Around this time of year, the calls and texts ratchet up for Michael C. Williams, one of the lead actors in “The Blair Witch Project.”
“People, at the very least, still get a kick out of the movie, and then clearly there are still some people who are super-passionate about it,” Williams tells me.
Filmed partly in Burkittsville, about 25 minutes west of Frederick, the horror film became an instant pop culture phenomenon when it hit theaters in 1999, eventually grossing nearly $250 million worldwide from a budget of roughly $35,000.
A quarter-century later, the film has become much more than an unlikely Hollywood success story: It’s one of the most influential horror films of all time, a prescient document that predicted the way the masses would one day consume content made by regular people just trying to tell their own story.
It also remains uniquely terrifying.
“It’s a movie that taps into our primal fears with horror,” said Dan Myrick, the movie’s co-director and co-writer. “It does it in a very authentic, simple way.”
Outsized fervor
John Waters remembers the lines around the block outside the Charles Theater in July 1999.
“Everybody was screaming and yelling,” the director recalled. “It was just the kind of thing you don’t almost ever feel with an audience today in a movie theater, that kind of excitement.”
It’s easy to forget just how different 1999 was. “Genie in a Bottle” was the country’s No. 1 song, Richard Gere was the sexiest man alive and the creation of YouTube was still more than five years away.
The outsized fervor for “Blair Witch” stood in contrast to a simple story: Three aspiring film students head into the woods to make a documentary about a local myth. The trio gets lost, and blame gets passed around like a flask. It’s a horror movie, so you know what happens next.
But it was the format — found footage of a shaky, first-person-filmed search for an urban legend — that would live on long after “Blair Witch’s” theatrical run. Myrick said the original plan was for the film to be presented as a typical documentary, with about 20 minutes of found footage, but they made a last-minute creative decision to lean entirely into it, viewers’ nausea be damned.
”When we saw [an early cut] projected on a large screen, we kind of knew we had an issue,” he said with a laugh.
Many critics knew early on that Myrick and co-director/writer Eduardo Sánchez had something special (“a most inventive departure from standard horror fare” reads a New York Times review).
It also made the stars — Williams, Heather Donahue and Joshua Leonard, who used their real names in the film — overnight darlings. However, the movie’s unorthodox marketing was so committed to the bit (they’re not actors and wait, are they even still alive?) that it made it difficult for the actors to capitalize on the moment, Williams said.
”There was nowhere to put us,” he said. ”We were reality TV stars. We were unidentifiable talent, and they all thought we were actually scared in the woods.”
They weren’t the only unexpected stars. Burkittsville (population: 150) became its own draw, with enthusiastic fans descending upon the village in search of hints that the Blair Witch was, in fact, real.
The horror-obsessed visitors have slowed over the years, but some still show up around Halloween to look for shooting locations like the cemetery, according to Mayor Michael J. Robinson.
”Most people who live here don’t really care, or some can get a little upset if you bring it up, but I think it’s more of a curio at this point,” Robinson said.
Most of the woods scenes were actually filmed in Gaithersburg’s Seneca Creek State Park, which offers its own “Blair Witch” themed hikes.
Inspiring a new genre
The movie’s true boogeyman is not a witch, but rather the woods.
The panoramic views of endless trees, leaves and streams are a special kind of terrifying when all you want is the exit. As a former kid who played manhunt in the pinelands of southern New Jersey, the sort of queasy dread “Blair Witch” effortlessly taps into is still easy to imagine.
“We walked 15 hours today! We ended up in the same place!” Josh yells at Heather as his delirium turns to hopelessness. What’s worse than walking to your death? Walking in circles to it.
A recent rewatch reaffirmed the movie’s horrors. The actors’ manic performances are still compelling, and the escalating tension between them still jumps off the screen.
It was also a reminder that this movie doesn’t look or sound particularly good. Much of the dialogue is yelling, shrieking and crying. The filming is purposefully fast-moving and unstable. It’s not always in focus. (Many movies are better stoned. “The Blair Witch Project” is not one of them.)
In fact, it wasn’t even intended to be seen in theaters, Myrick said. They initially envisioned “Blair Witch” leading to television or a home-video release, formats that make the film’s approach a lot more digestible.
”I think our fantasy was to get into a decent festival and get a TV deal,” he said.
And yet that’s its ingenuity. The unvarnished display of humans melting down — mentally, physically, spiritually — grows increasingly unsettling as the characters march toward their inevitable ends. The actors’ commitment to realism, from reactions to dialogue, is a key reason why the movie is still so effective. To reach each other’s boiling points, they had code words to stop filming and take a break, Williams said.
”You can only get to that real, raw emotion if you have trust with the other actors,” he said.
Williams said he’s heard through the industry grapevine that numerous directors (”legends,” he adds) love the film, including the performances. They wonder what happened to him, he said.
”What happened to me? You didn’t hire me! That’s what happened,” Williams said. ”Where are all you filmmakers who think it’s so good?”
I tell him Waters is also a fan, which delights him.
“Blair Witch’s” influence on the genre feels as vast as the film’s woods. Franchises like “Paranormal Activity” and “Cloverfield” found major success with clear nods to “Blair Witch’s” use of found footage. Countless others have tried, and continue to do so, on the big screen, TV, YouTube and more.
“It inspired a genre,” Waters said. “Now there’s thousands of found-footage movies still today.”
While not the first to do it, “Blair Witch” expertly leans into a different type of scare — one that’s implied, not seen. The result feels more sinister than a movie based around traditional jump scares.
The movie’s potency isn’t tied to CGI or gore, but rather fear and isolation. It showed horror fans they could create genuine scares, too, without a budget.
”Everyone decided they had to go home and start a band supposedly when the Sex Pistols played,” said Eric Allen Hatch, co-founder of the New/Next Film Festival. ”And everyone decided they had to make a movie when they saw ‘Blair Witch Project.’ ”
Ongoing fight for fair treatment
Like most horror stories, this one doesn’t have a happy ending — or at least not yet.
In April, the actors released a public letter, asking Lionsgate for retroactive residuals and consultation on future “Blair Witch” projects. The original film was a nonunion production.
For the stars of a movie that grossed nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, they do not have the fame one might expect. Williams, a middle school counselor in New York who acts in the summer, said the actors spoke out to warn the next generation of artists who strike gold before joining a union or having proper representation.
”If people are finding value in your work, you should be compensated accordingly because you created the value,” the 51-year-old said. ”That’s important for us to get out there, regardless of what happens.”
Williams said the actors had a phone call with Lionsgate since the letter. It’s not clear what, if anything, will happen next, but Williams said the entertainment company acknowledged that the three actors likely ”should have done better.”
”Before we started saying this was unfair treatment, we wouldn’t have had a phone call. So they listened to at least our concerns, and I thought that was a nice way to possibly move forward,” he said. ”I’m a hopeful person.”
Lionsgate did not respond to request for comment.
Myrick said the directors support the actors’ fight. Regardless of the business issues, both are incredibly proud of their place in American film history. To Myrick, they ”hit the lottery,” and he doesn’t mean financially.
It sounds corny, Myrick said, but he’s most proud of the times when aspiring filmmakers tell him ”Blair Witch” helped convince them to pick up a camera.
”To think there might be some young Scorsese or Spielberg out there that’s going to make some awesome movie down the road,” he said, ”and they got into filmmaking because of ’Blair,’ there’s just nothing better than that.”
“The Blair Witch Project” is streaming on Peacock.
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