Yours! Is! Absolutely! One! Of! The! Best! Reactions! to this film!! Thank you! So fun watching this with you. I'll bet Mary Brown is the Blair Witch: look at her gate with the intertwined wood at her trailer house (just like the wood figures in the forest).
Hey, thanks much, I'm so glad you enjoyed the video! I appreciate the kind words! Oooh I didn't notice that, that's a great point! 😁 She is also super creepy 😅
Way back when I was fresh out of highschool and starting college, I moved from my parents house to my own. A lady I worked with lived on a sorghum farm about halfway between where I worked and the college. It wasn't a bad commute. It was very, very, very rural which I liked...at the time. It had every farm cliche.....big red barn, horse stables, farm equipment bigger than my house. It had an apple orchard, a few ducks and a couple of geese (the kind that weren't assholes) wandering around the yard and sometimes followed me inside....whereupon the cat became upset...Years ago they had converted their huge chicken coop to a tiny, cute widdle house. And their artistic daughter had decorated it and it was a GLORIOUS piece of nothing matching anything...green carpet in the living room. Pink in the bedroom. French doors to the bedroom. Blue tile fireplace, the fridge was painted black and white checkerboard, chandelier shaped like a bunch of daisies.... But I digress. The farm was big enough that there were no neighbors close by. This place was down a dirt road to the middle of nowhere. I saw this movie in theaters and it freaked me right the hell out...the drive home was fun. It was isolated enough that when it got dark, IT GOT DARK. I couldn't see my own hand waving in front of my face kind of dark. And I'd gone to the midnight showing, (in hindsight, that was a stupid idea) so I was driving home down this dirt road at 2 in the morning with my eyes bugging out trying to see beyond my car's headlights. The couple was gone at the time, visiting a new grandchild so there weren't any lights on in the house, either. Remember that apple orchard I mentioned in the previous paragraph? It just so happened that it was dead and abandoned. So NOW I had: Driving home. Two AM. Middle of nowhere. Pitch. Black. THROUGH AN OCEAN OF DEAD TREES. Paranoid, and jumpy as hell. I didn't want to leave my car because my house had no lights on either. I could set my headlights on the front door, which I did. But there was about 10 feet between the car and the door. I have no idea how long I sat there, telling myself there was nothing out there and just a movie and blah blah blah....working up the courage to turn off the car and go for it. Eventually I did, but even with it being just ten feet away, I couldn't see it anymore and immediately got disoriented. I veered off to the side and smacked my face into one of the dead trees, some of the branches catching on my hair and then I went insane for about ten seconds, trying to untangle myself from this tree in the dark and screaming bloody murder. In the middle of that, I DROPPED MY KEY TO MY DOOR. I WAS GOING TO DIE. THERE WAS A WITCH OUT THERE WITH ROCKS AND STICKS AND I WAS GOING TO DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEeeee.....lurching around trying to find the door and tripping over the car groping around on the ground for the keys in my "driveway" made entirely of ROCKS and woke up the geese, who started cussing me out at the top of their lungs (I did finally manage to pop the latch off the back door with a stick and made it inside after about 48 of the longest seconds of my LIFE). I love this movie. Talk about effective.
This is the greatest comment ever haha! That story is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time!! You have a way with words! This feels like it should be a review for the film 😂 Honestly though if that had happened to me I would have died 😂
@@SofaSloths oh I freely admit that I'm a shameless storyteller and boyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy have I got some stories. I think the only other movie that traumatized me to that extent was Jaws. Some sadistic asshole let me watch that on TV at age 5 or 6 and I spent the next five-ish years terrified of going to the toilet because there was a giant (invisible) shark in there that could swim up the pipes and eat me in half ass first. (Thanks, Grandma.)
