By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
(Writer’s note: When revising my second book, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film, last summer, as is almost always the case, several sections had to be cut – including an essay on the most famous Y2K witch film of them all, The Blair Witch Project. Over the course of the book tour, I had the pleasure of screening The Blair Witch Project with the Brooklyn Horror Society and reading this essay for an audience. While I cut this section from That Very Witch in the interest of flow, that experience, in addition to the film’s obvious significance to the witch cinematic canon, inspired me to share a lightly edited and expanded version of this essay here.
My interest in cinematic witches is political and historiographic, and in the book, I focus on their relationships to American feminism and American counterculturalism over time. This essay focuses in part on a lesser-discussed element of the film’s famously multifaceted roll-out: A fascinating Sci-Fi Channel tie-in mockumentary called Curse of the Blair Witch, as well as the film itself.)
Eight months after the commercial failure of Practical Magic, in the summer of 1999, the first truly Y2K witch film would hit American screens: The Blair Witch Project. Made famous for its terrifying manipulation of reality and as an early, cross-genre instance of virality on the burgeoning internet, Blair Witch was just as much a phenomenon as it was a movie, sparking endless imitations (The Scooby Doo Project, for example). This early iteration (alongside The Matrix) of the evolution of ‘90s “branding” of films into what film historian Henry Jenkins calls the “convergence culture” of the 2000s would radically reshape the horror landscape; its found-footage stylings eventually becoming inescapable.
Before its release at the end of July, audiences got their first taste of the actual footage behind the phenomenon on the Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy). Alongside the film’s highly detailed website, the “missing” posters that lined LA streets and the dozens of screenings at colleges the team held to generate word of mouth, the filmmakers, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, made a mockumentary familiarizing viewers with the backstory of their fictional witch after being approached by Sci-Fi with a tie-in offer. The resulting mockumentary, Curse of the Blair Witch, is underappreciated today on its own terms but provides an excellent window into how Americans understood witches as a cultural symbol at the end of the millennium. Made up largely of unused footage from the film, it’s both a brilliant parody of the aesthetics of the kind of Y2K-era History Channel special it represents – replete with jarring flash cuts and freeze frames, melodramatic musical stings and ominous voiceover – and a sort of satirical meta-historiography of witch lore, taking viewers through the aesthetic and political history of American witchcraft as a way to put The Blair Witch Project in context. It was also, according to Curse editor/co-producer and Blair Witch producer Mike Monello, the highest rated SyFy special ever released up to that point, receiving tremendous positive feedback online as well as in Variety, which called Curse “a mind game made by skilled hands,” and complimented its “macabre sense of humor.” For Monello, the mockumentary, the first actual footage from the film to hit audiences, felt like “a confirmation that what we were doing [with The Blair Witch Project] was working at a larger scale than we ever anticipated.”
Myrick and Sánchez’s attention to historical detail (they named their production company Haxan Films after Benjamin Christensen’s famous 1922 witch documentary) makes this mockumentary an astute, amusing, and, in retrospect, highly informative tour of the historiography of witch lore at the end of the millennium. After setting up the premise of The Blair Witch Project, Curse presents a series of “historians,” “occult experts” and “concerned citizens” to explain that the woman who became known as the Blair Witch was really named Elly Kedward, a citizen of Blair, Maryland (next door to Burkittsville), accused of killing children in the 17th century. Irrespective of her guilt, the people of Blair found her guilty and banished her to the woods, tying her to a tree and leaving her to freeze to death. This explanation is paired with “17th-century” illustrations of Kedward. The film also “excerpts” from a note-perfect recreation of a mondo, exploitation-style documentary, called Mystic Occurrences (ostensibly from 1971 and originally intended for inclusion in Blair Witch itself). This film takes the story of the Blair Witch and recontextualizes it into the ideological framework of the so-called “occult revival” of the late 1960s for laughs. Footage of Wiccan rituals in a room with beaded curtains and a shag carpet evokes classic occult-revival era witch films like Satanis: The Devil’s Mass (1970), about Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Neopagan Lucan Johnson, sporting a slicked-back ponytail, pentagram necklace, round red sunglasses and an open silk robe, explains the history of neo-paganism (goddess worship, nature worship, etc.) as lounge music plays. He explains that the Salem Witch Trials were a product of “bad bread” that caused “hallucinations” (a reference to the famous debunked “ergotism theory” of the trials ). He concludes that Elly was innocent: “These [so-called witches] were people trying to help through herbalism, medicine … that wouldn’t have been standard practice,” he drawls.
