Every found footage film since 1999 still answers to the Blair Witch Project.
The Blair Witch Project Is Found Footage’s Jaws | Interview | Fright Club
Michael C. Williams played Mike in The Blair Witch Project, the 1999 found footage film that convinced audiences its three missing filmmakers were real. Twenty seven years later, Williams is touring reunion screenings with fellow cast members Heather Donahue and Joshua Leonard, while Lionsgate and Blumhouse prepare a 2027 reboot from director Dylan Clark. On the Fright Club podcast, Williams described Blair Witch as found footage’s answer to Jaws, the film every other found footage movie gets measured against. This piece traces that comparison through Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield and the underperforming 2016 sequel, and asks what it means for the reboot now arriving.
The Blair Witch Project convinced a mainstream audience, at scale, that its fiction might not be fiction at all, and everything in found footage since has had to either chase that trick or abandon it. The clearest evidence for how hard that shadow is to escape is the 2016 sequel that tried to actually be the original.
Every found footage film made since 1999 has had to answer for a man standing in the corner of a ruined house, facing the wall, saying nothing. That final shot of The Blair Witch Project is horror’s most reproduced ending that nobody has actually managed to reproduce. Filmmakers have borrowed the shaking camera, the confessional monologue into a dying lens, the sense of something following just outside the frame. Nobody has borrowed the corner. It is too small, too specific, too much the product of eight cold days in a Maryland state park in October 1997 to be copied rather than merely referenced.
Michael C. Williams stood in that corner. He is the third of the three amateur filmmakers, alongside Heather Donahue and Joshua Leonard, playing the crew that vanished into the Black Hills chasing a local legend. Twenty seven years on, he is touring the film with both of them, and he has a line he uses to describe what The Blair Witch Project did to the genre it created. Speaking on the Fright Club podcast with Hope Madden and George Wolf of MaddWolf.com, Williams called it, simply, the Jaws of found footage. Every shark movie since 1975 gets measured against Spielberg’s, he said, and every found footage film since 1999 gets measured against his.
He is not being falsely modest and he is not wrong. What he is doing, whether he means to or not, is setting up the exact question this autumn is about to answer twice: once with a reunion tour that puts him in front of audiences who can look up every fact he tells them mid sentence, and once with a 2027 reboot that has to scare a generation raised on the format he helped invent.
Twenty seven years on, The Blair Witch Project still charges rent to every found footage film that moves into its neighbourhood, and the 2027 reboot is the first tenant with a key to the original house.
Hope “Madd at the Movies” Madden, a graduate of The Ohio State University, is a freelance writer and co-founder of maddwolf.com. In addition to 12 years at the award-winning independent weekly newspaper The Other Paper, Hope has written for Columbus Monthly Magazine, The Ohio State University Alumni Magazine, is a published poet and fiction writer. She also currently writes for Columbus Underground, Screen Fervor and the UK Film Review.
Hope’s a member of the Critics Choice Association, the Online Association of Female Film Critics, Columbus Film Critics Association and the Women’s Film Critic Circle. She’s also on the Nightmares Film Festival jury. She co-hosts the weekly movie review podcast The Screening Room and the bi-weekly horror film podcast, Fright Club.
In Columbus, Ohio, you can catch Hope on TV every Friday morning on ABC6/Fox28’s Good Day Columbus.
George “Screen” Wolf, an Ohio State University grad, is co-founder and writer for maddwolf.com as well as being a DJ, voiceover artist, Program Director and film critic for the Columbus Radio Group (Sunny 95, Rewind 103.5/104.3, Mix 107.9, and QFM96) as well as film critic for Saga Communications radio (25 other markets across the US). George wrote for award winning independent weekly The Other Paper for 5 years, and currently writes for Columbus Underground and the UK Film Review as well as Ginger Nuts of Horror.
In Columbus, Ohio, you can catch George on TV every Friday morning on ABC6/Fox28’s Good Day Columbus.
George is a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Columbus Film Critics Association. He’s also on the Nightmares Film Festival jury. He co-hosts the weekly movie review podcast The Screening Room and the bi-weekly horror film podcast, Fright Club.
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