For, TBWP is an artefact of Web 1.0 that reveals how much the internet has shaped people’s relationship with fact and fiction.
If it seems today that nothing can be trusted — thanks to the manipulations of AI and other tools of misinformation and disinformation — it is instructive to look back at a horror film from 25 years ago. The Blair Witch Project (TBWP) may not be the first “found footage” film — that honour would go to 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust about a filmmaking crew that goes missing in the Amazon rainforest. But its significance goes beyond its undeniable contributions to the horror genre. For, TBWP is an artefact of Web 1.0 that reveals how much the internet has shaped people’s relationship with fact and fiction.
Released on July 30, 1999, the film which tells the “true story” of three filmmaking students who go missing in the woods while on the trail of the legendary Blair Witch, confounded viewers because it expertly leveraged their trust in what they read online. The film’s directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, created a publicity campaign featuring “missing” posters, police reports, investigator interviews and other “evidence” from the “case”, all of which could be found on a dedicated website. For viewers, the terror lay in never being a hundred per cent certain that what they were watching on screen was not, in fact, played straight from the camera that had been “recovered” from the woods where the students went missing.
Today, it is unlikely that something like TBWP would fool anyone. One, because the “found footage” trick has become an overused horror trope. Two, because the internet, in its 3.0 user-controlled avatar, has travelled far from those days of innocence. If the words “I read it on the internet” once conveyed a simple faith in information, in the age of deep fakes, they’re an indictment of what is lost and found online.
