![]() I had forgotten that one of the reasons people didn’t believe the movie was a hoax (it isn’t really even one of those, by definition) was because the actors’ names were the same as the characters. ![]() Just to do a quick recap of the plot of this thing: A lone title card that starts the film tells us that we’re watching footage recovered a year after the disappearances of three student filmmakers who were lost in the woods around Burkittsville, Maryland, in 1994. I was seriously afraid I was going to barf, but it was okay, because he was like, “Shh, I’m here,” and again: older and cute. He didn’t seem to believe that I wasn’t scared, just motion sick, and coaxed me back into the theater for the last twenty minutes. When my sister’s cute friend came out to see if I was okay, I was trying not to dry-heave on the carpet. Everybody else seemed unaffected, but, certain GIFs make me nauseated, so you can imagine what this was like for me. We’d gotten there late and had to sit in the front row, and the overall effect was like being in a Gravitron full of sticks. H ere’s the uncool part: About 50 minutes into the movie, I had to go into the lobby, where I sat next to the water cooler and sipped from a paper cone with my head between my knees. Did I have Nat Shermans in my bag? Probably. I was in high school, and I was very bitchin’. I went to the opening night midnight show, at the movie theater, with my older sister and a bunch of her cool friends. Nostalgia Fact-Check: I’m going to open this fact-check with an embarrassing confession. (Did you not see how much money this movie made?) Nostalgia Demographic: Impressionable types who didn’t know how to Google in 1999, so mostly everyone. By a witch. Those were simpler, and scarier, times. No amount of news coverage (“The movie is fake! The cast is ALIVE!”) could convince some people that the girl they’d seen weeping into a hand-cam in those previews hadn’t been murdered. The film was one of the first to publicize itself with a stealth Internet campaign, part of what made many, many people believe that The Blair Witch Project - a faux docu about a team of missing paranormal investigators - was actual found footage (i.e., that the movie was a real documentary), and that the “students” in it had the wherewithal to film their own murder by a ghost-witch and get the whole thing in wide distribution. Back in 1999, the year it was released, the nation was in a bit of a Y2k techno-panic and not quite as reality-TV and Internet-savvy as it would soon become. The critically acclaimed The Blair Witch Project famously cost less than $1 million to make, and after finding distribution at Sundance, went on to make $248 million, spawning the found-footage craze we are still living through today. īackground: Before “found footage” was its own annoying genre convention (see: Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, The Last Exorcism, and most recently Chronicleand ABC’s The River, which premieres tonight), it was a pretty decent, brand-new, and very cheap ticket-selling gimmick. This week, we consider 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. Now, years later, we will take a look at these classics in a more objective, unforgiving adult light: Are they really the best ever? How do they hold up now? We’ve already reconsidered a number of once-beloved entertainments. ![]() The Nostalgia Fact-Check is a recurring Vulture feature in which we revisit a seminal movie, TV show, or album that reflexively evinces an “Oh my God, that was the best ever!” response by a certain demographic, owing to it having been imprinted on them early.
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