The three of them were dropped in the middle of the forest. They were told spots to stop and to film a documentary, no script. Everything that went wrong (with the exception of the final scene) was caused by the production team- the cast had no idea. This is their real reactions. Heather was instructed to walk them in circles, the others did not know. Mike was instructed to destroy the map, the others did not know. Josh received no instructions until night 5, when the production team kidnapped him. The true panic when a member went missing, gives me chills to this day. The producers had him, and were instructing him when to scream. The evening of day 6, they revealed themselves and discussed the final scene. There was someone cast as the witch, the camera was supposed to fall and reveal her, instead it fell too far left only revealing Mikey. They only went with original shots, no second takes, and this final scene made this film what it is. This made me fear the woods, but love the idea of this type of production. They had missing posters up, they even released a book “The Blair Witch Project: A Case Dossier”, it was crazy. These three actors could’ve had AMAZING futures, the problem is, they were harassed in the woods by a production team for a week with little/no food, told to record everything and then it was all over the US. They took their money, invested it wisely, and they take smaller parts here and there, but they ALL have done interviews about how they will never trust the film industry. The lead in interviews in the towns were all filmed a month and a half AFTER they were in the woods. Brilliant filmmaking, but torturous for any actor or actress.
😮😮😮 Wait...THERE WAS NO SCRIPT?!?!?! That's actually incredible! I thought that some of it was improvised but THE WHOLE THING?!?! 🤯 Thanks for this comment, really interesting!! I'm not surprised they have trust issues after this! It would have scarred me for life haha! But the end result it SO GOOD!
It's still today a very effective horror movie because the acting is so realistic. But I found it's more about leading to a state of desperation, rather than actually about scares. Interesting to watch the atmosphere between the trio gradually change from jovial at first, to distrustful and finally to a state of desperation.
The only shot they had to re-do was when Heather found the bundle of sticks. She was supposed to open it but I'm sure at this point her nerves were pretty frazzled. The producers had to tell her to bring it back and open it. Josh had some sort of function he had to attend, so that's why he disappeared...of course the other two weren't told this. When the three were booking it through the woods and heather shrieks "WTF IS THAT??!" Josh was supposed to film a glimpse of something just far enough away that they couldn't tell what it actually was...but Heather's scream of horror was so genuine that he forgot to do that. (But also it's not a great idea to go running through the woods in total darkness and NOT watching where you're going. You can hurt yourself pretty bad doing that.) One of the producers friends was wearing a white jogging suit and running along with them at distance. I don't blame Josh for getting spooked.
This is a great fact, another comment mentioned another shot where some of the produced action was missed on camera and if anything it adds to the whole vibe of this movie! Heather screaming in that scene was so haunting!! 😵
Loved the video camera frame graphic haha. Yea, I think this is a great and successfully scary movie (though I get scared by everything). It feels like the best horror movies are the ones that rely on CGI very little. They're also the ones that last which is why Blair Witch Project is still a classic. One of my favorite choices the filmmakers made was the sound design for the eery noises. It would have been natural to choose snapping twigs and rustling to imply something is creeping around, just out of sight. And that would have been scary, don't get me wrong. But they went with a sound that was hard to identify so it threw off our balance further. The cracking almost sounded like a tree falling over but without the landing crash or when you throw a rock into a pile of rocks in an open echoing place. Was it a person out there? People? Magic? I don't know but I love that I never came to fully understand the nature of what was going on.
Haha thank you, I thought it helped with the found footage to put it on a camera 😁 Very true about CGI, especially films that came out in the 90s as they just age much better! Completely agree about the sound design, its eerie enough to add to the ominous vibe but you can't figure out exactly what it could be! The ending really left a lot up to the audience to decide and I loved that!!
i was watching UK Tv news and they said it was true on it (Was like a april fools thing) but i went into the cinema thinking it as a real found footage. Scared me like crazy in the cinema not knowing what was touching the tent and so on. Still love this film today
This is a film that people could understandably watch for the first time today and not really grasp the impact it had at the time. The marketing for it was genius. It was marketed completely as an authentic "found footage documentary" film. The internet was still really young at the time and they leveraged people's naivete of it by creating several fake websites full of "real" news articles of missing people from the area and various things that made it seem very authentic. Fake newspaper articles dating back decades, fake obituaries, fake missing persons reports, etc. So anyone who went online to see if this supposedly "real" movie was genuine was met with all these websites making it look that way. They even had it in the actor's contracts that they had to essentially disappear for a couple months after the release so as not to break the immersion. It had everyone talking. Even hardcore skeptics wanted to see it for themselves. To my knowledge, they were one of, if not the very first, viral marketing campaign for a film. Between all this, plus the way the acting was improvised as other commenters have mentioned, you end up with a truly iconic film that may not stand up to the test of time. But I'm really happy I was there to experience it.
