Cutting Deep Into Horror | The Blair Witch Project (1999): Found-Footage Folklore and Fear

0:00 Excuse me, miss? What seems to bring you to the forest tonight? Oh? Just looking around? You know, it's beautiful night. I fine, look at the stars. Why Okay, you're not You're not trying to creep yourself out because it's nearly Halloween or anything like that. No, just looking for a nice peaceful time, you know. Oh I'm sorry, where are my manners? I'm the Blair Witch. It's nice to meet you. Oh that's a very interesting name. Is that Polish? It is? Yes, my father was Polish and my mother wasn't. That's an interesting way of putting it. Okay, you clearly have opinions about me.

0:43 It's just weird. You came up like right on me. Well, I'm not trying to be aggressive, but I live in the woods, obviously. I think I'm gonna go oh okay. I mean what what about me was rude? I don't understand it. Just like if if you live out here, I feel bad intruding on your Well. The entire woods is my domain and dominion, just as it is the birds and the bees and the hummingbirds as well, which is another kind of bird. Yeah, that's why I you know, I I think that I should Wow, what's that on the ground? How'd that get there? Well? I put it there because this is my dominion it but yeah.

1:23 But it wasn't here when I was like, how'd you get that there? No? I mean, a witch never reveals his secrets, but I have my ways. You saw that movie, didn't you? Everyone saw the movie which which, yes, the Witch movie. There's several though, which one though. If you're going to be obtuse like this, I'll just have to make you get lost out here until you go mad and die in some strange way. That's why I'm leaving now. Right, that's why you're leaving. I'm winking at you a big, big wink. Uh. I'm so lowly.

2:11 This podcast is about why horror scares us, what deep, dark secret scary cinema shines a light on. The discussions are frank and involve conversations about abuse, trauma, and mental health. There are also spoilers, so keep that in mind too. Now, sharpen your machetes and straight raisers, because this is cutting deep into horror. Hello, my spookies, and welcome back to cutting deep into horror.

2:56 I am, of course, what's that? What's that? Scared? Was really goofy to me? What was a goofy about it? I was trying to get across that the Blair Witch is unfairly maligned in today's society. I get that. No, thank you, do you? Thank you for standing up for the rights of which Americans everywhere? I try, I try my best. But anyway, I'm your host, Enrique Kuto of course, here with my co host on cutting deep into horror, Rachel Ridolfi. Rachel, how are you? I'm doing pretty all right? Good, good, good October. We're nearly through it. It's hard to believe it not for me. It's been like a time war. Things are moving so fast, so often it feels like but this is airing on the twenty fourth of October, so we're nearly to the big day. We're a week away from the big day. And tonight we're talking about one of the first horror movies I remember seeing in the theater that scared me very very much, A movie that was very polarizing in the back in the day. But I don't know that it's so polarizing now.

4:11 I think most people, most people just like nineteen ninety nine's The blair Witch Project. I think they just dig it now, but there was a long period of time where they did not. I remember as far back as maybe twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, there was a lot of malignment towards found footage movies in general, and that really died out. Yeah. I remember in twenty fourteen when I wanted to make my first found footage movie, which ended up being Alone in the Ghost House. I actually like put it to Facebook it said, like, would you guys be like down if I made a found footage because people there were a lot of people were like I hate them, I never watch them. That mentality is like gone now, yeah, it really is completely gone. So and I'm glad because found footage is not only a very valid storytelling technique for filmmaking, but it's also one that's very cost effective, which is important if you're going to democratize the art form. And then on top of that, it's really nothing that different. Like Dracula, the book by Brown Stoker is a found footage book. It's a diary.

5:25 Yeah. Yeah. There are tons of famous books, especially in the horror genre, that are reading diary entries. And the entire point of reading a air quote diary is that it really happened and you're reading the record of it. It has dates and times on it. It is a found footage movie. It's just a found footage book. Yeah. Absolutely, So with that all being said, the Blair Witch Project was not, by any means the first found footage movie, not at all. There were many precursors to it, some of them more famous than others. One of the absolute most famous films of all time that was technically a found footage movie.

6:13 And I guess we should explain what a found footage. Movie is for those who don't know well, and. More so for the sake of the discussion. But found footage and this is something I'm very passionate about because I love what you can do with the found footage subgenre. I think that it's a very exciting way to tell a story and it's very accessible. And as time has gone on, people have only gotten more used to literally watching raw footage on their own phones, so it's even more comfortable to watch raw footage of a movie of a story being told exactly. But so for the for this case, it's basically having a film presented to you as actual footage discovered and shown to you of something that happened. That's probably pretty terrible. And although I will say it's thinly a found footage movie, it is a found footage movie would be nineteen eighties Cannibal Holocaust.

7:11 I'm glad you brought that up because I was gonna talk about that. It's one of my favorite horror films. I know it sounds like and it is. I mean, it's a disgusting, nasty, Italian cannibal horror movie. But it has a lot to say about the media. It has a lot to say about the involvement of well to do first world people who go into the third world and just start messing things up. It has a lot to say about presenting yourself as virtuous when you're not. Cannibal Holocaust has so much going on for it. Directed by Rigio Dia Dado Italian film and I've always loved the movie, even though it can be hard to stomach at times, and it's literally about a documentary crew going into the Amazon and never getting out and then their footage being found. The difference between this and kind of the more modern era of found footage movies is that is that in the film there is a like narrative movie where they are viewing the found footage, the footage that is discovered, right, and that is a major delineation. And there are a few others like that, because then the found footage movie has a cousin, which is the mockumentary. Yes, the mockumentary or fake documentary is a whole other ballgame, but very similar.

8:36 Blair Witch Project starts as kind of a mockumentary of sorts, but it devolves into raw footage of scary shit, right, and honestly, found footage movies I find much scarier than a mockumentary in general. Well, it's more intimate, well true, no, absolutely, And on top of that, Blair Witch Project had one of the best mockumentaries of all time as it's marketing, which was the Curse of the Blair Witch The Sci Fi Channel special TV specials like forty four Minutes that they ran add nauseum on the Sci Fi Channel leading up to the release of The Blair Witch Project. And I watched that must have been five or six times on TV before I went to see the movie, and it got me scared. It's scary, it's spooky.

9:16 It's a really spooky and fascinating dive into the mythos that the filmmaking team went really hard into creating. And we'll talk a little bit more about found footage films and then get into the Blair Witch project right after this. So after Cannibal Holocaust and I'm sure I'm missing something, I'm going relatively off the top of my head. I don't have like a Google list in front of me or a chatch ept research thing in front of me.

9:57 One of the next contenders for early version of a found footage movie to go at least moderately mainstream is nineteen ninety two's Man Bites Dog. Have you ever seen Man Bytes Dog? No, but I feel like I've heard of it. It's a very interesting movie. It followed. The film follows a crew of filmmakers who are following a serial killer, recording his horrific crimes for a documentary they're producing. At first dispassionate observers, they find themselves increasingly caught up in the chaotic and nihilistic violence, eventually becoming accomplices who It's really good. It's a Belgium movie, of course it is, and very similar to Man BYTE's Dog. There was a much smaller budget American movie around the same time called America's Deadliest home Video, which doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, so I'm trying to figure out what year that came out.

10:54 I think it was ninety three or ninety four, obviously playing on America's most are not funniest home videos. Yeah, but it stars Danny Bonaducci, of all people, from from Gosh It Okay nineteen ninety three, so it's very similar to Man Bites Dog. I don't think it's ripping it off, but it could be. But yeah, Danny Bonaducci from Oh what's that show with the kids in the school bus? The Partridge Family. Oh, and it's actually very good. It's a man videotaping a road trip, although that's not really perfectly described, is taken hostage by three criminals and forced to tape their crime spree, including robberies and murder. Ooh yeah, and it's actually like really fun, it's really sleazy. Well yeah, and it works very very well. So that's another one that's that's really really fun. I was actually involved in the remastering of that movie to come out on home video, and now it's out through our buddies at Terror Vision, which you can find at terror dot Vision dot com.

11:57 They put out the Blu ray. But so you had ban BYTE's Dog, you had America's Deadliest Home Video, and there were a few other ones I'm sure that I'm not remembering. And then you come up to the blair Witch Project in nineteen ninety nine. But what's really interesting is in nineteen ninety eight there was an independent film released called The Last Broadcast, And when blair Witch was coming out, everyone was talking about how The Last Broadcast was very similar to the blair Witch Project. They were both made in the same part of the country around the same time. But and it's a big butt. The Last Broadcast is a mock youmentary.

12:44 Right, there's a difference. It's not really a found footage movie. It's like it's put together. It's clearly edited all the way through. But I do like it, and it works really well, and it's this is so stupid. It says the film is credited as the first feature on length film shot on and edited entirely on consumer level digital equipment. That's not true, not in nineteen ninety eight. I knew people doing it in ninety seven. But uh yeah, let's see, uh told in a pseudo documentary format and employing found footage technique. The fictional film appears to tell the story of a man convicted of in nineteen ninety five of murdering the members of his team during an expedition to find the mythic Jersey Devil in the New Jersey Pine barrens. Ooh, it's a really fun one. It really is. It's not the Blair Witch Project though it's it's honestly, it's it's more glossy, and in that way it makes it less interesting.

13:39 I get that, but I do love it. I do think that the Last Broadcast is a worthwhile movie. But people were just all over saying this knocked off the blair Witch Project, this did this, this did that, which caused me to go to my local Hollywood Video and rent it because they didn't have it at Blockbuster, but they had at Hollywood Video. So I rented and watched it. I liked it, but it was not the Blair Project. It was much more like Curse of the blair Witch. Okay, I will say I hated the very ending though, but that's I don't want to spoil it, even though the movie's very old at this point. But it's a pretty good one. So, and then The Blair Witch Project comes out in nineteen ninety nine, and basically it basically gives us the concept of found footage, almost a blueprint in many ways up until Paranormal Activity then takes it one step further. And there are a lot of great I'll never be able to name them all. There are a lot of great found footage movies out there that are really interesting. Paranormal Activity obviously, that's a pretty pretty solid one. Wreck. Yeah, have they showed you Wreck?

