SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

By: Erin M. Routson
October 13, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT | d. DANIEL MTYRICK and EDUARDO SÁNCHEZ | 1999

I am not built for horror movies. I’ve been known to embrace a depressing documentary with open arms, to devote myself to non-fiction tomes memorializing humankind’s perpetrations on one another. But something about manufactured gore and terror makes me uncomfortable and becomes something that I can’t forget. I once saw a scene from Hereditary out of the corner of my eye on someone’s iPad next to me on a plane. I remain horrified.

But that’s today. On the precipice of the 2000s, I was 16 and still open to being scared by horror flicks. I was also an avid Internet user, and so the lore, the uncertainty and the nascent viral nature of The Blair Witch Project totally worked on me. Was it a true story? Did someone really find these tapes and release this supernatural tale in theaters across the country? Were the people in this movie really deceased or missing? Was the Blair Witch still haunting rural Maryland?

What added to my fear and the mythos was how I actually ended up seeing the film. My friend Dustin had a bootleg someone had recorded in a theater, so I watched a shitty VHS of a low-budget film, magnifying our collective uncertainty about the story’s veracity. As we watched this thing we didn’t fully understand in a rural Ohio basement, it scared the hell out of me and cemented that horror was not my preferred genre, no matter how much other people took pleasure in it.

Now that information is so readily available and reality television on a shoestring budget is entrenched in the culture, it’s hard to believe that there was a time when we had never seen something like this before. Any mainstream horror movie was cast, acted, had effects and so much studio backing and promotion that even if you were terrified, you knew it was made up. When Blair Witch was released with a guerilla marketing campaign that defined the term “going viral,” we did not know what was real and what was a construct.

Being the first to do it this way is what made it the best. The questions that it left us with—the fan theories that proliferated in virtual spaces—hardened a conspiracy culture that only grew stronger through the connectivity of the Internet. We weren’t only sitting around with a small group of friends shooting the shit on what was happening with that guy in the corner at the end, we could get on an Internet message board and participate in hundreds of ideas of what the hell we had just watched.

Its concept, production and marketing left a legacy that changed our interactions around media forever. We’re left not just feeling fearful, but wondering if what we’re terrified by is true or false. I don’t want to be scared like that anymore—my brain stays focused on the horrors of what I know is our reality.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

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