Lucan Johnson in CURSE OF THE BLAIR WITCH (1999)
This character, alongside the aging hippie-coded “concerned citizen,” whom the film “interviews” after leaving notes at the police station claiming that the Blair Witch is “alive and well,” is obviously presented as odd and somewhat silly, an affectionately crackpot nostalgic throwback, á la the characters of the contemporaneous That ‘70s Show. Highlighting this cultural relationship further, in the sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), the hippie origins of the New Age witch are parodied, presenting one of the film’s new batch of college-kid victims as a crunchy (but sexy) Wiccan feminist, even adding a parodic “mean goth” Satanist to the mix. But ultimately, Curse of the Blair Witch’s entire purpose is to explain, in ominous terms, why three film students went missing in the woods – and send shivers up your spine. The Blair Witch Project makes references to most of this lore, but never the New Ageism of Mystic Occurrences, and not for any practical purpose. That breadth was something else Monello recalled enjoying about the opportunity to make Curse: It “resembled more of what our original vision of [The Blair Witch Project] was” before the decision to exclusively use the found footage elements that earned the film its place in cinema history.
Without this context, the Blair Witch herself is less legible from a historical and political perspective. Elly Kedward is described in The Blair Witch Project’s opening passages, but by the time the gang heads for the woods, a “crazy” local has explained that the Blair Witch, whom she claims to have seen as a child, is barely human. “You could tell it was a female,” she explains, but she “had hair all over her body, like horse’s hair.” This interview subject, Mary Brown, is eventually given credence when the students find ominous cairns outside their tent. “What was she saying about rocks?” Heather asks, “Fuck, I wasn’t listening to her because I thought she was a lunatic.” Thus, without the Curse footage, the witch becomes dehumanized, almost a sasquatch, in the viewer’s mind, divorcing her from the history of violence against women for the film’s monster-movie, quasi-slasher framework.
Meanwhile, when The Blair Witch Project was released, Heather Donahue (now known as Rei Hance) was received by many as, to quote Andrew Sarris’ review, a “bitch,” taking the witch’s place as a vilified woman. Throughout the film, Donahue, the director of the film-within-the-film, is continually blamed by her companions for the trio’s predicament. She’s framed as bossy, superior and condescending, lightly patronizing her crewmen and delivering dramatic voiceover during their “shoots.” Her worst sin is, of course, getting them lost in the woods and refusing to acknowledge it. In the film’s iconic climax, Heather apologizes and takes the blame for everything, crying, “I’m so, so sorry, because… it is my fault, because it’s my project, and I insisted … everything had to be my way.” And indeed, in a certain light, given that her crew has gone out of its way to present her as hubristic and superior, this apology is in one sense presented as valid, necessary and tragically correct.
But the very notion of the Blair Witch’s “curse” as framed by the mockumentary troubles this presentation. For example, much of the film’s conflict lies in whether Heather is reading the map correctly. Neither of the men can, and their continued failure to escape casts her assurances into doubt. Eventually, they berate her for her failure, making her cry, even as she continues to promise she “knows what [she’s] doing.” Finally, after one of the men discards the map, they find their way back to a spot they’ve clearly been to before, having walked south the entire time, a physical impossibility that suggests their fate was sealed from the start, and Heather had in fact known what she was doing. Viewers of Curse would likely have understood this, too: As Variety pointed out, that film goes out of its way to explain that “something horrible happens in this community every 50 or 60 years,” spurred by the historical trauma of Elly Kedward’s femicide. Nevertheless, Heather is still blamed by the men in her crew not just broadly “because it’s [her] project” but for the far more gendered sin of asserting creative and directorial control. (“Everything had to be my way.”) Heather’s status as a woman with power is vilified, making her the film’s true “witch.” Andrew Sarris’ scathing review of this otherwise almost universally praised hit film connects this subliminal characterization to the era’s misogynistic backlash directly, arguing that:
“Heather’s unsympathetic smugness from the outset, strangely, is what has made the movie such a big hit with audiences and critics… The antifeminist-backlash spectacle of a pushy female leading two comparatively inoffensive males to be slaughtered by persons unknown and unseen gives the audience a ready-made scapegoat for the disaster.“
“Is that the Blair Witch?” Josh asks over a shot of Heather early into their camping trip, “Nope! That’s just Heather taking a piss.”
Taken together, questions of (anti)feminism in Blair Witch’s reception and the added context of Curse reveal that, while the most famous witch of the ‘90s may not appear to relate to the broader history of American witch lore, it was intimately connected with this history from its conception. For viewers who saw Curse on TV, perhaps Heather’s status as scapegoat may have stood out more clearly, putting her and the Witch herself in conversation with a broader political context – the kind of witchy history you make documentaries about.