14:39 No, But you've talked about it, so we need to watch it since. I have the box set. Oh, it's a Spanish found footage movie about a news reporter who gets caught in the middle of the zombie virus beginning the world ended. It's super good. The second one is also pretty damn good. I don't know if i've I don't think I've seen the third and fourth ones though, but I have the box set. But Reck is a really good one. It was remade into the film Quarantine in America. Okay, and Quarantine's all right, but rec was way better. It's rec r e C like record rec. Yeah. I was always confused with people to say, oh, have you seen rec and it'd be like, what like WRC cam, Yeah, that's what I thought they were talking about. So but yeah, So that's my little, like early diatribe about found footage.

15:25 I think there's a lot to love about found footage as a filmmaking style, at whether you're making the movies or you're viewing them. I think there's a lot to enjoy about it. I think just the fact that as you're watching, as you're watching the camera pan around, you're constantly thinking about what you're not able to see or what you're about to see. Yes, because it feels more random, even though you know it's not. Then if it was a scene being cut together bouncing between cameras, where you're like, oh, yeah, of course here comes the scare. In this way, you're like every time the cameras pan around, you're like, what am I gonna see? What am I going to see? Oh? Did I see something? Was that something great? There? Yeah? Yeah, it's a really interesting it's a really interesting way to watch a movie.

16:08 I agree. And we'll talk a little bit more about that and then we'll really dive into the boer Wish project. Right. Oh, they're used to it by now, if they listen to Cutting Deep right after this. So, with all that being said, do you remember the first time that you became aware of the concept of found footage? Well, that's a I've got a two part answer, because you were talking about found footage books.

16:50 Yes, well yeah, like fake diaries, fake journals, fake but fake diaries, fake journals, fake ship logs, yes, all kinds of stuff like that. Yeah. So, being being someone who plays video games, uh in a lot, uh in a lot of games, you know, like BioShock is a good one, you uncover a lot of It's a horror game. It would terrify you. I've heard of you, you'd love it. But you uncover a lot of the backstory and a lot of the plot is revealed through logs and through recordings. So I think that's a you know, to gamers, that's a very common uh storytelling tactic. But for me, the first time I was made aware of presenting something as real and that being part of the story was War.

17:46 Of the World's m m okay, that's a really good idea. That's a really good thought. Rather, because you know, my family, we did not celebrate Halloween because we were you know, we're a good Christian home. So what we would do on Halloween night, on like Beggar's Night, is we would turn off all the lights and we would like go down in the basement and just watch wholesome movies downstairs. That's kind I mean, it is like it's it's some good memories looking back. Like, but when I was like twelve thirteen, one year, my dad wanted to change it up and he had an old vinyl recording of the broadcast of the War of the Worlds and he was like, well, this is something fun.

18:31 Let's all listen to it as a family. And I was like entranced with it, and that very interesting it is, and it's especially interesting looking at the history of it, and you know, there's there's a lot of contention over how much panic did actually spread, and there's also like it seems like Orson Wells in interviews with him, he wanted it both ways that. Yeah, totally, there's nothing better for you than the legend of a thing you did. Right, Yeah, no, because if you listen to it, which the first time I ever heard the War of the World's broadcast was when I first got my driver's license. So the week this is so me the week I got my driver's license two days.

19:18 Three days later, I drove to Rochester, New York, which is about eleven hours ten hours from US. I got in the car and did that with like zero driving experience. And I needed stuff to listen to, and this was before iPods were affordable for me, So I went to a used CD store and just bought a bunch of stuff. And one of the things I found in the little discount bin was a CD of War of the World's the broadcast. So that's the first time I listened to it, and I really enjoyed it, although I have to say they do constantly say that it's not real. They do, like. They're constantly reminding you that you're listening to a theatrical perf for months.

20:01 Yeah, So how anyone could get that mixed up? I'm not entirely certain, but I do. I do also understand, like you know, you've back back then, like radio was still relatively a new entertainment form. Definitely, so. Hearing something like that, if you were caught off guard, I could imagine until you got to the next commercial break that you would be a little bit freaked out. So it was that was like my first introduction of like you suspend your disbelief to get into the world of the entertainment, but then you suspend your disbelief even further and accept it as that is the world that you're in. You're not just observing the story, you're actually a part of it. And so when Cloverfield came out, I was so into it, like I was. I was like visiting the website every single day to see if I could find clues lose like I was ate up.

21:03 So that was the first found footage movie that I saw, and I did go to see it in the theater and I was absolutely hooked because again, you you feel so much more intimately about what you're viewing because it is, you know, treated as you are the character, right, you know, whoever's holding the camera, you're that person. So yeah, and ever since then, I've kind of had a soft spot for found footage. I completely didn't think about Cloverfield, but Cloverfield's a really good example. And Blair Witch Project, I mean, they had a website, they had all kinds of crazy stuff. The marketing was intense and it worked because I had to see it. I would I begged to see it when it came out, So for those who don't know the blair Witch Project from nineteen ninety nine, it's a found footage movie about a group of filmmakers who head into the Burkettsville Woods in Maryland to shoot a documentary about a local myth known as the Blair Witch. And while attempting to film this documentary, they get lost in the woods and start being stalked and terrorized by unseen forces.

22:27 And that's really I mean, that's the bulk of what blair Witch Project is. But they had went to such lengths to make it seem legitimate in every way, including at like Sundance Film Festival when they premiered it there, putting up missing posters for the three actors and doing the opposite of what basically every Sundance premiere does, which is not having the actors there. Yeah, it was. It was crazy. So in fact, this little it was a little heiny, low budget movie that initially cost around thirty five thousand dollars to make, but then ballooned up to anywhere from estimates of two hundred thousand to seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars after post production costs and things from artisan Films who bought it. They bought the film from at Sun Dance for one point one million dollars, and then it had a limited release in July of ninety nine, and by the end of July it was everywhere in America. I don't know why this listing says it was a sleeper hit that grows nearly two hundred and fifty million dollars, because sleeper hit means that it starts unsuccessful. Everybody wanted to go see the blurb project.

23:40 We were all primed. That is not the right word. So it made about two hundred and fifty million dollars at the box office on at worst about a million dollars all in on the movie, and most of that was spent by the production company. I'd call that a good ROI it's a. Huge success, although the filmmakers will tell you that they did not get a share, a very big share of it. The actors in particular have filed lawsuits about their compensation, and I'd have to look into it to really have an opinion there. To me, it's like, whatever you signed, whatever you were paid, whatever you agreed to, is what you're supposed to get. But it is trickier though, with the blair Witch Project, because those actors were in many ways authors of the film as well. Although they did not finance it, they did not launch it. They were participants later. But there's a good debate either direction on that.

24:34 So that's yeah, that's the blair Witch Project. And I'll tell you all about my first viewing of it, and then we'll learn about yours, Rachel, right after this. So, as I had alluded to earlier, my first viewing of the blair Witch Project was in its initial theatrical run. I saw that Curse of the blair Witch mockumentary on sci fi channels so many times, and I at first thought it was real. I was gosh, in ninety nine, I would have been twelve or thirteen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, at first I thought maybe it was real, and then, you know, as time went on, it was like, no, it's it's clearly not real, but like it's really fun and creepy and spoopy, which are all things I still enjoy to this very day. And I got my mother to take me. My mom thought it was fine, she was like, ah's interesting, But I was engrossed the whole time I saw in the theater. I was just like wow, and I lucked out and didn't get motion sick that.

25:57 I don't know if you remember people talking people crazy saying they got motion sick, because it is a lot of the camera shaking around and stuff like that. The film was was partially shot on sixteen millimeter black and white film using a CP sixteen camera, which nobody cares, but I do kind of you do care a little bit, and then the other portion, the majority of the movie is shot on a high eight cam quarter, which was at the time this was supposed to take place. I don't know exactly when they filmed, but it was supposed to take place in nineteen ninety four. Okay, so the idea being that it was. The footage was found a couple years later, and then a few years after that the Blair Witch Project movie comes together and I, yeah, I really enjoyed it. Oh and it was so shot a heyt video, which at the time in nineteen ninety four was the new hotness of home video cameras because it had a lot of visual clarity on a little eight millimeter tape. So this is the kind of boring tech stuff I live off of. So and then I remember when the movie came out on home video, I begged and pleaded to get the double VHS release that had the Blair Witch Project, and then it had Curse of the Blair Witch and it had all these other like deleted scenes and little bits and bobs on the

27:28 other tape. Ooh, and I ate it up. I watched it over and over again, and since then, I think I've owned Blair Witch Project on every format that has been available. I'm pretty sure I had a DVD of it. I know I had the original Blu ray, and now I have this brand new British import second Sight Blu ray, which is fully remastered from the ground up and looks great. And we actually watched for the first time ever for either of us, the festival cut. Yeah, the version that was shown at Sundance, which is a bit longer and has a little bit more to it. I will say that in many ways, the theatrical is the better movie, but it was cool to get more of the movie having been such a big fan. So what about you, what was your first Blair Witch Project viewing.

28:13 With you? Once again, once again, I don't think it was on one of our camping trips, but I think it was maybe after we got back from whatever our camping trips. I can't remember. Yeah, I can't exactly remember the exact timeframe, but you know it was, you know, late summer, early fall, in the sort of we want to get in the spooky season spirit, but not actually watch a Halloween movie because it's not Halloween yet. And I had mentioned how much I enjoy found footage, and so you were like, well, have you have you seen this?

28:54 And I was like, well, no, but I'm curious. So we watched it, and I was engrossed the entire higher time, because it really does a great job, especially with the theatrical version, of finding its pace very quickly and keeping the pace going without feeling like it's going to run off the rails at any moment. Like the tension builds perfectly, and on the second watch through, especially with the festival cut, I realize how much of the tension is just everything that's going on between the characters. Sure, that's obviously more drawn out in the longer version, but even in you know, the theatrical version, when I watch it with you, that's really where a lot of the conflict and a lot of the scary elements comes down to what's going on between the characters during the day and all the scary stuff at night is just like there to remind you, like what the stakes? What know what stakes there are?

