They hailed from as far as Texas, Ontario, Connecticut and New Jersey. And on a drizzly Saturday in October, 30 devotees of The Blair Witch Project hopped onto a rented bus in Germantown to explore locations in Montgomery and Frederick counties where the pathbreaking Hollywood horror blockbuster was filmed.
How serious were they? Several had spent the night in the same motel the doomed movie characters visit near Brunswick.
As the tour got underway, Chloe Loudan, 45, from Shepherdstown, West Virginia, made and gave away hats with the film’s creepy stick man image on the front. She watches Blair Witch every year. “It scares me every time,” she says.
This annual celebration, called The Blair Witch Experience, is a passion project of Matt Blazi, 42, a commercial loan portfolio manager from central Pennsylvania, who launched the tours in 2013. Blazi’s hoodie featured the movie’s opening words, announcing its audacious premise: “Three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.” Blazi is also the author of 8 Days in the Woods: The Making of The Blair Witch Project, a chronicle of the filming and aftermath. He’ll never forget the stunned silence in the theater when it opened in the summer of 1999. “No one had ever seen anything like that,” he says.
The cultural sensation inspired a generation of low-budget independent filmmakers, popularized the found-footage genre of horror movies, and pioneered the concept of an immersive digital marketing campaign, with online clues designed to support the fiction that the characters were real film students who had gone missing.
But at the time, the scrappy young filmmakers were so broke that after the 10 days of filming—mostly in Gaithersburg’s Seneca Creek State Park—they returned a video camera to Circuit City for a $500 refund. Their utilities were being cut off as their film premiered to acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999 and sold for about $1 million. Blair Witch made the covers of Time and Newsweek and remains one of the most profitable movies ever. It grossed more than $248 million worldwide on an initial budget that the film’s co-director Eduardo Sánchez estimates at $20,000.
This year, the film turns 25—and continues to cast its spell. Tickets for the two-day tour of locations cost $50—just enough for Blazi to cover expenses, he says.
The first stop was the cemetery in Burkittsville, in Frederick County, featured in the movie. There, Mayor Michael Robinson greeted the tourists. He lauded fans for supporting the town—raising money for families displaced by a fire and helping care for the cemetery.
In the movie, the protagonists buzz around back roads of Montgomery and Frederick counties, conducting interviews about the Blair Witch—a myth the filmmakers invented. Sometimes they run into planted actors, sometimes unsuspecting residents. They soon come to the “Black Hills Forest” (Seneca Creek State Park), getting lost for days in the haunted woods.
The unknown actors, Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard—they used their real names for their characters, in keeping with the conceit of found footage—were given packs and supplies, two cameras, and a primitive GPS device. At drop points they would swap out batteries, film and videotape, and pick up an intentionally diminishing supply of food. There were notes but no script. The actors improvised everything.
The tour roughly followed their route. At each stop, Blazi dished film lore—“Right around here is where Heather was standing when she was doing her opening monologue”—and group members snapped selfies. At the park, Blazi led the fans down a trail off Montevideo Road and through a thicket to the notorious “Stick Man Forest.” Here, in the film, the characters stumble upon dozens of crude five-pointed figures dangling from branches. It’s the moment they realize they are doomed.
Sánchez was waiting for the group there. For the expectant fans, this was like meeting “the guy who essentially created what you worship,” says Ann Wolfe, 23, a supervisor at a movie theater in Pennsylvania.
“I just feel so blessed that people like you are still somehow interested in it 25 years later,” Sánchez says. He grew up in Takoma Park, attended Wheaton High School and Montgomery College, and studied film at the University of Central Florida, where he met Blair Witch co-director Daniel Myrick and other collaborators on the film. Sánchez and Myrick have gone on to careers directing film and television.
Sánchez held court. “We were definitely kind of at the end of our ropes,” he recalls. “It was a total experiment that somehow worked out.” He demonstrated how to make stick men, after which the fans repopulated the forest with a new generation of cursed craftwork.
Next came stops at filming locations “Coffin Rock” and “Fishermen’s Rock.” The Blair Witch community originated the names, but Seneca Creek has unofficially adopted them. “It’s part of the cultural history of the park,” says Erik Ledbetter, a ranger who also gives Blair Witch tours every October. “It’s as legitimate a part of the park’s heritage as the old grain mill.”
Toward the end, the group encountered Susie Gooch, a middle school teacher who lives minutes from the park, and her daughter, Ingrid Mazziotta. The pair appeared in a brief, beloved scene: They happened to be in a diner when the actors arrived in search of interviews. Few patrons would talk to them. Wanting to help the supposed student filmmakers, Gooch gamely spun a yarn about this witch she’d never heard of, while Ingrid, then 2 and squirming in her arms, tried to cover her mother’s mouth. They appear on screen for 44 seconds. Gooch only found out that it wasn’t a student project but a Hollywood hit when friends started calling after the premiere. Says Gooch: “That film scares me—and I’m in it!”
This story appears in the January/February issue of Bethesda Magazine.