Hey again, pre-sloth Ryan! Another surprise, I won’t lie. I vaguely remember the craze about _Blair Witch Project_ back in the early 00s, but I think its premise and manner of filming was a sort of a risky double-edged sword: it was mostly praised by critics but less warmly received by audiences at festivals and cinemas. Only almost a decade later, with the mainstream impact of _Cloverfield_ and _Paranormal Activity_ did the found footage genre really, well, found its footage, hahaha, I couldn’t resist that pun! I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it. Jokes aside, I think everybody acknowledges the success of its nature and production as low budget independent film, ofc. And it is a good horror movie overall. If you are interested in more of this genre, I would recommend some other classics from the ‘00s and ‘10s like _Rec_ , _V/H/S_ , _The Taking of Deborah Logan_ and _Unfriended_ , and my personal favorite, albeit it also goes further into mocumentary style, 2007 _Lake Mungo_ , probably the saddest horror movie ever. (Alas, I didn’t manage to watch the HP reaction entirely so I will have to resume and comment later, hopefully tonight!)
That was a GREAT pun haha! Some great recommendations in there, thank you! This film has been on my radar forever! I was so glad to get round to it! I feel like it's a movie everyone has seen and it didn't disappoint!
Yours! Is! Absolutely! One! Of! The! Best! Reactions! to this film!! Thank you! So fun watching this with you. I'll bet Mary Brown is the Blair Witch: look at her gate with the intertwined wood at her trailer house (just like the wood figures in the forest).
Hey, thanks much, I'm so glad you enjoyed the video! I appreciate the kind words! Oooh I didn't notice that, that's a great point! 😁 She is also super creepy 😅
Way back when I was fresh out of highschool and starting college, I moved from my parents house to my own. A lady I worked with lived on a sorghum farm about halfway between where I worked and the college. It wasn't a bad commute. It was very, very, very rural which I liked...at the time. It had every farm cliche.....big red barn, horse stables, farm equipment bigger than my house. It had an apple orchard, a few ducks and a couple of geese (the kind that weren't assholes) wandering around the yard and sometimes followed me inside....whereupon the cat became upset...Years ago they had converted their huge chicken coop to a tiny, cute widdle house. And their artistic daughter had decorated it and it was a GLORIOUS piece of nothing matching anything...green carpet in the living room. Pink in the bedroom. French doors to the bedroom. Blue tile fireplace, the fridge was painted black and white checkerboard, chandelier shaped like a bunch of daisies....
But I digress. The farm was big enough that there were no neighbors close by. This place was down a dirt road to the middle of nowhere. I saw this movie in theaters and it freaked me right the hell out...the drive home was fun. It was isolated enough that when it got dark, IT GOT DARK. I couldn't see my own hand waving in front of my face kind of dark. And I'd gone to the midnight showing, (in hindsight, that was a stupid idea) so I was driving home down this dirt road at 2 in the morning with my eyes bugging out trying to see beyond my car's headlights. The couple was gone at the time, visiting a new grandchild so there weren't any lights on in the house, either. Remember that apple orchard I mentioned in the previous paragraph? It just so happened that it was dead and abandoned. So NOW I had: Driving home. Two AM. Middle of nowhere. Pitch. Black. THROUGH AN OCEAN OF DEAD TREES. Paranoid, and jumpy as hell. I didn't want to leave my car because my house had no lights on either. I could set my headlights on the front door, which I did. But there was about 10 feet between the car and the door. I have no idea how long I sat there, telling myself there was nothing out there and just a movie and blah blah blah....working up the courage to turn off the car and go for it. Eventually I did, but even with it being just ten feet away, I couldn't see it anymore and immediately got disoriented. I veered off to the side and smacked my face into one of the dead trees, some of the branches catching on my hair and then I went insane for about ten seconds, trying to untangle myself from this tree in the dark and screaming bloody murder. In the middle of that, I DROPPED MY KEY TO MY DOOR. I WAS GOING TO DIE. THERE WAS A WITCH OUT THERE WITH ROCKS AND STICKS AND I WAS GOING TO DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEeeee.....lurching around trying to find the door and tripping over the car groping around on the ground for the keys in my "driveway" made entirely of ROCKS and woke up the geese, who started cussing me out at the top of their lungs (I did finally manage to pop the latch off the back door with a stick and made it inside after about 48 of the longest seconds of my LIFE).