30:02 Yeah, no, I would have to agree, So I take it you you did enjoy it quite a bit. Oh yeah, yeah, because after we watched it, you and I were at second time around and I saw it for real cheap on DVD and I was like, well, I've got it. I've got to just own it now, like there's no and I still have it in my collection. Yeah. Yeah, No, it's it's a it's a solid movie and there's there's a lot to love about it. So we'll we'll dive into it, dig a little deeper into it. So gosh, where to start because there is a lot of Blair Witch stuff. So first of all, we have our three characters, which are Heather, Michael, and josh Yeah, Heather is the director of the project and Michael is the sound guy who is new to Heather and Joshua, and Joshua is the camera operator and cinematographer. So of the two, Heather and josh have quite a camaraderie that makes it clear that they've probably known each other for quite a while, and they constantly reference that Michael is younger than them. He's probably like a sophomore in college, I think, is what they they suggest, And I think they're both juniors or seniors. Actually know they're seniors because they're making a senior thesis. Yeah, so at least Heather is a senior. I did not go to film school, so I have to guess. But so they head out to Burkettsville, Maryland. It's never I don't remember if it's

31:32 fully stated what college they were coming from. I think it was supposed to be the University of Maryland. I think you're right. So they drive out to this place called Burkettsville, Maryland, a real place and the fictitional Blair was the town there before Burkettsville, which when you look at especially American history, there's a lot of that. Yeah, there's a lot of towns that get dissolved, but maybe the name just never quite goes away. One of my favorite examples in my own life is the Mahoning Drive In, which is not in Mahoning, Pennsylvania because there is no Mahoning, Pennsylvania anymore, but it's le Heighten, Pennsylvania. But yeah, there was a Mahoning Pennsylvania. So there's a Mahoning drive in right there, not really in Mahoning Pennsylvania. Now, if you say Mahoning Pennsylvania in that part of PA, most people will know where you're talking about, because they at least somewhat remember it. But yeah, it's no longer a town.

32:33 And much like that, Blair was a town founded a very long time ago that has since been dissolved and turned into Burkettsville. And we'll find out more about what the townsfolk think of their little documentary right after this. So the three young filmmakers get to Burkettsville and they start interviewing all of the locals. And this is, to me such a great introduction to the film, because not only do you start learning about the lore of the Blair Witch and Burkettsville and Blair itself, you also start to learn a bit about our three main characters because in between the interviews they kind of talk back and forth about the project. They talk back and forth about who they just interviewed or what they just heard, so we kind of get a little bit of Josh's easygoing nature and Mike being a little more uptight and a little more sarcastic. Yeah, and how they're like really being all in on this.

33:52 Oh yeah, she's very like natural leader mentality. One thing I always enjoyed about the movie was they have that adorable glow of like where like we're making our first movie. Yeah when even when the movie is this little kind of pretentious college thesis film, and it is kind of pretentious. There are a few a few times in the film where Sarah or a Heather sorry Heather does stand ups, which are where you're standing in front of a camera with a background that's prudent, and she gives like a little speech about the area, about formerly Blair and you know what coffin rock is and all this stuff. And it's very film school. It's very low fig you know, wanna be national geographic. But that's what you would that's what you would make, especially if you're a film student.

34:46 Nineteen ninety four, nineteen ninety five. I mean it was literally made by these two filmmakers named Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, and they were film students at one time, and they put this, they pulled this together. They were the writers and directors of the film, and yeah, they they you know, I think they were pulling from experience a bit. Oh, absolutely that way. They also, I think it's worth mentioning too, that when they were hiring actors, So the legend is that they saw two thousand actors. That's the legend, is that they interviewed two thousand actors and they settled on these three. And one of the big requirements was you had to have massive improv experience, and you had to have experience shooting film and video.

35:39 Right because you're gonna be the one holding the camera. Yeah, almost everything in the film is shot by the actors, with almost no I don't think they're I think other than the little brief little shots at the beginning, it's all shot by the actors. So yeah, that was a big A big element was being able to come up with actors who could film the whole thing and acted out so well, which they really did. They really lucked out with these actors. Yeah. So now they're talking about the area of Burkettsville, the strange occurrences in the woods related to a certain witch that is of legend, and as they're asking people around town, one thing I found really interesting is most people don't really have anything to say about the Blair Witch. Only a few people do.

36:35 Mostly what they have to talk about is a guy by the name of Rustin Parr who lived in the forest and abducted seven children in nineteen forty one and murdered them all in his basement. So this town already has like a you know, in this century, horrific thing that happened that people are still reeling from. To some extent, most of the people they are interviewing were likely children when that happened may or maybe even not even born, So that gives it a whole other element because there's a lot of lore building, and that's the one thing I love. But also, you know what, no I love about the blur which right I'm gonna say I also hate about it. You can go in blind and have a pretty good time, or you can watch Curse of the Blair Witch and read all the stuff from the old website and really be pulled in. Oh yeah, because there is so much lore that they go over again and again, deeper and deeper. And it also should be mentioned the backstory of how the footage was found. I mean, these kids go into the woods they never come back.

37:48 They they search and search and search for them, they never find them ever. And this is the thing I mentioned the other night to you that I had to double check, Like where they claimed the footage was found through through sheer luck. They found the film cans and audio and video cassette tapes underneath a stone foundation of a house that burned down. And according to the archaeology expert at the local at the local school, there's no real way he could think of that you could put that stuff underneath the foundation of a house. Yeah, without doing it before the house was put there. But the house has been was there for a very long time and had burned down a very long time ago. So that's that's another added suit. I mean though, Like so knowing that lore which is not in the movie, Yeah, you only know that if you watched Curse of the blair Witch or went to the old blair Witch website.

38:48 That brings so much more creepy spooky fun to the film. Yeah. Well that's that's the movies. Like, uh, it's like an onion. It has so many layers and it's enjoyable at every single layer because you've got the initial layer of just like Oh, this is a spooky found footage movie that's got scary stuff that happens in it, so you should be scared. And then this is also a movie about how being in the wilderness and trying to survive, praise on your emotions and praise on your psyche. There's, you know, the layers of story behind it about the Blair Witch and then about Rust and Parr, and you know it just it keeps going and going. It's a rabbit hole that you can go down. And that's why I like this movie so much. So as they're interviewing the townsfolk, the big, the big thing that we realize is people really aren't all that scared with the Blair Witch anymore. It really is the trauma of Rust and Parr.

40:03 And I loved the interview with the two guys like fishing in the river. Oh, that's one of my favorite scenes in the first act because they're like annoying each other and stuff, because one guy's probably thirty five and the other guy is probably about twenty five years or twenty years older than him. Yeah, and the older guy is a lot more like kind of playful and annoying him. So they're they're constantly like teasing each other and talking over each other, and the younger guy will like be all serious talking about Rust and Parr and how horrible it was what he did to those kids, And you know, the older guy will just be like, Rust and par you don't even remember Rust and Parr. You weren't even born yet.

40:46 Well, and he and we forgot to mention some of the more grisly details of rustin Parr's crime, and we'll get to those right after this. So Rust and Parr had murdered those seven children I mentioned in nineteen forty one, killing them in pairs while having one stand in the corner facing the wall. Horrific. Absolutely, So when they talk to those two fishermen, it's important to mention they don't talk about Rust and Parr that much because Rust and Parr to some of the people who are more invested in myths, you know, local legends, whatever. Whether it's out of sheer, morbid curiosity or something more grandiose, who knows.

41:42 They're talking about how the woods are cursed because Rust and Parr lived deep in the woods, and those woods are known to be where a lot of weird things have happened over the course of Blair and later Burkettsville. So one thing they mention is that a young boy named Robin Weaver went missing in eighteen eighty eight, but he was returned three days later, and or she was returned. Uh, and she talked about how there was an old woman whose feet never touched the ground and that's who who saved her. Yeah, so that's pretty freaky. And they go into some other crazy things. They go to a place called Coffin Rock where supposedly five men were found ritualistically slaughtered in the nineteenth century, tied hands to feet at Coffin Rock. But one thing I really love about that is when they're showing like the build up to going to Coffin Rock and how they're having to hike into the woods to find these locations that are a bit you know, they're a bit less you know, commonplace, like yeah, you don't just know where Coffin Rock is or whatever, you know, Like yeah, So they mentioned that there's only like one book book that Heather could find in any library that says anything about Coffin Rock, which I love that too because that makes me wonder like did it even happen? I mean, like it's in one book, but

43:14 with after they talk about coffin Rock. Oh, the big one is that then somebody discovered it, ran away, came back and the bodies were gone. Yeah, all matter if no hours? Maybe no, it was two days. Yeah, because we're talking deep in the woods in the eighteen hundreds. But as we dig a little bit deeper, we find out they find out a little bit about the Blair Witch and a lot more about the Blair Witch. As I said, is in Curse of the Blair Witch. But the Blair Witch was named Ellie Keedward, and she was said to have practiced witchcraft, and she was banished from the town in seventeen eighty five after several local children accused her of performing magic. So she was presumed dead from exposure, so she was sent off to freeze to death. Oh she was hung. Sorry, she was hung on a tree with stones tied to each of her limbs, stretching her body down with gravity. I forgot that part. Oh, But then the next year, all of her accusers and half of the town's children vanished without a trace. Fearing a curse, the townspeople immediately fled Blair, vowing never to utter the name Ellie Edward again. So yeah, that's the that's the big you know, blair Witch concept. But then if you want to get even deeper and I can into these concepts.

44:42 In eighteen twenty five, a year after the town was rediscovered and founded as Burkettsville, the villagers held the first annual wheat harvest picnic. During the event, ten year old alien Treacle wandered off towards Tappy East Creek and drowned in the shallow water. Witnesses claim to have seen a ghostly white hand reach out from the water and pull her in. The creek was searched, but Aileen's body was never recovered. Afterwards, the creek mysteriously became clogged with oily bundles of sticks, rendering the water useless for thirteen days. A man drank the water within that time, resulting in his death, while several animals also got sick and died.

45:25 The incident was the first of several to be blamed on the blair Witch, and then, of course eighteen eighty six Robin Weaver, which was blamed on the blair Witch. See oh and then oh yeah, and then there was the massacre of the Birkins Hill seven rust In par So, those are the echoes of the Blair Witch. You have this one thing happening in eighteen seventy or eighteen or seventeen eighty five, and then eighteen twenty five something awful happens, and then eighteen eighty six Robin Weaver leads directly into finding the dead men at Coffin Rock. They were I apologize, I got mixed up. They were the they were like a search party for looking for Robin Weaver. Okay, they were the ones who were slaughtered. So it says they were slaughtered by Ellie Keedward, who disemboweled them and left their corpses on Coffin Rock, then returned to the house supposedly to kill Robin. However, she discovered the house empty and realized that Robin had fled. That's like the deeper version, see what I mean. They're so much waw and I love it. It's so thick.

