Podcasts
These ‘Blair Witch Project’ Bonus Features Question Aspects of the Movie [Guide to the Unknown]
The Blair Witch Project has little-known lore that extends beyond the movies, including books, comics, TV specials, and video games. Not to mention the fan discussion on subreddits and Facebook groups that’s been going on in one way or another since the movie’s release 25 years ago.
Bloody FM’s Guide to the Unknown is in the process of covering all the bonus Blair Witch material along with their discussions of all the movies — you can check out every current Blair Witch deep dive here — and this week, we’re unlocking new levels of lore that kind of weirdly upend key plot points of the movie.
Major Blairheads may already know about The Curse of the Blair Witch, the made-for-TV companion piece timed to come out on the SyFy network before The Blair Witch Project (henceforth to be abbreviated to TBWP) to stir up the “Wait, is this real?” fervor around the release. But fewer people are aware of the follow-up, The Massacre of the Burkittsville 7: The Blair Witch Legacy, created to drum up excitement for the Showtime TV release of TBWP.
It’s shot in faux-TV news magazine, 20/20 style, with expert interviews given straight to camera, and focuses primarily on a central thesis: that Rustin Parr, who’s said in TBWP to have abducted and killed a group of children in the 1940s under the direction of the witch (think: iconic little handprints all over the house in the woods, the “one kid stands facing the corner while the other is killed” rule), may not actually be responsible for the killings.
Instead, the documentary suggests it may have been the one surviving child from the group, a boy named Kyle Brody, who grew into a man who exhibited mental health issues and wrote in witch language. There’s even a Geraldo Rivera Willowbrook State School-style fictional expose-within-a-mockumentary called White Enamel, where we’re privy to Kyle’s agitated state. It is, quite frankly, a lot, and the implication that the “crazy” person must have actually been the killer is a bummer…but arguably, so is the weirdo loner trope that lives in Rustin Parr’s story. As horror lovers, we just have to take our lumps sometimes. (Although the “witch language” Kyle is seen writing in, Transitus Fluvii, is undeniably awesome — Duolingo, ready when you are.)
Rustin Parr’s whole deal is explored further in The Confessions of Rustin Parr, written by DA Stern, who also wrote the completely awesome companion book The Blair Witch Project Dossier. It’s part investigation, part journal pages from a priest introduced in the TV special who counseled Rustin Parr before his death. The book serves to further dismantle what TBWP set forth as a fairly cut-and-dry case (if you discount the wildcard that the murders were committed under a witch’s control).
Disputing your own story in non-essential bonus materials is kind of a weird and unheard-of thing to do, indie production or not. But TBWP was such a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon that it makes sense that everyone may have been trying to make the most of it in any way possible. And that’s a good thing! It fuels all of the stickman-toting nerds (complimentary) out there to this day. Whether it was Rustin or Kyle, we know it was really the witch behind all the ground-shifting, mind-bending evil-doing, and it seems like the forever fans are cool with a little ambiguity as long as it means we still get to have fun getting lost in the witch’s woods.
Join Kristen and Will this week on Guide to the Unknown as we go to town on Burkittsville. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to get a new episode every Friday.
It’s been a busy month on Murder Made Fiction podcast. In addition to introducing a new co-host (Perfectly Good Moment‘s Amanda Jane Stern), we spent Pride Month tackling a wide variety of Leopold and Loeb fictional adaptations.
In 1924 Chicago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb plotted to commit the perfect murder when they abducted and killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks. As Amanda outlines in her primer on the case, the men were caught almost immediately and the media circus that followed was billed “the trial of the century”.
Listen to Leopold and Loeb mini primer.
The fallout has reverberated throughout the last century as countless books, plays, musicals, and films have drawn on the case for inspiration. Some are more faithful than others, such as Richard Fleischer‘s 1959 drama Compulsion, which stars a young Dean Stockwell as Leopold and Orson Welles as the boys’ lawyer, John Darrow (named Jonathan Wilk in the film).
Listen to Leopold and Loeb: Compulsion (1959).
Then there are the texts that use the idea of queer-coded killers as a jumping off point, but confuse (or flat-out disregard) the details of the real life case in favour of jumbled fiction. That’s what happens in Barbet Schroeder‘s Murder by Numbers, which awkwardly introduces a tortured backstory for lead actress (and executive producer) Sandra Bullock. The result is an uneven film that misunderstands which of its two competing storylines are actually interesting (hint: it’s the Leopold and Loeb stuff with Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt).
Listen to Leopold and Loeb: Murder by Numbers (2002).
We ended up discussing other (often more successful) titles on Patreon, including 1992’s Swoon (a New Queer Cinema art-house take on the crime), Michael Haneke‘s 2007 Funny Games remake, and gay screenwriter Kevin Williamson‘s Scream, which proved to be a much more reverent and sly interpretation of L&L than we anticipated.
We wrapped up the month with a final summary episode about our favorite adaptations before chatting with author and archivist Erik Rebain, who literally wrote the book on Leopold (Arrested Adolescence) and maintains one of the foremost websites on the crime.
Watch our discussion on YouTube below (or listen here):
Next month: For July, we’re turning our attention to the Boston Strangler, with a look at films from 1964 and 1968, as well as the most contemporary version from 2023, starring Kiera Knightley and Carrie Coon.
Want even more true crime adaptations and Murder Made Fiction? Support the show on Patreon to listen to the aforementioned episodes, as well as a full-length primer on the case and 160+ hours of bonus content.
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