The year was 1999 and everyone was going to the theater. Before the internet had really taken off, and long before forums like Reddit and Twitter obfuscated reality and fiction in such a way that we often can’t tell them apart anymore, we had The Blair Witch Project, supposed found footage presented to moviegoers as legitimate evidence of something really strange going on in Burkittsville, Maryland.
The trailers were gripping, most memorable for one character’s now famous and often parodied snot-nosed and crying plea for help as she was lost alone in the woods after a few days of hell. Until then, nothing else was quite like The Blair Witch Project. Being only ten years old at the time it hit theaters, I remember when my mom came home from seeing it without me, telling me how unnerving it was, and how it was all real. As a budding fan of cryptids and urban legends, my mind was blitzed with thoughts. What did she see? What kind of evidence was presented in the theater that night? Was it really all true?
As we all now know, of course, it wasn’t true, but the campaign to present it as the real thing was so effective and so exhilarating, it revitalized the horror genre. The movie slyly cast unknown actors, built up a ton of interesting lore, and even sold it all with a tie-in special on the Sci-Fi network which, like the movie, operated on a don’t ask, don’t tell policy regarding the story’s validity in a pre-Snopes world. After slashers dominated horror in the 80s and into the 90s with Wes Craven’s Scream, The Blair Witch Project arrived at the turn of the millennium to change horror forever.
In the 20 years since The Blair Witch Project stunned audiences, we’ve seen other torchbearers arrive on the scene. Blockbuster franchises like Paranormal Activity spawned more sequels than many could keep up with, while indie anthologies like V/H/S gave multiple up and coming horror auteurs the freedom to tell one-off stories they were passionate about. Today, the success of found footage horror movies is all over the place, but the importance of The Blair Witch Project lives on. Found footage horror had arrived, and its influence today stretches beyond just cinema.
There are so many excellent found footage horror movies we wouldn’t have without The Blair Witch Project, but without this crucial genre progenitor, we may still be sailing adrift in the world of horror gaming. Some terrifying games like Outlast take the found footage element seriously and behave just like the 1999 film. You’re alone on an investigation into some nauseatingly scary locale and every horror you encounter is captured on camera. I personally find Outlast 2 to be the scariest game of the generation, and its roots leading to Blair Witch are obvious, but the inspiration doesn’t end there. While few other horrors have taken the found footage element so literally, modern horror games are defined in large part by their defenseless protagonists, much like the trio in the woods of Burkittsville.
All-time great genre entries like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA don’t have you carrying a camera, but they helped popularize the idea of immersive horror games where you didn’t just have few resources like you did in the previous era of horror games in Resident Evil or Dead Space. Now you had no resources whatsoever — other than your legs. The new era of horror had arrived. Run, hide, and hope the entity chasing you through labyrinthine woods, dark hallways, or foreboding underground bunkers didn’t spot you. Today these defenseless immersive horror games outnumber more traditional survival horror games at a pace of about two to one. Upgrade-able plasma cutters and gut-busting shotguns are out. Running for your life is in, and it all started in 1999.
That’s what makes this week’s E3 announcement of a new Blair Witch video game so exciting. Bloober Team, the horror-focused studio behind recent hits like Observer and Layers of Fear, has revealed a found footage Blair Witch game is coming this August. The trailer looks awesome, and excitingly, the game promises to build on the lore of the Blair Witch. There surely exists an entire generation of younger horror fans that don’t even know about The Blair Witch Project and for them, this could be the entry point to a new beloved franchise.
For those who have longed for more from the series for years, this seems like the best possible outcome too. Two movie sequels failed to really capture the magic of the original, while Outlast has shown us no found footage experience is scarier than the one in which you’re holding the camera. In 1999, The Blair Witch Project catalyzed the most prominent trend in modern horror cinema and inspired a new kind of horror video game. With Bloober Team’s Blair Witch, the last two decades of horror come full circle.