46:32 Yeah. So to get back to the movie. But like, if you didn't know this lore, it really does make the movie way more fun. But the film is mostly the first twenty minutes are ghost stories of this little town in Maryland, and then it's them in the woods. And this is something that always got to me pretty intensely. Because i've I'm better about it now obviously, But when I was young, I had a very strong fear of getting lost in the woods. Oh really, mm hmm, I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, I mean it's the woods, you know, Like, you don't want to get lost in It's bad and there's no there's no map, there's no you know, roads.

47:19 How do you not get lost in the woods? Oh, I see, I'm a farm kid, so I'm just like going to see. Yeah, but those woods weren't thick, no, I mean there is a difference. Yes, yeah, yeah, I'm talking about woods that I thought were really big when I'm sure they weren't actually because the river. I'm a child when I'm saying this, but it made me think a lot because there were a lot of things that would help make you afraid of getting lost in the woods. Like have I ever shown you the Haunted Cab episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? I think so, Yeah, the. One with the Haunted Cabby driving through the woods. Yeah, that one. I thought about it all the time when I was a kid. How these two brothers get lost in the woods. It was very scary to me, the idea of getting lost in the woods and nightfall and it gets really cold, and you don't have any food on any water, you don't know how to get out. Of course, then there's the old say, you know, how far do you walk? How far can you walk through the woods? Halfway? Because if you walk any further than that, you're walking out. You know, you could just keep going straight and you'll leave the woods eventually. Of course that doesn't quite ring so true for our intrepid filmmakers. But the good news, I guess is they don't even really know that they're lost yet because they camp for the night uneventful. Yeah, and the next day we find out that they're going so far into the woods because she read in one of these books that there's an old graveyard deep in the woods, away from everything. And when you go out, if you spend enough time in New England, like I did, or enough time in some of the really old sections of the East Coast, which I did

48:51 a little bit of, that there's stuff just in the middle of the woods that makes no sense. There'll be churches where it's like, how did anybody come here to worship? It's in the middle. It's in the middle of the woods. I guess you just hiked to it. Weird people used to live places, but I mean you'd think there'd be trails or a road, like a very rough road or something. No, just in the woods. That's where it is. Feels weird. But they do find the old graveyard, but they might find more than just funeral grave markers. Funeral markers. It's been a long week, but we'll explain more after this.

49:45 So they find this graveyard deep in the woods, but it's not a traditional graveyard. It has these little rock piles or cairns, the term cairns, and there are seven of them, which is an interesting thing considering that's how many kids that rust and Parr killed. Yeah, and one of the things excuse me. One of the things that they mention is that the way Rustin Parr was caught. I can't believe I left this part out was that he walked down into town and let me find it.

50:25 I want to find the exact term. I'm looking at the Blair Witch Project fandom wiki, which has all of this info. So Rustin, after he killed the seven kids, Rustin hid the secret for two days and then uh. And then Kelly Ellie Keedwards supposedly said reappeared to him after telling him to kill those children and said peace shall come to the if the revealed by actions. So and that's you. It's hard to find like this is in all of the lore bundled up. But the way that I originally heard it was just that he walked into town, sat down at a diner and said I'm finally finished, and nobody knew what he was talking about.

51:13 And eventually people went to his house and they found the seven kids, and it shocked the community. He was proclaimed guilty and he was executed. He never denied any of it, of the killings, and confessed in forming authorities of Birkertsville that he was merely doing what an old woman dressed in black had told him to do. Parr was convicted and authorities executed him by hanging in nineteen forty one. And yes, there were still hangings in nineteen forty one. Yeah. Yeah, some people get surprised by that that firing squad and hangings are not very old or not very or not. They're not far removed than history.

51:55 That's work. That's a good way to put it. So anyway, But I just want to mention, for got to mention the part about how he comes into town and says, I'm finally finished. So it's creepy. Yeah, that's super creepy. And remember he lived deep in the woods of former Blair, which is supposedly where Ellie Edward lives and rains Supreme and wreaks havoc and all this stuff. So at one point while they're going through trying to look at these and it's the middle of the day and they're filming all these little cairns and Josh while operating camera, and it's important to keep in mind that, especially in nineteen eighty four, when you're making a student thesis film, it has to be on film. So the video camera that Heather is running around with all the time that was supplemental.

52:44 The thought thinking being I guess that if she got something really good on it that she couldn't get on film, she might be able to use it because documentaries are more forgiving of format changing, yeah, and of lower quality format. Because before video, making a documentary was very, very hard and very challenging because you had to have all of these roles of film and you didn't always know what circumstance you were going to be in because your film, you don't have your ISO and gain is set on the film stock. Oh just like just like photography film. Yeah, yeah, it's exactly the same. So and the film is color balance too, so you have tungsten balanced film and daylight balance film, so you can't just run and gun.

53:30 But also on sixteen millimeter you might get seven minutes maybe nine minutes of film rolling and it's expensive, which is one of my favorite things. When he tests the camera's like that's enough, that's enough. Yeah, And now as I'm older, I'm like that that's because that's one hundred and twenty dollars worth of film rolling through the camera in nineteen ninety four. That's why she's getting upset. So yeah, you're burning money, man, I. Mean literally, that's the saying that a lot of the old timers in my business, they say a lot is they say that like in the olden days, one of the nice things about shooting on film was that everybody knew when they heard the drum buzzing of the film camera that it was money running through the machine. So they took it very seriously. They would shut the hell up they would stop what they were doing and they would do their job. So but with documentaries, I mean that's yeah, the interviewing part would be would not be that hard, although you would have those moments where you'd be like, I'm sorry, you were in the middle of a thought, but we ran out of film. Yeah, can you let us take fifteen minutes to reload it and then do it again. That's it's a really I don't know how they did it, to be honest, because documentary making now is get a bunch of video cameras, you know, try to have some that are high quality. But whatever works.

54:42 You know, whatever you have works as long as the sounds decent, and just film and film and film and film and film and then cut it all together. Yeah, but when it was shot on film, it was a lot harder. So that being said, I think that's one of the reasons she brought the extra camera. That and just being a film student means that she obviously loves cameras. And filming anyway. Yeah, So but that being said, whenever they find anything of note, she's going to want to take a second and get it on sixteen millimeters black and white, which, by the way, it's in black and white because that's cheaper, like three times cheaper than color film. So that's that's why film student films are almost always in black and white. It's not an artistic choice. It's it's a money choice, much cheaper, okay, And that's good to know. And a lot of times film schools, well this is back then.

55:25 See when I was when I was supposed to go to film school, and it would have been my time to go to film school, there was no video program at all. That was broadcasting. You could go into broadcasting, but you couldn't go into film. You couldn't be making movies on videotape. So that's one of the things that kept me out. Because my mother was really like all about me going to film school, and she was willing to send me to any film school I wanted to go to. She was going to mortgage our house to send me to college because I didn't have well, I mean, well, this conversation was before I could have turned my grades around to get into a better college. These conversations were early. But she wanted me to go to film school and she was willing to send me. She wanted to send me to this new England Film School. I can't remember the name of it now. She was like, I'd be good for you. You know, you'd be you know, somewhat near your dad, and you know you already know New England pretty well. And it's a really good film school without being like UCLA or USC or NYU, which would be I mean we yeah, even mortgaging the house would be a bit of a stretch to go to those places for me. But you know, but I looked into it and it was like crazy because yeah, it's like ten thousand dollars a semester or eight thousand dollars a semester, but then your film costs are like another ten grand a year. Whoof yeah it could be more sometimes. So film's expensive is the long and the short of all of that.

56:49 But my only experience with film was I had to take one film photography class at Sinclair and I paid a lot of attention to the price of silver for that what four month five month period because I had to buy all the film and it was silver based photography. So as the price of silver went up and down, I was like, well, this is when I'm not buying film or oh, if the price has gone down this week. I'm gonna buy it. They still use silver nitrate in photography film because they don't in motion picture film because it's two damn flamble. Oh yeah, well, we gotta remember they're piling giant stacks of film for movies. But that was a very long digression to say that. As Josh is trying to get a good sixteen millimeters shot of this pile of stones, something that may have triggered all of the horrors we're about to talk about happens. We'll talk about that right after this. Okay, So Josh over one of the piles of rocks. I'm so sorry that I made it take so long for us to get there. I feel like, if you're just tuning into cutting deep into horror, I hope you really like movie talk and film talk because I can't help myself. I have been in the film

58:19 business actively since I was fifteen years old, you know or two, well more, so I can't help but know a thing or two, and it's obviously what I'm interested in because it ain't a way to make lots of money fast, I'll tell you that much. So I remember I gave a talk at Film Dayton I've given two. I give one about distribution. Oh no, they were both about distribution, but they were like three or four years apart. And when I gave the first talk about it, I had just had like three massive wins in film distribution because I made money. Not a lot of money, but I made money and I kept getting movies released, which people were just like, how do you do it? How do you get your movies released? And I was like, I don't know. You make them and then you ask people to release them. What if they say no, then you ask more people. That was like the Q and A basically, but but it was funny because I was very aggressive about like do your research, you know, make the right movie for the right price. You know, that's that kind of thing. And toward the end of it, somebody had said like it said, like this should be like a seminar, like I made movies and I made money in movies and you can too. And I was like, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, go into real estate for the love of God that if you want to make money, like go into something else. Yeah, this is in my blood. I can't help it. Like I just happened to be the functional drunk, you know, of this whole thing, like I'm the functional speedball user

59:50 of the of the filmatics. You know, I'm the one who still shows up to work on time every day. So anyway, he knocks over the pile of of stones, and now the tone does shift. And I have to admit that, in all the years of watching Blair Witch Project, I there's something about watching movies you've seen dozens and dozens of times, how you'll just miss little things. And I remember him knocking over the stones, but I also remember kind of going like, peh, whatever, and it I think it's a massive element. I do believe. So, yeah, do you remember when. She puts the stone back on there, she kisses, she kisses her hand and ketches it and then looks it just can't be too careful. It's a really awesome moment. So, and it should be mentioned that the way the movie was made. Have you ever looked into the way the movie was actually made? No, it's weirder than you think.

1:00:49 So the actors were given let's see, uh, let's see okay, So the actors were given clues as to their next location through messages hidden Inde thirty five millimeter film cans left in milk crates they found using satellite and navigation units. They did not directly speak to the directors very often at all. That is insane, and they get this though. This is part I love. They were given individual instructions to use to use in order to help improvise the action of the day, So each of them got their own script so that the others didn't know things that they knew. I love that, and that's something that I found really fascinating because like when I've made found footage movies in the past, and I've never made me of to the caliber of Blair Witch or whatever, but I've made ones that I thought were pretty fun. I'm pretty scary.

