The magic was gone, but not for any of the reasons I listed above. While all of this may be true, there was still something off about Blair Witch as a film.
Or maybe still it was the fact that age had worn me down and I’d lost my belief in magic? I’d seen The Blair Witch Project as a teen, that period between the certainty of childhood, when all things imagined can be real, and the uncertainty of adulthood, when nothing is. Or maybe it was the fact that we were attending a screening in Philadelphia, a place far more jaded and cynical than Reading? We throw batteries at Santa Claus in Philadelphia. But, this time around, I knew this film to be “fake” before I even set foot in the theater, and so did the rest of audience. It was certainly a hot August evening when I saw the film, so that hadn’t changed. I’m older now, by 17 years to be exact, and the anticipation and glee I felt going into seeing The Blair Witch Project wasn’t there when I attended a preview screening of its “official” sequel, Blair Witch. It contained fake news reports, fabricated interviews, and fictionalized historical information so convincing that the residents of these quiet Pennsylvania suburbs legitimately believed a group of kids had disappeared.
The movie’s website (which, sadly, is no longer active in its original form) didn’t help matters. The location of the film was close enough to register with people, but also far enough that no one could easily question its veracity.
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 2016 SHOWTIMES MOVIE
There was talk that this movie “was real” - we were about to watch “real footage” of some college students who had gone missing in the woods of Maryland. That balmy Saturday afternoon, however, the crowd was buzzing. Normally, the only reaction you could expect with certainty was a stern side-eye from the elderly ticket taker if you were walking into a movie like Stigmata or Lake Placid. The only movies that might have attracted lines like that were midnight screenings or the occasional blockbuster, but never a horror film and certainly not a low-budget film like The Blair Witch Project. I remember going to a Saturday matinee screening with my mother and brother and seeing a line out the door of the theater, a rarity for matinee screenings in the normally docile suburbs of Reading, PA. I was a young teen when The Blair Witch Project hit theaters in the summer of 1999.
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