I love this movie. Talk about effective.
This is the greatest comment ever haha! That story is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time!! You have a way with words! This feels like it should be a review for the film 😂 Honestly though if that had happened to me I would have died 😂
@@SofaSloths oh I freely admit that I'm a shameless storyteller and boyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy have I got some stories. I think the only other movie that traumatized me to that extent was Jaws. Some sadistic asshole let me watch that on TV at age 5 or 6 and I spent the next five-ish years terrified of going to the toilet because there was a giant (invisible) shark in there that could swim up the pipes and eat me in half ass first. (Thanks, Grandma.)
The three of them were dropped in the middle of the forest. They were told spots to stop and to film a documentary, no script. Everything that went wrong (with the exception of the final scene) was caused by the production team- the cast had no idea. This is their real reactions. Heather was instructed to walk them in circles, the others did not know. Mike was instructed to destroy the map, the others did not know. Josh received no instructions until night 5, when the production team kidnapped him. The true panic when a member went missing, gives me chills to this day. The producers had him, and were instructing him when to scream. The evening of day 6, they revealed themselves and discussed the final scene. There was someone cast as the witch, the camera was supposed to fall and reveal her, instead it fell too far left only revealing Mikey. They only went with original shots, no second takes, and this final scene made this film what it is. This made me fear the woods, but love the idea of this type of production. They had missing posters up, they even released a book “The Blair Witch Project: A Case Dossier”, it was crazy. These three actors could’ve had AMAZING futures, the problem is, they were harassed in the woods by a production team for a week with little/no food, told to record everything and then it was all over the US. They took their money, invested it wisely, and they take smaller parts here and there, but they ALL have done interviews about how they will never trust the film industry. The lead in interviews in the towns were all filmed a month and a half AFTER they were in the woods.
Brilliant filmmaking, but torturous for any actor or actress.
😮😮😮 Wait...THERE WAS NO SCRIPT?!?!?! That's actually incredible! I thought that some of it was improvised but THE WHOLE THING?!?! 🤯 Thanks for this comment, really interesting!! I'm not surprised they have trust issues after this! It would have scarred me for life haha! But the end result it SO GOOD!
One of the best reactions to this movie, very insightful.
Hey thanks so much! I'm so glad you enjoyed it 😁
It's still today a very effective horror movie because the acting is so realistic. But I found it's more about leading to a state of desperation, rather than actually about scares. Interesting to watch the atmosphere between the trio gradually change from jovial at first, to distrustful and finally to a state of desperation.
So true, this movie became so tense, watching the trio break was almost too realistic!!
The only shot they had to re-do was when Heather found the bundle of sticks. She was supposed to open it but I'm sure at this point her nerves were pretty frazzled. The producers had to tell her to bring it back and open it. Josh had some sort of function he had to attend, so that's why he disappeared...of course the other two weren't told this. When the three were booking it through the woods and heather shrieks "WTF IS THAT??!" Josh was supposed to film a glimpse of something just far enough away that they couldn't tell what it actually was...but Heather's scream of horror was so genuine that he forgot to do that. (But also it's not a great idea to go running through the woods in total darkness and NOT watching where you're going. You can hurt yourself pretty bad doing that.) One of the producers friends was wearing a white jogging suit and running along with them at distance. I don't blame Josh for getting spooked.