1:01:48 The biggest tool I always had was was misleading and confusing the actors. That was like the best way to get great stuff, Like having them break character and not realize I'm using the footage. Yeah, that was one of my favorites. Or misleading them or saying things that they didn't know I was going to say if I was a character in the scene, sneaking up on them when they weren't expecting. It's it's really good fun. So they were given instructions and also from what I understand, also like food and water in these little drops. Yeah, and you mentioned that they were given less and less food as the shooting. Yeah, they could. They from what I understand, they consented to that. They consented to having their food get rationed less and less to help them build up the reality of being lost in the woods and having no food at all. So, yeah, it's it's really really wild. And according to the commentary, the filmmakers did the figure that donnae Whu was shouting about when she's running away from the tent later on, which we'll get to that in a minute, was the art director Ricardo Moreno, who was wearing white long John's, white stockings and white pantyhose pulled over his head, and which is extra funny because you never even get a peek. You never even get a peek at him. So so and obviously I would have to guarantee that, you know, without digging super deep, that that there was a little more direction given here and

1:03:18 there for more poignant and pivotal moments, but overall the actors were really just kind of running and gunning, you know, just kind of going for it. So they've knocked over the Karens and now night is falling, and as they're trying to go to sleep, they're turning on the cameras because they're talking to each other about hearing sticks snapping and things like that. And I think that's the one where in the morning they're talking to Josh and he's like, I heard sounds over here and over here. You know, there were this and there was a two layers of sound over here, one layer of sound over here. And I love it because Mike and Heather are just like, I didn't hear anything like sleep really heavy, and Mike's like, or Josh is like, I don't sleep heavy. Yeah, so I heard all this stuff. But they're kind of like, well, it could be a raccoon. But then he says something that really creeps me out every time, which he says, I swear it kind of sounded like a cackling, And that's when you start to realize that you are indeed watching the Blair Witch Project and a yea. The following day, though, they decide, welp, we've got our footage. It's time to head back to the car and skid out or is it We'll find out after that.

1:04:50 So they wake up that next morning after a after talking about what all Josh had heard through the night, and they realized that there are three cairns around their tent. So, and this is after they tried to find the car and failed. They absolutely could not find and they were hiking like most of the day. So Heather's explanation, it's just like they had heart hiked farther than they thought, so they can't make it to the car before nightfall. They've got a camp. So when they wake up that next morning, there's three cairns around their tent, and the two guys don't think much of it, but Heather insists that those cairns were not there when they made camp last night, and so she's kind of on edge. But what the guys are more worried about is getting back to the car because they've rented all their equipment. They've got to get it back in time.

1:05:57 Back then, this stuff was very very It still is somewhat, but it's very expensive to rent. You couldn't just own a digital tape recorder. You couldn't just own a sixteen millimeter camera. Yeah, you were renting it and you get a deal on the weekend because they're not open on Sunday, so you get Sunday for free if you return it first thing Monday morning. And you got to give back there on Monday, Yes you do. And not to mention, they've got deadlines looming with apparently like finals coming up. So the guys really want to get back to the car, and Heather starts, you know, after kind of being freaked out about the Cairns, Heather starts leading them, and this is where the tension, Like I was talking about, the tension isn't just rust and Parr. It's not just the Woods, it's not just the Witch. It's also what's going on with them because they've been out there, you know, all all yesterday. It's getting later and later in the day, and they're all snapping at each other. Josh is trying to be like the media between Mike and Heather, and we really see that, like he doesn't want to take Heather's side necessarily because he's also annoyed that they've been out there so long.

1:07:12 But Heather is the one who has the map, has the compass and says she knows and she knows where everything is. She knew where Coffin Rock was, she knew where the cemetery was, so she knows where the car is, and of course Mike is gonna get upset because Mike knows her the least. Yeah, So from his perspective, he's like, it's starting to look like you just don't know what you're talking about. There are a few parts where there's one part where he like tells her straight up like, Okay, but I'm gonna tell you right now, I don't know if I trust you right now because you're not you know, you're telling me stuff. And then it's not really happened in that way, mm hmm, which I love those little exchanges where he just looks at her very matter of fact. He says like, I don't know if I trust you. Yeah, because she keeps saying the cars were almost there, the car's almost there. The night that they camp, she just says like, we must have been deeper in the ones, and I thought, we're probably less than an hour's hike from the car, but we can't make it at night.

1:08:00 There's no chance, too dark, so we'll do it in the morning. Yeah, And so they're hiking for an hour and he's like, well, where's the car, and she keeps insisting like she knows where it is, she knows where they are. And as things get more and more tense, like Mike is really the one who's like lashing out, yes, And as it gets later in the day, she starts talking about like, well, we're gonna have to make camp again because it's gonna get dark very quickly in these woods and we cannot make it back to the car. And he gets really upset because they were supposed to be back at the car like first thing this morning. Yeah, And now Josh is really getting upset too, and he's asking, Josh is asking, I want to see the map, like at least let me look at it.

1:08:49 Josh is extra mad because he's supposed to be at work on Monday morning. They're supposed to be home Sunday night, yeah, returning the gear and going back to their lives Monday morning. Yeah. So he demands the map because he's like, I'm tired of you doing this. I want to see the map. And that's when Heather reveals she can't find the map, and that's she starts accusing Josh, like why why were you asking for the map? Did you take the map from me? And then well, she suggests that maybe off camera he had asked to look at it before and that he and she's like, I don't think you gave it back to me because I don't have it. And I love Josh's response because he's like, it's not you're fucking with me right like that is not cool. Do not act like you don't have it, Like, if you're messing with me, stop right now, because I'm pretty pissed off. And your point about him being kind of the mediator really is fair, because this is where he finally starts to go like, fuck you and fuck your movie. I want to go home.

1:09:59 I'm tired this shit. So if you didn't lose the map and you're saying it because you're an asshole, I hate you. And if you lost the map, I hate you. I hate you for all of this. And who hasn't been there on a film set most people? Fair? Fair, I'm just being straight up with you. But no, I mean I would be livid. I mean as a filmmaker, as a film worker, which is not something I don't usually film work very much. I filmmake, and there's the delineation as film workers are hired on movies. Filmmakers are like are are generating the movies. Yeah, And it's really just a semantic way to understand a specific point. I've been hired on movies where I've become positive the leadership does not know what they're doing and it is very frustrating.

1:10:54 But it was never once. It was always like, great, so I'm not gonna have fucking dinner. I'm gonna be really grouchy. It was never like, great, so we're lost in the woods for days. Slight difference, Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, not a great position to be in for anyone, especially like Heather's trying. But it's also very clear that she's While she is a natural born leader, she's never been a position where she has to like rally the troops. Yeah, or where she's just been wrong and can't byes her way out of being wrong. Because before the map even disappears, she's constantly being told by Mike and eventually by Josh as well, like just if we're lost, just say we're lost. Yeah, like almost like that would make them feel better.

1:11:52 Yeah, the admission would be like, Okay, now we are working with all the information. Yeah, we're working together, instead of just like and I get that too, because if you put your trust into somebody to get you out of a situation, and they're feeding you the wrong information, or they're misleading you or whatever. It's like you're not using your own problem solving skills to help or to try and get yourself out of the situation. If she just said we're lost, they could all start concentrating on figuring out how the hell to get out. But instead they're being told no, I know exactly whe're going. So they're like, okay, so just going along with it and getting more lost. So I get why the frustration is building so intensely. And Heather is she's very bullheaded, she's very intense. And as you said, Mikey Is he's a bit more serious. But again I think that really comes down to the fact that he's younger and he doesn't know these guys. Yeah, so he's trying.

1:12:53 Because that's another thing I should mention. In film school, usually you crewe your films from the class, right, So Mikey is running DAT, which is digital tape. It's he's a sound person. That's where you would get you. You try to find somebody who's studying sound or at least knows enough about it, and they would do it, and they usually get like credit hours or some kind of bonus for it. Same thing with dps. You'd find somebody who is studying to be a DP and you'd get them to come on your project. So it's so that's why he's doing this and for him, you know, he keeps early on, he keeps saying and thank you for the opportunity, thank you for the opportunity. He's being very like exactly the way you should be when you're young and you're just getting your first opportunity to do something.

1:13:36 You're just gracious and friendly. Yes, sir, No, sir, sounds good. It takes him two days, like two days of hanging out with them to even kind of let loose a little bit and laugh about the fact that they are drinking beer and Scotch and stuff in between you know, working, because they got to unwind a little bit. But Mike is about to reveal something that is not easy going or lighthearted, and we'll talk about that right after this.

1:14:16 As Josh and Heather are arguing about crossing the water, I think this is around the time that she gets soaked crossing this creek, which by the way, is one of the moments that really pushes the movie's authenticity because the camera comes on like moments after it's happened. You don't actually get to see all of it, which is reality. That's the way it actually goes. And she soaked her stuff and Josh is laughing at her, Mike is laughing at her. It's kind of a little cathartic for them because they feel like, well, they know that she's gotten them into all this trouble, so they're enjoying herself.

1:14:58 Well, you've got your comeuppance. But she's not. She's like, do you really think it's funny that my shit has to be wet all day? And literally, as she says that, Josh goes back to laughing because she says that, Like, he goes back to being seriously like, but you're okay, and she's like, yeah, but I don't think it's funny that my shit is going to be wet all toda, and he starts laughing. I love that that that her saying how awful it is brings the humor path like, because you know, the only thing worse than a the only thing harder to hold back than a laugh, is a forbidden laugh. Oh yeah, yeah, that's how many times in church where you just try and not to laugh. Oh do you think I saw it on the back? No, yeah, it wasn't so you could see because you're short.

1:15:40 Well that too. But but so as they're kind of fighting again, her and Josh about you know, the map and being lost and her not admitting it and him and also we forgot the elephant in the in the forest, which is they're tired of her filming them. Yeah, they're like, it's not your fucking documentary anymore. Yeah, we got we you literally said we got everything. Where are you stuffin the woods? And at first her excuse is like, because we're gonna look back at this and it's gonna be really funny, you know how mad we were, how stressed we were, when in reality, like we were just about out. Yeah, that's the initial you know, argument for it, and I could see that a little bit.

