Candyman. The decade closed with a bang with the release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999, a supernatural horror movie made in a “found footage” style and marketed as a real story, which was key to its success.
Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, The Blair Witch Project followed three filmmaking students (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard) who ventured into the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland, to make a documentary about the local legend of the Blair Witch. Once in the woods, they began to realize that the legend isn’t entirely fictional, and they quickly found themselves living a real nightmare. The three disappeared, and what the audience watches is the “recovered footage” of their trip. The Blair Witch Project was a big box office hit and a success with critics, also becoming one of the most influential movies in the horror genre.
The impact of The Blair Witch Project was such that most viewers truly believed the story and footage were real and ventured into the woods to find clues of what happened to Heather, Michael, and Josh. Of course, they also believed the legend of the Blair Witch was real, but it was only a very elaborate and carefully planned fictional story with the purpose of selling the movie to the audience. The legend was created by Sánchez and Myrick and published on the official website for the movie, and was also explored in the mockumentary Curse of the Blair Witch. The core of the legend is the story of Elly Kedward, a Blair resident accused of witchcraft in 1785 and sentenced to death by exposure.
Elly Kedward was banished from Blair after many children accused her of performing witchcraft, and though she’s presumed dead from exposure, she was hung from a tree with stones tied to her limbs. The following year, all those who accused her and half the town’s children vanished without a trace, making way for the curse and the legend of the Blair Witch, with the townspeople leaving Blair and vowing to never mention Kedward’s name again. The town was rediscovered in 1824 and renamed Burkittsville, and the following year, a ten-year-old girl named Eileen Treacle drowned in the shallow water of Tappy East Creek, with several eye-witnesses claiming that a ghostly white hand reached out of the water and pulled her in. Eileen’s body was never recovered, and the creek became clogged, with the water useless and killing every living being who drank it. Of course, this incident was blamed on the Blair Witch, and it wasn’t the only one.
In 1886, an eight-year-old kid named Robin Weaver got lost in the forest around Blair and met an old woman whose feet “didn’t touch the ground”. The old lady took her to an abandoned house in the woods and led her to the basement, where she stayed for hours before finding a way out. The police sent a search party to her rescue, but they were killed by Kedward. After realizing that Robin fled, Kedward was furious and dragged the corpses of the search party into the forest. In late 1940, a man named Rustin Parr was ordered by the spirit of Kedward to take the first group of children he found, so he took them to his secluded house and brutally killed them. Kedward’s next assignment for Parr was “revealing his actions”, which he did, earning him a death sentence, and so Parr was executed by hanging in 1941. The amount of work and attention to detail that the creators of The Blair Witch Project put into all elements of the movie is outstanding, and the legend is equal parts believable and scary.
