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Six authors. Four horror movies. Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib
This is Horror upon Horror.

Listen to the first episode in this series, with Nathan Ballingrud & Sara Maria Griffin talking about The Blob (1988) on AEWCH 327 and the second episode with Dan Chaon talking 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple on AEWCH 328.

Friends,
I’m sure you know the THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) by now but if not, here’s the plot: three students go out into the woods to make a documentary about local legend of a witch. They’re never seen again. A video is found later of their footage. That’s it.

You probably also know that it wasn’t like other movies when it came out, but was marketed in the most bizarre and convincing ways: missing posters were put out of the three actors that appear in the film (Rei Hance, known in the film as Heather, Donaghue’ Michael, C, Williams; and Joshua Leonard); and in fact their IMDB pages listed them as deceased. There was a short documentary about the documentary made, and aired as if it were real. There was all kinds of chatter on the then-burgeoning Internet about what it happened to these three students.

On top of that. it wasn’t filmed like other movies, not even found footage ones. The cast themselves were directors of the film, along with the overall directors of the film along with Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, since they filmed the bulk of the movie.

In other words, the found footage was actually found footage. The directors did not know what the cast had filmed because they sent them out on missions to film and turn the refults to them later. For instance, they were sent to certain locations to talk to town residents about the legends of the Blair witch and some adjacent murders. The promptings were brilliant. There was, for instance, a actor who was a plant in a diner not spoken to until after the main actors walked around and talked to other unknowing people. The effect is that they were stimulating the idea of witch for everybody else in the diner but not involved.

While the characters of the Blair Witch Project were investigating folklore, the actors and producers were also creating it.

Later, when the cast members enter the woods to go looking for signs of the witch, they are prompted by the directors to certain sites and cues at those sites, and told to film the whole time. Their moods were intensified by bad weather, long shoots, surprises, coldness and camping. All of it brings out tremendous performances from the three of them.

I went to see the Blair witch project in the theater right when it came out I saw it in Allentown, Pennsylvania was with some friends. We all thought it was real.

The whole movie is tense, horrifying, truly frightening. There are moments when the screen is pitch black, so the entire theater was was pitch black too. And people were screaming.

When it was done — and I’d never had this experience before nor have had it since — the entire audience sat in silence until the credits finished rolling.

What a new dimension of horror to be brought into the world!

And it’s one that echoes into our own time, with the difficulty of interpreting what is and what isn’t real on the screens that we face and encounter each day. The Blair Witch Project is the forerunner of DIY projects, of found footage, of the tensions between reality and unreality, of constant surveillance of our most vulnerable moments… So many things were set free into the world by this movie. There was nothing like it at the time, and few films take such great risks to such great effect.

So I was thrilled when my guests both asked to talk about it.

PAUL TREMBLAY was last on the show on AEWCH 235 (with CJ Leede) and is the author, most recently of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, and also Horror Movie, his most famous novel A Head Full of Ghosts and my favorite novel of his, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

SARA GRAN was last on the show on AEWCH 233 (with Nathan Ballingrud) and is the author of what is recognized as one of the most terrifying horror novels of all time, Come Closer. She’s also the author of the incredible occult-horror-detective story, The Book of the Most Precious Substance.

What a great, and deep episode on the topic, and on urban legends.

I hope you love it.

CH
PS: If you want to hear more about the movie and how it was made, Kylie Roseanne’s excellent deep dive on Haunted Hippie.

PPS: i do love Off Season by Jack Ketchum. It’s well worth the awful feeling it will give you (or maybe that feeling is what will make it worth it for you).

PPPS: Rei Hance AKA Heather Donohue has written her own book! It’s a memoir about her life – Growgirl: The Blossoming of an Unlikely Outlaw.