1:16:22 But then you want to take you want to do the honors of Mike's big reveal. Mike's listening to them argue and he's kind of like stewing by himself, and then he finally just explodes and he says he starts laughing, Yeah, just laughing, and he says, of course you can't find the map. I kicked the map. I kicked that ship in the river. It was useless, it wasn't doing it any good. Yeah, so I kicked that ship in the river and the creek. And she asks, like, when did you do this? He's like, earl today, when we. Were yesterday something. Yeah, like it was doing us no good. And obviously now both she and to an extent Josh is upset, but she's way more upset at Mike because that is not only in subordination, but a complete betrayal of her trust, because she is convinced that she could have gotten them out of well the forest.

1:17:25 This is a big moment because as Josh is trying to simultaneously keep them from physically fighting, but also he wants to throttle Mike too. After he pulls Heather away and kind of gets them to have their space. This is the first time she says if we if we get hurt or we die out here, it'll be your fucking fault. She's like screaming at him, and I mean, that's but that's like kind of the moment when you hear her confidence falter, because she really does hold that second where she said we get hurt or if we die out here, because you're stuck in the woods.

1:18:11 Man, and people die in the woods. I know it happens. I don't want to be one of them. So but what what I thought was really interesting is a lot of the times when they fight, they do they do make up, you know, like I think very like a humans do, where like, you know, we don't know how much time passes when the camera cuts, so then you know they're all yelling at each other, all in each other's faces. And at one point, I don't know if it was right after this fighter, later on, there's a part where like they're kind of breathing and Mike like literally just looks at her very sincerely and just says, are you okay? Like I didn't hurt you or anything. And I felt that in my soul that that moment when you're like, I don't know who that was, I'm sorry, Like are you okay? Because that's what matters now. It's very like, it's very heart wrenching.

1:18:58 It is. It is so now that they have no map, Heather's like, well, will head south because she's got a compass? Yeah, because eventually we'll hit something, and that's when they discover one of the most if no the most iconic other than the shot of her filming herself while she's crying in the woods at night, Yeah, the most iconic thing in the whole film, which is the stick figures hanging from the trees. And this is one of my favorite moments. I mean, they're just finding all these stick figures. And it should be mentioned. I don't know if we mentioned it. My brain's a little out of it, but when they found the Karen's outside their campsite, there were three of them, right, we mentioned I just want to mention that because they're three of these guys, I'm pretty sure there were seven stick figures. Yet again another seven reference. So yeah, it's just they find the stick figures, and of course, because they're so weird, and at this point, they're trying to figure out like what is even happening, Like what is even after us? What is even going on? I mean, we're lost, but like somebody's what tracking us at night?

1:20:08 So they're saying stuff like we're not gonna have a fire tonight, because like the first night we camped, we didn't have a fire. There were no problems and then the next night we had a fire and then we heard a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, but they also pull out the sixteen millimeters camera and film these stick figures because it is really strange. And regardless of no fire, when they go to sleep that night, things they don't calm down, not at all. And we'll discuss it in detail right after this. I don't know what's with me. I'm weird. So not only the night they don't have a campfire, does weird stuff still happen. But this is one of the biggest moments of scare because as they're sitting in their tent and they're talking, they hear sounds, weird sounds, and I think the sounds are really up to interpretation. Some people have said have told me they've heard like groans or screams.

1:21:19 I've heard people say they heard like children laughing. I always just heard sounds. I could never really place them personally. They do sound like they're coming from like a person or a creature, yes, But aside from that, yeah, the sounds and with your sound system, it was kind of cool hearing like, yeah, you can hear different sounds in different parts of the forest, and some of them like move around the screen, so like whatever's out there, there's a lot of it, Yeah, and it's circling them to some extent I would I would have to a thousand percent degree. So they all the sudden, the tent starts getting like shaken on every side.

1:22:03 Yeah, like something's pressing in on it and shaking it, and they all. Just run for it, screaming, camera shaking, and one element of the camera is also there's a light on it, so it encourages you to use it. And they end up just running outside and just hiding in the forest until the sun comes up. No tent, no sleep, no nothing. And when they return to their tent, their stuff is just strewn about everywhere, and in particular, Josh's stuff has been dug through the most. Yeah, it's been tossed everywhere. And one of my favorite moments is Heather looks at some of the stuff and says, it looks like slime some on your stuff, and he goes, no, it's just water, and he touches it and goes, it is fucking slime.

1:22:55 What the fuck is that? And that moment is so creepy and and makes me so uneasy because that's such a like, I feel like that would happen to me if I was in an unreasonable situation, Like, no, it's just what the hell that is? What that is? What is happening? I was going with the easy explanation, and at this point Josh's extra Matt, He's like, why are they fucking with my stuff? More than everybody else's why why is this happening at all? So you know all of this and early on ways back one of my favorite exchanges, and there are a lot of really great moments, and I think some of that comes down to the actors being really good, but it also comes down to the filmmakers taking twenty hours of footage and making eighty one minutes of movie, being able to really pare down the best of the best. When I made Alone in the Ghost House, my first found footage movie, the first cut was almost two hours, the first cut of just everything that seemed poignant, and my editor Eric Whiting, when we were talking about it, I told him like, all right, we need this to be way shorter, no more than eighty five minutes. And I told him flat out like my character in it was always making jokes constantly because I knew like try to keep the story going, try to keep it moving. And I told him, I was like, cut out any of my jokes. You don't think land like, please just cut out any jokes because if he's constantly doing jokes like this, he's gonna be so obnoxious. And

1:24:26 I want him to be funny, but not like Actually, in wrestling, we have a thing called go home heat. Heat is when the audience doesn't like you, but they're like, they want to see you get your ass whooped. Go home heat is when they just sincerely don't want you around, like they don't even want to watch you wrestle. Yeah and yeah. So I was like, I don't want go home heat. I want I want people to be like cringing because I'm always making jokes, but not like literally going God, but this guy ever shut up, Like I want to shut off the movie. I'm just gonna turn it off. So and I think that helped the movie a ton, because he had so much raw material to work with, And I think that's why we have a lot of these great moments. In the moment I'm referring to is when Josh and Heather are first kind of postulating what is going on here? Like, and she's he says, like, if it's an animal, that's like whatever. You know, we're in it their woods and we're bugging it and dah dah dah da dah, and I don't want to mess with that. And then she says, what if it's not an animal? He goes, he looks right, ever, I don't want to mess with that either, And it's so funny the way he says it, because he means it, you know, and I don't want to mess with that either, and his eyes get just a little wider. It's this movie.

1:25:29 The characters really work. They do They really really work. So now, uh, yeah, the slime has all happened. They get back on their hiking. They're heading south. They cross this very trepidacious fallen tree to get across the creek. They hike all day and just as the sun is starting to wane, they arrive at a really trepidacious fallen tree on the creek and they realize they've been walking in circles for like eleven hours. Yeah, and this breaks them.

1:26:11 And one of the moments, I don't know, did it did it? How? What effects? Sorry? I just got excited? What effect? Did it? Have on you that moment when they're all saying She's like, no, it's not they just look a lot alike. And then she goes up by herself and she starts literally going like the same goddamn tree and she starts like freaking out by herself. It gives me chills, it really does, because the uh, the contrast between Mike's very very outward, external explosive freak out, Josh is also freaking out, but he's having more of like just a meltdown, and Heather almost holding it together, and then slowly that slow burn of a meltdown is just all of the all of the emotional range. It's very great and very effective and makes you feel so bad for these characters because even if there wasn't the supernatural element of what's going on at night, there is also this element of survival of them realizing like how truly screwed they are because they are before they were lost, now they're so lost that they are walking in circles, which is in survival situations in the wild, the absolute.

1:27:34 Worst, not good at hell. And one scene I wanted to talk about that's in It's in the festival cut that we watched it's not in the theatrical cut, but I really wanted to highlight it. Is that brief exchange that night or that evening after discovering that they've walked in circles. That brief exchange between Josh and Heather where she's filming something and he's, you know, kind of standing behind her, and he says, I think I figured it out. Well, that's in the theatrical Li is that in the theat That's one of my favorite scenes whole movie. Yeah, because he says I think I figured it out, And at first she's just kind of confused, and then he says, I figured out why you're always filming and everything.

1:28:20 It's because it gives you control. You can control that, you can control what's on screen, and that's what you truly want. And she's she doesn't outright reject it, but I don't think that she understands, like, that's not it wasn't a dig, it was a good lifelong friend of hers. Like having a realization about her based on the experience that they've gone through over the past like forty eight to thirty six hours together, is that she wants to remain in control at all costs. Well, and I think it's worth mentioning. And I apologize for being this way, but I do have that bizarre auditory recall. He more so says that it's the separation. Yes, that's what he finds comforting, That it's like you're watching it happen, it's not actually happening. And I think that that is a major element that I've always said is a key crucial component of a found footage movie. How it ends, which tells you why the footage was found super important, but why everything's being filmed and how to justify it is extremely important. One of the best found footage movies I've ever seen in my life is Look, and I wish it was easier to tell people to watch it, but you have to. You can't find a movie named Look. I've shown you Look, right.

1:29:37 Did we? And I don't know, oh, you'd remember it now that I haven't. Look is one of the best found footage movies ever. It's all stories told from security cameras and cameras that are normally in a place like security cameras, phone cameras, all this stuff. I'll show it to you sometimes, but it's a really good movie. I know, I know That's one critique that detractors of found footage have is like, why would you keep filming? And it's like I think, but especially now that we have smartphones, that's probably part of why audiences now are more receptive to found footage is we are much more acquainted with the idea of I want to be filming or taking pictures twenty four to seven. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And whereas before it really was like why would you carry around a handycam or a cam corder all the time, And now it is we've literally got one in our pockets. Yeah, but that is part of what makes a good found footage film good is why are they filming?

1:30:35 Yes, And with all that being said, they're about to go to sleep and have another interesting night. But things get even more interesting in the morning when one of them is missing. And we'll talk about that right after this. So they wake up in the morning and Josh is gone, and this is really where everything paces way up and things start just happening, I mean really really happening. They try to find him. Obviously, they can't find him anywhere.

1:31:22 They're they're literally walking away from camp yelling Josh, Josh, hearing nothing back Mike is at first like Josh isn't gone, He's probably just at the creek, and she's like, well, why isn't he answering me? Then he should be able to answer me. He'd be with an earshot. So they're both really un I mean, like the fact that one of them is gone suggests that you know, whatever is going on is escalating, yes, and that it's dividing and conquering or something along those lines. So then night falls again, and I think I read it was eight it's eight nights that they're in that the whole thing takes place. Over they hear Josh's voice screaming and crying from very far away, echoing through the woods, and it I don't know.

