A quarter of a century has passed since Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s bombshell surprise box office smash The Blair Witch Project. It’s fair to say the movie’s legacy has been monumental, even if its direct descendants have not endured the best reputation.
Since three student filmmakers went into the Burkittsville woods to shoot a documentary, there have been more stories concerning the titular witch and her history with those woods. All told in various mediums.
For the 25th anniversary of The Blair Witch Project, ComingSoon looks at the movies, books, and games birthed from the found footage behemoth.
The Movies
The Blair Witch Project
The original movie has such a massive legacy that it’s easy to overlook what it does well in its own right. There’s a sense of it all being plausible that is not present in any other iteration of this tale onscreen
Three student filmmakers venture into the woods of Burkittsville to document the local legend of The Blair Witch. Things begin to go wrong almost immediately, and as they lose their way, they lose their grip on reality. Cue lots of running in the dark and screaming until that blunt-force final scene.
It would be easy to say that it’s some sicko outdoorsman types messing with the trio. Still, there’s just enough weird shit going on that it would make you doubt rational thought and perhaps believe there was something more to it because we’ve been fed this story of the Blair Witch beforehand, so you expect that it should be about that.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
In the age of the meta-horror film (and with the original film trading on that to some degree) Blair Witch 2 should have been a smart deviation from expectations. A sequel that treats the first movie as a real thing that people debate the legitamcy of? A fantastic angle.
And yet, it falls short. It ends up largely playing out like a typical late 90s/early 2000s glossy teen horror movie, and not a particularly good one at that. However, it’s not the outright disaster it seems.
Blair Witch 2’s best trait is how it sneers at fan culture and so-called experts. The cast of this film are clearly cosplaying as the characters they think they’re supposed to be. Their desperation to be a part of someone else’s cultural phenomenon is a fun way to approach a semi-retread.
Blair Witch
If the first film is a cultural landmark and the sequel a cynical disappointment, what does that make Adam Wingard’s successor to the 1999 original?
Divisive is probably the fairest way to view it. Arriving under a secret name did help it generate festival buzz, but its star fell hard once it arrived in the public forum. It goes back to the found footage style and shows early promise, but it ends up more of a homage until it breaks the original’s golden rule of hiding any actual horrors in a big way.
The Woods Movie: The Making of the Blair Witch Project
There’s a great irony in a documentary on the making of The Blair Witch Project vanishing off the face of the earth, but that’s what happened to Russell Gomm’s 2015 documentary. Few have seen it, but it did at least reemerge as a book by Gomm a few years later.
The 2025 Reboot
Nine years after the last cinematic excursion into the Burkittsville woods, Lionsgate is planning another trip that supposedly relaunches the series after two fumbled sequels. Blumhouse is helping out now, but there’s been controversy over the lack of involvement for the original team.
With found footage a very different beast 25 years on, it will be interesting to see what the approach is for a new entry looking to kickstart the phenomenon once more.
The Games
Blair Witch Trilogy (Rustin Parr, The Legend of Coffin Rock, The Elly Kedward Tale)
Just one year after the original movie, a trio of PC games were released from the now-defunct Terminal Reality. Based on its Nocturn horror game series, the Blair Witch games all focused on some aspect of the established folklore. Each featured a period setting, and the final game (The Elly Kedward Tale) goes back to the early days of Burkittsville, then known as Blair Township.
As an expansion of the folklore, they’re fascinating and worthwhile additions. As video games, they’re an endurance test. They were not particularly well received then, and being PC-only probably didn’t help them gain a wide enough audience to make an impact anyway.
Blair Witch
Bloober Team would be the next to tackle a video game adaptation of The Blair Witch in 2019. It tried to evoke the found footage lost in the woods feel of the original movie but with a brand new story of a man and his dog.
The idea was sound, but as is par for the course in this realm, the game misunderstood what The Blair Witch Project was about, and the result was an underwhelming Blair Witch game and a lackluster, frustrating horror game.
The Books/Comics
The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier
D. A. Stern’s tie-in dossier builds on the premise that The Blair Witch Project is a true story. It contains fictional police reports, interviews, newspaper reports, and information on the legends of Elly Kedward and Rustin Parr.
Blair Witch: The Secret Confessions of Rustin Parr
Stern further enriches the Blair Witch folklore with this account of what supposed child murderer Rustin Parr told his priest the night before his hanging.
It’s perhaps the best piece of media outside the original film in terms of building believable folklore on the legends surrounding the weird and worrying goings on in those fated woods.
Blair Witch: Graveyard Shift
The Exorcist III of Blair Witch media. D. A. Stern’s original story follows a detective hunting for a notorious serial killer on the backroads of Maryland. Naturally, they end up in Burkittsville, and doubt begins to creep in about how human this killer is.
It occurs after the three filmmakers go missing before their footage is found and released. It offers up a different perspective on the unnerving terrors of the Black Hills of Burkittsville.
The Blair Witch Files
Blair Witch gets the young adult novel treatment with a series of eight books building on the film by following a fictional cousin of lost filmmaker Heather Donahue as she tries to figure out what really happened. Unlike most Blair Witch books, they don’t tend to be cheap to buy nowadays.
The Blair Witch Project (Russell Gomm)
This book, released just shy of the film’s 20th anniversary, is a wonderful document of the film’s making, its unconventional creation, and how its legacy has touched the film industry in the years since.
The Blair Witch Project #1/Blair Witch: Dark Testaments
For each of the first two movies, a one-shot comic was released. Cece Malvey wrote and illustrated The Blair Witch Project #1 for Oni Press in July 1999. For Blair Witch 2, The Dark Testaments came from Image Comics and was written by Ian Edginton and illustrated by Charlie Adlard. It goes back to the tale of Rustin Parr.
The Blair Witch Chronicles
Jen Van Meter’s four-issue comic series released in 2000 was another collection of historic tales surrounding the legend of the Blair Witch, but not always the traditional tales already told.
It broadens the world of the legend in another medium, and unsurprisingly, it is not cheap to acquire these days.
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