THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT
The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American supernatural horror film written, directed and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. It is based on the purportedly true story of three student filmmakers — Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard — who hike in the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland in 1994 to film a documentary about a local legend known as the Blair Witch. The three disappeared, but their equipment and footage is discovered a year later. The purportedly “recovered footage” is the film the viewer sees. Myrick and Sánchez conceived of a fictional legend of the Blair Witch in 1993. They developed a 35-page screenplay with the dialogue to be improvised. Shot on an original budget of $35,000–$60,000, the final cost was $200,000–$750,000 after post-production edits. The film is heavily credited with reviving the found-footage technique which was later used by similarly successful horror films such as Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield. A sleeper hit, The Blair Witch Project grossed nearly $250 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time, as well as one of the most profitable.(More from Wikipedia)
Retirement is sniffing around me, waiting for me to take the bait, and I am starting to glimpse my working life in the rearview mirror. In my field of real estate appraisal, there are two kinds: those who appraise houses, and those who appraise everything else. I have been on dots of land barely as big as a living room, and sweeps of woods that I could scarce take in from a satellite photograph.
One called “Mike’s Island” comes to mind, a wooded riverfront 2½ Sections large and the next county over that later became a Naval proving ground, whose boundaries were delimited by creeks and streams, many that could be easily stepped across, where a steel bridge once carrying truck traffic now looked questionable even to support my meager frame. Sometimes there are a half dozen of us rolling through a forest down roads that are in much better shape than they have any business being; and sometimes it is just me on foot, wondering exactly where I am, with too-fresh memories of The Blair Witch Project as the sun is going down – a Sheriff’s Deputy was there to rescue me one time.
(Year 7 Review)