1:32:14 I mean, what did you think when you first saw that scene or when you rewatched it the other night? With me, it. Always scares me. It's like a primal fear because there's two There's two options. One, Josh is out there somewhere hurt and in danger, which is scary and perilous in and of itself. The other option is that's not Josh. It's something trying to sound like Josh and in like folklore, like if you hear a voice calling to you in the woods at night. You do not go investigate because it's not gonna be good for you. Yeah, and they're both very, very shaken, and they're like yelling out trying to find him, and they can't find him anywhere despite looking for him that night, so they kind of have to just like wait it out.

1:33:18 Yeah, and they even have a thought that maybe whatever's out there is trying to draw them out by Josh's screaming. So in the morning, another beautiful morning, Heather discovers a bundle of twigs tied together with fabric from Josh's shirt. And this is the part when I first saw it as a kid in the theater that legitimately scared me. And I love the way they play this because in found footage, you know, anything really horrific, you probably aren't going to look at head on, and you get a peek at it, you get a little view of it, but you don't get a ton of it. But as she opens the bundle, she finds blood on it. And it's up to debate what's in the bundle entirely, but there's definitely teeth and hair.

1:34:11 Definitely. When I looked at it again, preparing for the show. I almost think I saw a finger, yeah, some some part of his body. Well, and I swear there's a piece of tongue in there. It looks like it it. Looks like teeth and maybe a finger. I really did see, Like I thought it looked like a finger. Yeah, like the second joint or something. Yeah. And and she she freaks out, doesn't tell Mike what it is inside of it. Yeah. Yeah, she keeps it to herself. And it's a really like heart breaking, like like it's it's a really like, uh, fear rendering moment because she like goes over to the creaky and says, I'm just gonna wash my hands, and she's just like is washing her hands and trying to like not think about the fact that their friend disappeared.

1:34:56 They heard him screaming last night and now she's found parts of him left in front of them. And it's a very not popular theory, but there are theories that that was basically based on the idea of a mojo bundle and that our mojo bag, and that stealing someone's teeth and tongue is a way to steal their voice. So some people have postulated that I never heard Josh at all that was the Blair Witch mimicking him because she took his teeth and tongue to do that. I don't know. It just that's just some creepy cool stuff to lean into making me want to watch the movie again. Actually, I know I want to catch more.

1:35:36 Usually I don't really want to watch the movie again after we've picked it apart for two hours, but I actually kind of want to just put it back on and promise me we will find time to watch Curse of the Blair Witch and The Birketsville Seven. I've never seen The Birketsville Seven, the Showtime documentary. I've never seen it, and apparently a lot of people think there's another theory as to what happened to them in The Birketsville Seven. Ooh, I'm down. So okay, So she doesn't tell Mike. That night is when we get the big famous moment of the movie where Heather's filming herself and she's crying, and some of it is a very unfortunate angle up your nose. It just is what it is. But I love it. That's the rawness and the emotion Heather Donna hu Man.

1:36:22 She just knocks it out of the part. Well and the amount of One of the reasons that I think some people don't try to make legitimately scary movies when they're indie is you have to let yourself be vulnerable, you know, if you want to wink and laugh and be like ha ha, look it's a horror movie. Doo ba dooo la bla blah la lah, that's easy, but like looking at it, going this is scary when people go no, it's not. Oh, like that's hard, and her just sobbing to the lens and admitting like, this is my fault because it was my project. I'm sorry to Mike's mom and Josh's mom and my mom. It's like so heart, it's really rough, and her just completely taking responsibility and saying that something evil is hunting them and that they will not get out alive. She doesn't see how they could get out alive.

1:37:19 Yeah. Then in that same night, they hear Josh calling out to them again and they decide to just take each each take a camera and follow him, which I guess benefit of the doubt. This is the only part IVE always found a little hinky, is like why would they both just take a camera but you know, the cameras have lights on him. Maybe they want to at this point, maybe because they think they're dead meat. They just want to capture what happened to them. Because that's another good point is that I've seen in found footage and stuff, is like, I'm just going to record everything because I just want somebody to know what the hell even happened to me, or what happened to us, or whatever might be out there. So they start jogging through the woods, heading towards Josh's screaming voice way off in the distance.

1:38:06 And as they are going deeper and deeper into these just jet black woods, screaming Josh's name, they find something at the end of this long march into the brush that no one would have expected, least of all them. We'll get to that right after this. They find a house in the woods. It's a very decrepit house, but it is a worn down, beat up house, and it looks like it's Rustin Parr's house. But Rustin Parr's House would have been in disrepair since nineteen so there's no way there'd be anything standing, especially not a two story house.

1:39:06 It would be nearly all fallen over by then. With nobody taking care of it at all. In the middle of the woods. Yeah, and I think anywhere it would be yea, especially in the woods because the nature wants to reclaim everything, always, including you and me. So they enter the house, and the first thing I noticed, No, I want I want to hear from you because I know that I'm the blabermouth. That's why I have podcasts, you know, and I had all this. So what were your first impressions when they go into this house? Now we're cutting between the color footage of Heather's high eight camera and the black and white, grainy footage of the sixteen millimeter camera. As they're yelling. For Josh, first feeling is always complete and utter dread.

1:39:50 And then what I notice is as they're panning the camera around, there's handprints on one of the balls. But they're real small and they're down low. Yes, and it is very easy to tell that it is bloody children's hand prints. I mean, they're probably bloody. It's in black and white. It's in black and white. It's hard to tell. It's hard to tell. I mean, even if it was coal or like a charcoal dust or whatever, it doesn't it's still. It's not very good. It's not a good thing. It's good, that's a great way to put it, though it's not good. So you see the handprints, and at first Josh runs up to the attic and like or Mike runs up to the attic because he thinks he hears Josh up there, and how there's almost kind of like pleading with him because she can't quite hear it, and she wants them to kind of like remain calm and try to find him in a calm manner, collected with a plan maybe, but that's not what Mike.

1:41:01 Like. Mike is a broken man psychologically. Oh yeah, at this point, without a doubt. They both are pretty much shattered at this point. And there are a few like we obviously can't talk about every single moment in the movie, but there's a really sweet moment where they like where they hold each other after they hated each other so much because they're all they have in the world, And it's one of the only shots in the whole movie that is not a literal point of view of somebody. The cameras just sat down and they're hugging each. Other anyway, So Heather like follows him up to the attic, and attics are creepy. It's it's very unsettling there. But it gets worse when Mike claims that he can hear Josh in the basement now, and so he runs downstairs and Heather's left up in the attic for a few moments.

1:41:49 It's not very long, but she's left up there alone, and when she finally gets so much worse because Mike runs down to the basement and he's almost instantly once he gets down in the basement, you know, he's like looking around and it's fairly unimpressive. It's like a cellar basement, but he's almost instantly accosted and his camera just falls to the ground. Yeah, and that's I believe the black and white No, no, or was it the black and white? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think so it falls down and just kind of shudders. Yeah, because that's the one that actually has the microphone on it, right, because that's why heather sound sounds so weird.

1:42:34 Yeah, yeah, so I'm sorry I have confused myself, but regardless, Yeah, the reason that's the sound is very disembodied is that the only the sound is coming from. Yeah, he's not operating the film camera. You're right, he has the video camera. Yeah, because we're hearing his perspective. So when we hear her screaming Mike, Mike, she sounds really far away, even when it's her own camera. Yeah, it's because film cameras don't record sound, so the only sound being recorded was. The video keyes. Yes, correct, which I. Don't the creative choice. I don't know if it was strictly creative or if that was just the way they did it, because that's the way you do it. But it makes an already creepy and blood curdling scene even scarier to have that disembodied sound because up until that point, we've basically, like Heather has been our point of view, so to hear her voice so far removed from our point of view makes it feel almost like a out of body experience.

1:43:37 Yeah, it's definitely confusing in an upsetting way. Yeah. So she finally gets up the courage to run downstairs and chase after Mike into the basement, and when she gets down there, he's standing in a corner, motionless, and she calls to him and he doesn't do anything. He doesn't anything, and then she gets assaulted and her camera. She screams, and she drops her camera and it records for a few more seconds. We don't really see anything. It's on the floor. We can kind of hear, like her muffled screaming and stuff.

1:44:17 And the gait of the camera has been damaged, so the image is distorted. Yeah, and then the film just cuts to black and that's it. And that's the way found footage movies are supposed to be. I mean, the only other thing you can really do that I think works in found footage. It would be a slate saying like where it was found or you know nothing, well else was recovered or something. You could do that. But I remember people being like, that's it and being very frustrated by that ending. I thought it was scary, it's perfect. Then I remember people saying like, you never even see the blair Witch and I'm like, well, yes, you don't. You don't get a lot of things you want in this world, young man. But there are an immense amount of theories about what exactly was going on in the blair Witch project. The big one is the idea of possession. There's a lot of possession theories that if you look at the actors they're starting to act a little differently than they had been before. All of a sudden, they're being a little bit more argumentative or friendly.

1:45:29 That's a very popular theory. So I wanted to dig into some of the theories because, I mean, my theories aren't I don't have a lot of like It's not like Candy Man. I don't have a lot of wildly fresh takes on blair Witch because blair Witch is a movie that is meant to be theorized about because it is so ambiguous purposely. I mean, the filmmakers have said it's very purposely ambiguous. So for me, what's going on? Definitely, as they're being terrorized by something, could one of them be in on it? That's a question. Some people have suggested that Heather is possessed and that that's why she's kind of orchestrating everything. But after this break, I want you to tell me a little bit about your theory, and then I'll share some theories I've researched before we get the heck out of here and have some delicious beef vegetable soup not in the woods right after this.

1:46:41 So what's your theory, Rach, My theory you don't have to have a perfectly planned out when I just need like, what are your thoughts? What what like? What are your instincts saying? Do you think it's what you see is what you get? Or do you think there's something more going on? What's what's a what's dragging you around? I the way that because I'm not taking any of the blair Witch sequels into account, I'm only taking into account this movie. Maybe a little bit of the Curse of the blair Witch, but mostly I'm just going on the movies what you get. And to me, what it seems is that the ghost of Elliewards Hedwards. Yeah, the ghost of Ellie Edwards, like after she had died, her death was so horrific that she continued to haunt those woods.

