FAQ for
The Blair Witch Project (1999) More at IMDbPro »

No. The legend of the Blair Witch is fiction. This is something that not even the actors knew when they were making the movie though. This was to help get realistic reactions out of them when they were filming.

However, it is possible that the "legend" of the Blair Witch stems from the legend of the Bell Witch. Marylanders have suspected that it may be based on a vaguely similar legend, of a witch named Moll Dyer, who was run out of Leonardtown, MD, in colonial days, and who later froze to death, but that is only speculation. Leonardtown is in an entirely different part of the state from Burkittsville.

Shortly after the film was released, rumors also arose that the forests near the real Burkittsville were shunned by locals, and purportedly were the subject of terrifying stories and dozens of reported disappearances, but those rumors are untrue. The Appalachian Trail goes through the forests by Burkittsville, and thousands of people go through there, and camp overnight, with no reports of anything unusual. The same forest also contain a state park and a campground. There are a number of ghost stories in the area (as would be expected for any old town in Civil War country), the most notable being a "Gravity Hill" where cars left in neutral appear to move uphill, purportedly pushed by ghosts, although it's more likely an optical illusion. However, no local legend is even remotely similar to the Rustin Parr/Blair Witch story.

Shortly after the film was completed, the promotional website www.blairwitch.com was launched. Opened at the dawn of the World Wide Web and featuring fabricated police documents, photographs, etc. presenting the film as if it were fact, the website was a crucial factor in the film's promotion and popularity, building the entire mystique and marketing ploy of whether or not the film was real.

Previous to the film being picked up by distributors, there was a website that was a matter-of-fact production diary of the film (it was covered by the Washington Post). The site made no pretense of it being a true story and openly said the story was fictitious. Once the film was picked up for distribution, that particular site was taken down.

A new website called "Woods Movie: The Tenth Anniversary Edition. The Making of the Blair Witch Project" is open now, located at www.woodsmovie.com. It contains journals about the making of The Blair Witch Project, mockumentaries about the legend. Some Behind the Scenen clips have been added to the website, still more to come in a 12-part Behind the Scenes documentary.

Possibly, the Blair Witch was playing tricks on them; it really is unclear.

But if the continuity of the Blair Witch videogames applies, it could have been a number of objects or persons under control of the Blair Witch and other forces, like animals.

Like most of the events in the film, the answer is never explicitly stated, left instead to the viewer's imagination. Thus, there are varying explanations:

The foreshadowing throughout the film (knocking over the pile of rocks, getting what appears to be ectoplasm all over his camping gear, etc.) points to the possibility that Josh was kidnapped by forces linked to the Blair Witch legend, be it ghosts of the murdered children, Rustin Parr, or even the Blair Witch herself. Numerous other explanations have arisen, based on speculation, that Josh was even kidnapped by murderous hillbillies (hinted at when Mike suggests hill folk could be messing with them), or he could have simply abandoned Mike and Heather following a nervous breakdown (hinted at when Mike says about Josh "he's losing it").

According to the directors (given in interviews), the bundle contains teeth, blood, and hair. There are various rumors that it contains a tongue but they have denied that. (Gossip was circulated that there's a D&D spell that allows one to imitate a person's voice after cutting out their tongue; there is absolutely no truth to that story.) There was also claims and speculation that the bundle contained Josh's intestines, but that is patently absurd. For the bundle to have contained Josh's intestines, it would have had to have been several feet in diameter. If you watch the film, you'll notice Heather picking it up with one hand. The bundle is clearly too small to contain human intestines; at most, it could only have held a tiny piece of an intestine. Some have claimed they've seen human intestines in the bundle but their perceptions are colored by the Coffin Rock story earlier in the film.

Through the expository dialogue at the start of the film, it is assumed to be the house of Rustin Parr, the Burkittsville child murder who claimed to be under the influence of the Blair Witch. This "fact" is supported in both the film's sequel, Book of Shadows, and D.A. Stern's companion book, The Blair Witch Dossier.