This is a great fact, another comment mentioned another shot where some of the produced action was missed on camera and if anything it adds to the whole vibe of this movie! Heather screaming in that scene was so haunting!! 😵
Loved the video camera frame graphic haha.
Yea, I think this is a great and successfully scary movie (though I get scared by everything). It feels like the best horror movies are the ones that rely on CGI very little. They're also the ones that last which is why Blair Witch Project is still a classic. One of my favorite choices the filmmakers made was the sound design for the eery noises. It would have been natural to choose snapping twigs and rustling to imply something is creeping around, just out of sight. And that would have been scary, don't get me wrong. But they went with a sound that was hard to identify so it threw off our balance further. The cracking almost sounded like a tree falling over but without the landing crash or when you throw a rock into a pile of rocks in an open echoing place. Was it a person out there? People? Magic? I don't know but I love that I never came to fully understand the nature of what was going on.
Haha thank you, I thought it helped with the found footage to put it on a camera 😁 Very true about CGI, especially films that came out in the 90s as they just age much better! Completely agree about the sound design, its eerie enough to add to the ominous vibe but you can't figure out exactly what it could be! The ending really left a lot up to the audience to decide and I loved that!!
i was watching UK Tv news and they said it was true on it (Was like a april fools thing) but i went into the cinema thinking it as a real found footage. Scared me like crazy in the cinema not knowing what was touching the tent and so on. Still love this film today
Ahhh that would have freaked me out even more haha! What a unique first watch for you though!!!
This is a film that people could understandably watch for the first time today and not really grasp the impact it had at the time. The marketing for it was genius. It was marketed completely as an authentic "found footage documentary" film. The internet was still really young at the time and they leveraged people's naivete of it by creating several fake websites full of "real" news articles of missing people from the area and various things that made it seem very authentic. Fake newspaper articles dating back decades, fake obituaries, fake missing persons reports, etc. So anyone who went online to see if this supposedly "real" movie was genuine was met with all these websites making it look that way. They even had it in the actor's contracts that they had to essentially disappear for a couple months after the release so as not to break the immersion. It had everyone talking. Even hardcore skeptics wanted to see it for themselves. To my knowledge, they were one of, if not the very first, viral marketing campaign for a film. Between all this, plus the way the acting was improvised as other commenters have mentioned, you end up with a truly iconic film that may not stand up to the test of time. But I'm really happy I was there to experience it.
I LOVE the confusion this must have caused!! Really showed what they could do with a small budget! You have to respect it haha! 😁
Hey again, pre-sloth Ryan! Another surprise, I won’t lie. I vaguely remember the craze about _Blair Witch Project_ back in the early 00s, but I think its premise and manner of filming was a sort of a risky double-edged sword: it was mostly praised by critics but less warmly received by audiences at festivals and cinemas.
Only almost a decade later, with the mainstream impact of _Cloverfield_ and _Paranormal Activity_ did the found footage genre really, well, found its footage, hahaha, I couldn’t resist that pun! I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it. Jokes aside, I think everybody acknowledges the success of its nature and production as low budget independent film, ofc. And it is a good horror movie overall.
If you are interested in more of this genre, I would recommend some other classics from the ‘00s and ‘10s like _Rec_ , _V/H/S_ , _The Taking of Deborah Logan_ and _Unfriended_ , and my personal favorite, albeit it also goes further into mocumentary style, 2007 _Lake Mungo_ , probably the saddest horror movie ever.
(Alas, I didn’t manage to watch the HP reaction entirely so I will have to resume and comment later, hopefully tonight!)
That was a GREAT pun haha! Some great recommendations in there, thank you! This film has been on my radar forever! I was so glad to get round to it! I feel like it's a movie everyone has seen and it didn't disappoint!