1:47:37 And she's the one who her ghost like killed those men in the search party. And as she gained power, she was able to possess rust and Parr so that he killed those kids. And after that all happened in the forties, everyone pretty much just cleared out of the woods. Like even the fisher guys they're like, yeah, we don't even go hunting there. Well, when they say you never go there at night. You never go there at night. The one mom that they asked, she's like, well, I know, we're going the woods. And even the what was the crazy lady? Yeah, her name is escaping me, but yeah, there was a lady who claimed she saw her when she was a little girl.

1:48:21 Yeah, and even she's like, very crazy, She's incredibly insane. So to me, it feels like as long as you stay out of the woods, you cannot come under the power of the blair Witch. Once they get into the woods, they could have possibly had some leniency if they would have gotten right back out. But I think that Josh disturbing the cairn is what made him the specific target, and that's why the blair Witch eventually took him and used him as bait to draw the other two into their depths. Basically, pretty you're pretty standard fare when it comes to Blair Witch theories.

1:49:07 No, but I mean that makes sense. So one of the most popular theories is that there never was a witch, that it was Mike and Josh murdering Heather ooh. The concept is the guys staged the noises, the stick figures, and the loss of the map, lured Heather to the house and killed her with one standing in the corner to echo rustin Parr's legend. It explains the human sounding calls the teeth Bundle, and why we never see anything supernatural. It's a very popularly discussed piece on like YouTube explainers and stuff like that, but there are some big problems with that. I will count Curse of the blair Witch as cannon because it was created by the creators of the movie before the movie was even out. There's also their video that have massive explanit, like early two thousands video games that have massive expansions on the lore, but I'm not counting those. There's also Heather's Diary which came in the special edition Blu ray that is supposed to be cannon, but I'm not going to count that. I'm just going to count curs with the blair Witch and the Blare which product, But that wouldn't explain where the hell did that house come from? How the hell did the tapes get underneath the foundation of a house. Yeah, and that leads into the second very popular theory and one that is expanded upon heavily in the twenty sixteen sequel blair Witch, which I actually really liked, which is

1:50:39 the time loop time dilation in the Black Hills, which suggests the woods warped time and space, which is why the trio walks in circles, can't find their car, and ends up at a house that shouldn't exist. As I mentioned, it was heavily referenced in the twenty sixteen sequel, which I loved that I remember element Viewers also point out that in this Sci Fi Channel mockumentary Chrystal Bar, which the par house burned down in the nineteen forties. Yet they arrive at the house and it's and in the documentary they never say that it's rust in Pars. How did you say it's a house in the wood? I mean that doesn't mean they know that it isn't. It just means that they are not aware that it was formerly.

1:51:22 It's now just a foundation. Another popular theory is the proxy killer or possession concept, and this one I find a bit plausible if I'm honest. It says a force doesn't attack directly, it compels someone, so one person faces the wall while another is killed, mirroring Par's method. This frames the final finale as ritual reenactment rather than a creature attack. There are tons of articles suggesting that it's this it's the same force that got par to kill the kids, which some people tie that into the idea that Heather or Josh were being guided by the same witch spirit as rust in par to lead them there to kill them just like the kids. Yeah, so they feed into each other. A bitch a bitch, a bit witch, bitch bitch bit. So this is an interesting one. I hadn't heard much about no witch at all, mass hysteria and human interference. Everything frightening is manufactured by people, locals or one of the trio amplified by fear, sleep deprivation in the films. It could be real presentation behind the scenes reporting about the productions, verite methods fuels this grounded reed because they were being terrorized by people in Realityah, but they were making a movie. So that one's interesting.

1:52:55 The idea that the locals don't like it because they did walk around town annoying people for like a whole day about stuff they don't generally want to. Talk about, and they like they did kind of disclose where they were going to be going and what all they were going to be looking at, So true, the locals would know how to track them and find them very easily. So this one I didn't know anything about because I haven't watched The Massacre of the Birkettsville seven, the documentary that was made for Showtime about the Blair Witch. But it says in the Birketsville Seven some suggest a lone survivor named Kyle Brody may have been involved in the child murders attributed to Parr, implying the mythology often pins crimes on a supernatural scapegoat, so fans have suggested that that could fold into being who attacked them in the woods.

1:53:40 Is this Kyle Brody character that may have been involved in the par killings? Okay? So, and we're going to hit a few more of these as we wrap up our show right after this. Okay, so just a few more theories. This one is the house paradox, which is equal to a proof of a temporal trap. A popular sub theory zooms in on the ending location. If the parhouse was destroyed long before nineteen ninety four, the students reaching it and the tapes being found there only make sense if the woods loop them back in time.

1:54:29 There we go. So very similar to the other concept, But this is one I'd never heard before. Heather's tape is the Witch's pov. Ooh. A more out there take suggests the last shots are not Heather's perspective at all right at the end, but the entities, hence the abrupt camera shift and disorienting final moments. It's less common, but is cited by some fans of the film. Okay, so the idea being that he was taken by the witch, or if you wanted to blend theories, or that Heather became the witch entirely, it could be an interesting theory, the idea that the Witch has taken over Yeah.

1:55:13 Yeah. And then, of course the final theory and the one that people I think like to pontificate on the most, which is the rational theory. A minority argue the trio simply gets lost and dies off screen. The Witch is a layering of local folklore, thus escalating fear. This overlaps with what we talked about before, the no witch at all, massyesteria, human interference, but it strips away the human malice entirely, suggesting that hypothermia, panic and getting lost just kills these kids because they just don't know what they're doing. Yeah, and that's that's why they're dead. So they're all interesting theories, and rightfully so. I mean, like I said, the movie is, by the filmmaker's ad mission, extremely open to interpretation and extremely what's the word ambiguous? Ambiguous? Thank you? I work too much? Uh, it's extremely ambiguous. So yeah, this has been a really fun, yeah thing to dive into. And there are tons more theories, I'm sure if I dug even deeper, but those seem to be the most common ones, and I definitely think there's a little something to it.

1:56:29 I do think maybe there's some kind of a little bit of a possession thing the him standing in the corner like Rustin Parr's kids. That's not a coincidence, no, not at all. So that definitely signifies something. At the very least, it signifies that if Heather is operating the camera, she's about to die, because when one child is facing the wall, the other one his eyes and then the other one gets killed too. So so could could it be that Josh was became the puppet? Could he have been come rust and Parr? I mean Rustin Parr was turned crazier than a loon by by the by the witch. So what if Josh, just what if the screams they heard the night that they were trying to find him, What if that was him pulling his own teeth out, cutting off his finger, cutting out a piece of his own tongue to make the screams realistic. And when that didn't work to draw them in, he made the little bundle in order to really make them unable to have any sense of security or calm at all.

1:57:34 Eh, that's spooky. Because after all, rust and Parr took the kids in two at a time, and he took them into Rustin's house two at a time. I don't know, I'm just I'm. Just you're's his way spookier than mine. Well, yeah, that's I mean, I have a little bit of experience spinning a scary story, I guess. So that's that's pretty much my whole my whole thought process on blair Witch Project. I love Blair Witch Project. I enjoy a book of Shadows. The sequel. I think it's pretty fun, and I like the blair Witch sequel from twenty sixteen quite a bit. I do like how they played with the time warping element a bunch. I thought it made it pretty fun. But obviously just nothing can really touch this original because the original is allowed to be less as more as fuck. Yeah, it's allowed to be so little and so much as to where the sequels can never be as sparse as the original, because everybody wants more, You want more and more more, you know. Nightmare and Elm Street one, Freddy kills like four people and it was all a dream. Nightmann Elm Street two, he kills like fifteen people and somehow it's not a dream anymore.

1:58:40 And then Nightmare three, it's like it's a whole dream world, freaking mc escher paintings and stuff. They always do that. Yeah, yeah, and I get it. I get it because you already have the one movie. Why make an exact same movie out of your sequel? So but yeah, I just think the Blair Witch Project, I mean, talk about a perfect addition your spooky season lineup. I know Halloween is coming right up. If you haven't watched Blair Witch Project in a while, you should check it out. I didn't look up where we can see it. I was just gonna mention that, well, it's nowhere. It's all you can rent it on like Amazon Prime or Fandango at home. But unfortunately the original movie is not the easiest to come up with. It always tends to be that way. So, but anything else you want to say at all about Blair Witch before we wrap things.

1:59:29 Up, I just think it's a beautiful archetype of the found footage genre. That's that's my final thoughts on that. I mean, I think that's pretty fair. I think that's probably probably an okay thought. I guess I'll allow it. So with that all being said, I hope everybody is having a wonderful spooky season. We got to go to Land of Illusions and enjoy some really spooky fun time. Fine, we had a blast. I was drunk on spooky by the end of the night. Man. It was really fun. And we're probably I think we're going to try and see Brimstone on this weekend. Brimstone Haunt, which is a three haunt and one. We did a six haunt in one before, so now we're easing up with a three haunt in one.

2:00:10 Got to get the big one out. Of the one, and we might sneak over to the other haunt as well if we have time. We'll see, we'll see, we'll see. But yeah, so I hope everybody's had a good spooky season. I hope if you're, you know, an avid listener of Weekly Spooky, you've been enjoying all the content we've been pumping out. Myself and all the authors and all my co hosts have been working our butts off to make sure you have the most fun, creepy, spooky Halloween you possibly can. So very proud of all the work we've done. And uh yeah, yeah, So now I'm. Tired, Let's go eat that soup. Yeah, And if you're still listening somehow, tomorrow there is the Ultimate Edgar Allan Poe compilation on Saturday, seven hours of Poe readings that I'm very proud of and I think you'll you'll enjoy because I love me some Poe.

2:01:01 So thank you guys so much for tuning into cutting deep into horror. Next month in November, we'll be covering two films, maybe more if we luck out, but probably just the two. And the first one is Bitter Feast, which you've probably never seen, so look it up. It is worth your time and it has Josh Leonard from Blair Witch Project coming. So with that all being said, if you love what we're doing here at Weekly Spooky make sure you're subscribed on your favorite podcasting app. You can send us an email at Weeklyspooky at gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you. If you have a thought opinion about the movie, or you have a movie you want us to watch and talk about, we'd love to hear about it. And if you want to support us for as little a one dollar a month, head to Weeklyspooky dot com slash join and the support really means a lot. But now I'm going to rest this poor voice of mine and until next time, go ahead, go into the woods. You're an adult, do what you want.

2:01:53 Treat yourself.