Today we seem to standardize horror movies into two categories: Type One, the generic ghost or demon story that usually involves some kind seance and Type Two, the found footage movies.

Now if you’re unfamiliar with the term “found footage,” then think back to the recent barrage of Paranormal Activity movies that have swarmed the theaters in the last decade. It’s just a style of filming in which it’s formatted to look like it is some kind of documentary and is not exclusive to horror. Both categories seem to have tacky plots with a ton of holes, low-grade acting, and lots of annoying jump scares.

Directors in the horror genre who are trying to get a quick success have turned to this style because it is cheap and does not take long to make.

It really is sad when movie developers forget that film is art. It just makes this fact glaringly obvious: Hollywood’s gone money-eyed.

Many horror directors have stopped putting time into a film with good acting, an actual story, characters that we actually care about, and more to offer than jump scares. Like many perversions in an art form, the found footage strain of the last decade was started with one diversion from the film-making norm, that being The Blair Witch Project.

The movie, which came out in 1999 and was directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, was not the first found footage film to have ever come out, but it was the first to gain any real big public hype. It also completely brought the found footage genre out of the experimental stage and actually made it a thing.

What made this movie different from other horror movies, found footage movies, and all other movies in general? 

The first big thing about this film that differed from previous films is the marketing techniques that were used to promote it.  This was in 1999 when the internet was not the info-oozing grapevine that it is today and it could be more easily used for secrecy.  According to MWP, the makers of the film created a website a year before the movies release. The website was dedicated to the fabricated Blair Witch Legend that the writers had created. The legend has a timeline of events, various stories, and ‘eyewitness’ accounts. Everything a real legend has. It sounded and looked legitimate.

The website also has the story of the three missing film-journalist students who went into the woods in 1994 never to be seen again and whose footage was found a year later. On the website the three students, who are actually actors, are listed as missing and presumed dead. The films marketers also went onto various forums and online discussions to keep the mystery surrounding the film growing. A documentary was also made. It aired on the Science channel and included interviews with the students’ “real” family members.

When Mrs. Davis of the Bob Jones Drama Department was asked what she thought about the marketing technique, she said it mainly had to do with how the movie was filmed. “Yes, well that was a big thing in the late 90’s. Everyone had a video camera, y’know. Dads would go and film holidays and things like that. So when people saw the previews and they saw that it was filmed in this VHS camera kind of way, I think it helped a lot of people to buy into it and make them think it was real.”

The way the movie was filmed was risky, but the genius directors were able to pull it off.

The actors were sent into the forest with their cameras. They had to memorize no scripts and were given only general instructions and motivations for their characters. There are no visual effects and nothing to indicate anything supernatural, said the CREATIVE PLANET network. The directors were going for a very subtle kind of scary with a creepy atmosphere. What they achieved was an enormous build up for the audience.

The actors had to improvise their dialogue. At night the directors would make noises, throw rocks, and play sounds on a boombox. The characters’ reaction was very raw. It may sound very tacky, but they really pulled it off.

For its time and even by today’s standards, it is a very ingeniously made film that recognized the found footage as an actual film format and reinvigorated the horror genre.

Unfortunately, this decade has been completely bombarded by terrible horror movies and found footage films done the wrong way. A recent film in theaters that falls into both those categories, ironically, is the new Blair Witch. In this age of jump scares and lack of tension, it makes you wonder how many fellow classmates would see this and think “boy, this is scary,” or watch it and think “oh, what slow-burning bore.”

“I appreciate what they were trying to do, making it all subtle, but I just found [the new Blair Witch] too boring, ” said Jack Richter, a senior here at Bob Jones.

I know there will probably never be another film to gain the hype and publicity that the original Blair Witch did, but I think that if filmmakers studied how this movie was made and marketed, both horror and found film genres would be directed back onto the right path.