However, according to the backstory outside of what is mentioned within the film, following the execution of Rustin Parr, his house was burnt to the ground by irate Burkittsville citizens. So, how did Mike and Heather find it near the end of the movie if it had been destroyed for over fifty years? Like most of the questions in the film, there are no solid answers. The most accepted theory is that Mike, Josh and Heather somehow got trapped or taken back in time by the Blair Witch or a similar supernatural being, thus explaining how the house manages to exist and why they can't get out of the woods. This is somewhat confirmed in Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr: taking place in 1941, after the destruction of the Parr house, it reveals the Black Woods to hold supernatural powers that manage to distort, briefly sending the main character back in time to the still standing Parr house, where ghostly visions of Mike and Heather being killed in the basement are seen (thus, the possibility that Parr killed the two). Whether or not the Rustin Parr Volume should be considered canonical is up to the viewer.

It is worth pointing out that early in the film, Parr's house is referred to as a "cabin," while the house that appears in the film does not appear to be a cabin, but a standard two-story house, hardly something one would expect to find in the middle of the woods, far from civilization.

There are varying explanations to this, none of which are explicitly made clear within the film:

Obviously, it is shown that Heather goes down the in basement and then is knocked out - and presumably killed - by whatever force similarly attacked Mike and Josh. Who or what was the attacker is open to debate, presumably Rustin Parr and even rednecks (see below).

Why was Mike standing in the corner, facing the wall?

One speculation as to the identity of the perpetrator is that it was Rustin Parr - the hermit child murderer who claimed to have been possessed by the Blair Witch mentioned earlier in the film. At the end of the film, Mike is standing in the corner facing the wall, recalling an early piece of expository dialogue that stated Parr used to take two children down into the basement and make one face the corner while he murdered the other child. For more information on this theory, see the additional question pertaining to Rustin Parr below.

Another speculation, this one offered by the filmmakers on the DVD commentary, is that Heather, Mike and Josh could all have been killed by rednecks, an explanation vaguely hinted at (or perhaps foreshadowed) throughout the film.

Ultimately, it is up to the viewer's own imagination as to what happened to the three students and the occurrences within the Black Woods: whether the viewer believes it was supernatural (i.e. the Witch, the Parr paradox) or a simpler explanation. In some threads on imdb.com and other websites, it is theorized that Josh (and maybe Mike) set it all up and cheated Heather. As mentioned there are several explanation to the end and probably more than explained here.

Yes.

The videogames reveal that an evil force recognized by the Native Americans as 'Hecaitomix' inhabited the hills and forest long before civilization grew there, and helped to influence Elly Kedward as she lived out there.

In the movie, it is possible that animals, stickmen and various creatures could've done the foul play against the main characters, and it also suggested in the videogames that when Heather toys with the talismen, she could've opened a time warp back to when Rustin Parr was still killing, resulting in the characters stumbling into the house and possibly meeting their deaths and never being found.

The female voice screaming in the house is that of Heather. Throughout the film, Mike is in charge of the DAT, the sound recording equipment (as the black & white 16mm camera lacks that technology). In the final sequence, Mike charges into the basement looking for Josh without waiting up for Heather. Given the distance between Heather and Mike's DAT down in th basement, her screams would naturally sound distant and disembodied. This is made clearer as Heather enters the basement, with the disembodied screams coming "closer" and more coherent--she is clearly screaming Mike's name.

Burkittsville is a real town, but it was never called Blair. Most of the other locations given in the film and its mythology...Coffin Rock, Tappy Creek, the "Black Hills" region of Maryland...are completely fictitious. There is a "Black Rock Road" in Frederick County, but nowhere near Burkittsville. The forest scenes were not even filmed near Burkittsville; in the movie, the forests are all on flat land, while the only forested areas near the real Burkittsville are on a sloping mountainside. The forest scenes were mostly shot in Seneca Creek State Park near Gaithersburg, MD. The house used in the film's final scenes was in a state park near Ellicott City, MD; it has since been demolished.

Simply, they were lost, but on another level, fans of the film have speculated that they were prevented from leaving by supernatural forces (such as the time they walked all day but ended up crossing the stream at the same log they crossed that morning). It is also worth pointing out that the characters were inexperienced and ill-equipped, and toward the end of the story were falling apart mentally and emotionally, and were incapable of thinking calmly and logically.