The Blair Witch Project

lt's already recording.

Okay, just...

-This is my home. -You look a little blurry, man.

Let me zoom out on you.

-Okay. -Okay.

Good morning.

-Got it? -Okay, I got you.

-This is my home. -Okay.

Which I am leaving the comforts of for the weekend

to explore the Blair Witch.

Some essential reading, How to Stay Alive in the Woods,

'cause you never know what's going to happen.

And this is a very important book

because it has the article about what happened at Coffin Rock.

-That looks pretty old. -Yeah,

it's totally old. And this is my field notebook.

-Hey, it's Mr. Punctuality. -Hey.

-How the hell are you this morning? -Tired.

So I got the CP up.

Good. That's important

'cause that's what we're shooting on.

No one knows I took it, but I got it.

All right, come on, into the house. Come on, come on.

l can see you.

l'm going to bump into shit. l'm walking backwards now.

Okay, we don't want to fuck up the cameras before we leave.

So, where's Mikey at?

We have to go get him.

Okay.

-We're supposed to get him at 8:30. -Okay.

Which means we're already going to be behind schedule,

-but it's important to have juice. -That's cool.

l guess you're Mike.

Here, wait... Stop, stop.

Don't we get to meet your mama?

See you later, Mom!

How are you, Mike? lt's nice to meet you.

l'm tired, but l'm doing good. l'm real excited about this.

-Thank you for the opportunity. -l'm very glad.

Well, thank you for getting the equipment together.

We've got so much fucking battery power,

we could fuel a small world country for a month.

We got rice, we got Mott's Fruit Punch.

Oatmeal raisin, baby.

-Ultimate camp food. -Marshmallows...

Feel how soft. Soft...

Hey, you weasel.

Marshmallows...

Do you believe in ghosts?

Have you ever heard of the Blair Witch?

lt's... lt actually sounds kind of familiar.

My older sister went to Blair High School.

The woods around Halloween time is a creepy enough phenomenon.

-Just tell me a little bit more... -l don't want to go cheesy.

l want to really avoid any cheese.

l want to present this in as straightforward a way as possible,

and I think the legend is unsettling enough.

You guys want to get the ceremonial first slate?

Absolutely.

Here he is, filling out our first slate for our first shot.

Should we all, like, cut our fingers open and bleed on it?

A little bloodletting on the slate?

No, we'll save that for later.

Kiss it. Kiss the slate.

lt's the first slate.

First slate. Marked by my lipstick.

Mikey, first slate. Kiss it. Good luck.

He licked it. God bless him.

You're not supposed to eat it. We need that for the rest of the shoot.

This is Burkittsville, formerly Blair.

lt is a small, quiet Maryland town,

much like a small, quiet town anywhere.

No more than 20 families laid their roots here

over 200 years ago, many of whom remain either on this hill or in the town below.

There are an unusually high number of children laid to rest here,

most of whom passed in the 1940s.

Yet, no one in the town seems to recall anything unusual about this time.

To us, anyway.

Yet, legend tells a different story. One whose evidence is all around us,

etched in stone.

Well, we have shot the first scene. The cemetery scene.

The opening is shot.

-We're doing a documentary. -Yeah?

About the Blair Witch.

-Have you heard of the Blair Witch? -Oh, yeah.

That's an old, old, old story.

As I remember, Mr. Parr was an old hermit.

-Right. -And he lived up on a mountain.

He had a place up there.

Been there for a long, long time.

-You've heard of the Blair Witch? -Several times.

Several times? And what was the first incident?

l've heard stories about her from people and neighbors and stuff like that.

But also I saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel, or somewhere,

-once about her. -Really?

About the ghosts and legends of Maryland.

Yeah, that's a story my grandmother used to tell us all.

-Make us go to bed early. -Really?

They say if you stay up after dark, walk around the house too much,

the Blair Witch will come and get you.

Sort of in the winter, I guess,

the fall or the winter of 1940, some of the young kids started to disappear.

Nobody knew anything about why they were...

Why they were disappearing.

The creepiest...

-The creepiest story about her... -That's kind of an omen, isn't it?

...that I ever heard was that two men were out hunting,

and they were camped near the cabin, or something,

that she's supposed to haunt.

No, no!

And they disappeared off the face of the Earth.

-No. -Really?

Okay, it's all right, lngrid. l'm just telling a scary story,

-but it's not true. -lt's not true.

Finally, one day, old Mr. Parr come down into the market

and said, "l'm finally finished."

And what did he mean by that?

l guess nobody knew at first,

but the police finally went up on the mountain

and they searched his house

and they found the bodies of seven kids from the area.

What he did is, he took the kids

down into the basement by twos and he made one face into the corner.

Really?

And then he would kill the other one.

And then when he was done with that, he'd grab the one out of the corner

and kill that one, too.

And those were the seven kids that were missing.

And then they brought them out of the woods one at a time,

and it just was a terrible thing.

Just tore the whole community up.

Said in court that he couldn't take the eyes on him.

He could... He could feel the eyes watching him.

That's why he made them face into the corner like that.

All my life, really, l've believed in witches and ghosts and all that stuff.

Do you believe that there are some in this area?

Definitely.

-Do you believe in witchcraft? -No.

-No? -No, sir.

Are you a religious man?

-Yep. -All righty.

Pretty creepy stuff.

l believe there's something happening with her.

And you think that it's possible that she's still up there now?

-l don't go up there. -You don't go up there?

Yeah, I believe enough not to go up there.

And they say that the woods are all haunted up there

and stuff like that, but...

What do they say? How are they haunted?

l don't... There really isn't many people that say that it's haunted,

but there was this old woman, Mary Brown, who used to...

-Mary Brown? -Yeah, and she was kind of a crazy lady.

How was she seen by the community?

Crazy.

That's it. The American flag. That's Mary's house.

l'm going to grab her and bring her out.

Why don't you take a look around

and see where the best light is, all right?

Okay.

This is Mary's gate.

l'm not even sure how I pull this open.

'Cause something interesting happened to you, actually, at one point in your life.

You had an encounter with the Blair Witch?

Yes. That is a really, kind of, scary story.

To, kind of, make ends meet,

my dad and I would go fishing down by Tappy's Creek.

-Right. -And, you know, it's in Burkittsville.

l was lying down on the leaves, a pile of leaves,

kind of watching my pole and looking up at the sky.

-Sure. -And all of a sudden,

-l felt like something was near me. -Right.

You know, kind of an eerie feeling.

lt was like a woman,

only on her arms and on her hands and everything it was like hair.

Like a real dark, almost black, hair.

-Like a horse. -Like fur?

Yeah, like a fur. Like horse fur.

-Then on her arms, she had a shawl... -Right.

Wool shawl over her.

And she scared you?

-She threatened you? -And she didn't say anything,

but she just kept staring, and then she opened up her shawl...

And what was under there?

And under there was hair on her body like a horse.

So she was hairy from head to toe?

Yeah, and her legs...

-And you could see she was a female. -Right. How about her face?

lt was just kind of, like, strange-looking.

Thank God, she's not in the film business. l mean, can you imagine working with her?

She thinks she is in the film business. She also says she's a ballerina.

-Get out. -She says she's a historian

writing a book on American history...

-l heard that. -...and that she's a scientist

who does research at the Department of Energy.

l fucked up on Mary.

l'm checking my depth of field chart to see how bad.

So you measured for meters? What? We're not in Europe.

Yeah, the fucking lens has meters on it, okay.

lt also has our system.

No, it had meters on it. Look.