My first scholarly encounter with the Gothic was through my study of the 1999 independent VHS horror cult hit The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. The basis for my intrigue concerned how the film “performed reality”, or how it presented itself as actual documentary evidence of strange occurrences in a forest in Burkittsville, Maryland.

The film itself, with a modest runtime of 81 minutes, is but one piece of “evidence” (quite literally “found footage”) that forms part of a larger network of information relating to the Blair witch mythology. Myrick and Sánchez also produced a made-for-TV documentary film, Curse of the Blair Witch (1999), alongside a website displaying other mysterious “artefacts” (audio logs and photographs) that revealed more about the disturbing legend. In fact, actual newspaper articles were taken out to further infer the film’s authenticity. Therefore, much of the hype surrounding the release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999 centred around one question: “Is it real?” Of course, it’s not real, yet audiences at the time seemingly fell for it, or at least (as my research suggested) many willingly leaned into the idea that it could be real (quite the opposite of suspending one’s disbelief, rather reinvoking one’s belief to become involved in the hysteria).

To me, this is one of the most fascinating examples of a horror film’s reception by American society. It also reveals more about the influence of the internet (and media generally) during the 1990s, when we hadn’t fully become immersed in media culture, at least to extent that we are today. The information that audiences were presented with, either online or on-screen, still had the authority to invoke a sense of real-world superstition and mystery, whereas nowadays we probably know too much to be so subtly lulled into believing a story about three unsuspecting film students encountering a supernatural entity.

The alternate, fictional reality created by Myrick and Sánchez – might I suggest we call it the Blair Witch-verse? – was perhaps a once-off cultural phenomenon in terms of horror world-building. Fictional universes are the norm these days, and in the horror space, we welcome (or indeed become fatigued of) prequels, sequels and spin-offs that take place within a shared aesthetic space or fictional “reality” (The Conjuring universe, for example). Of course, there is the Texas Chainsaw series, Evil Dead and others that have done something similar before, yet what sets The Blair Witch Project apart is that it tries to occupy our world, the legend performs itself in our reality. The fact that the film never reinvokes its own fictionality (except for the credit sequences), while presenting raw, point-of-view footage from consumer-grade cameras, certainly makes for intoxicating viewing.

I have argued in my research that such a departure from cinematic conventions during this period must have felt invigorating for the audience, given the big-budget, visually arresting blockbusters that were being released throughout the late 1990s (The Matrix, among others). I believe that The Blair Witch Project is a true, modern techno-Gothic story that exploited a certain cultural naivety that perhaps we no longer possess in a media-saturated world. Having said that, the reach of the internet and social media platforms today has given us the ability to routinely create or present alternate realities of our own, whether tethered to perceivable reality or not. This begs the question: are we all similarly leaning into a sort of performed, shared reality not all too different from the one that surrounded the Blair Witch phenomenon?

Finally, we could surmise that the film’s legacy is one that reveals an uncomfortable truth about our modern condition: that reality itself is not experienced; rather, indeed, it is performed.

Since completing my undergraduate thesis concerning the performance of authenticity and The Blair Witch Project, I’m currently transferring to PhD and expanding my postgraduate research that examines the relationship between real-world anxiety and Korean horror-thriller TV and cinema. Many of the themes mentioned in this blog post relating to how horror can mirror or indeed shape our reality are among those of most interest in my research as a postgraduate at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. If you enjoyed this post and would like to reach out or connect, please e-mail me at D00127562@student.dkit.ie